#23 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

I like comic books, I like novels, I don't know why it took me so long to read this.


The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is the story of two cousins. One a visual artist, trained in escapism who was able to get out of Prague before WWII ahead of his family to live with relatives in New York City. That's Joe Kavalier. He moves in with his cousin (Sammy Clay) who immediately recognizes that their combined talents could rock the comic book world. The two boy wonders turn out a blockbuster superhero who fights Hitler and the Germans and makes the company they work for into a vast and wealthy comic empire. Joe works and works in an effort to save enough money to be able to bring his family over from Prague before they fall victim to the Third Reich.

Magic? Houdini? Superheroes? Nazis as the villains? An epic chronicle of the early years of the comic book industry? A cameo by Orson Welles? I LOVE IT!

The strengths of Kavalier and Clay are numerous. Outstanding writing, a wonderful storytelling style, funny dialogue, there's as much pop culture history as there is legitimate history. I especially liked Sammy and Joe, who work feverishly, almost unstoppably. Especially at the beginning when they put together a complete comic over the course of a couple days with original superheroes and artwork, because, you know, that's what they do. These chapters are infused with such optimism and youth and energy, that it was difficult for me not to put down the book and start scribbling out ideas for my own stories.

"New York never looks more beautiful than to a young man who has just pulled off something he knows is going to knock them dead." (p.165) This might be the theme of the books I am really connecting with this year, but there's a similar sentiment in a quote I pulled for my book report on Me and Orson Welles back in January. This first moment comes from Sammy, whom, it is evident early on, feels endowed with a greatness that he is so relieved to be able to unleash at the exact right moment in cultural history. At the beginning, Sammy works for himself, and Joe works to be able to save his family. After they've worked long and hard and are ready to move on to the next step of realizing the self-promised rewards of their labors, they are both denied by greater events. It is in the second half, the seeking of meaning and the reordering of priorities, the tumult of wartime, that the irony of superheroism is unveiled. In reality there're no such things as wonder men, only wonder boys.

Still, resilience makes great characters (which is what makes Wes Anderson films terrific), and late in the book Joe has a couple of realizations: "I need to do something...something that will be great, you know, instead of trying always to be Good." (p.367) And even more thematically appropriate, he extols the virtues of comic books with this endearing passage:

"Most of all he loved them for the pictures and the stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art." (p.575)

Not that I was ever maligned for my interest in comic books, but if I could have been that eloquent in defense of my collection, I probably could have convinced my 7th grade teacher that the 9-issue X-tinction Agenda crossover event should have made an acceptable book report.

Loved it. But I'm late to this party, I think everyone to whom I would recommend this book has already read it and I can't imagine my recommendation carries any more weight than that of Mr. Pulitzer.

posted by brettish @ 9:22 AM