The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
By Michael Chabon
Picador August 2000
636 Pages
Sammy Clay is cautious when his cousin from Prague, Joe
Kavalier moves into the New York City apartment he shares with his mother.
Before long, he discovers that they are a talented team in the new world of
comic books –Sammy comes up with the stories and Joe is an amazing artist. As
Joe focuses all of his efforts on getting his family safely out of Nazi-invaded
Europe, the boys find themselves at the height of the comic book world as they
invent beloved characters like The Escapist and Luna Moth.
Mr. Chabon is an immensely talented writer. Reading one of his books always feels like
reading an engrossing classic. This novel is extremely dense, chock-full of
fascinating characters, engaging locales, and a great story. The two cousins are very different, but both
are compelling.
“Over the years, reminiscing for friends or journalists or,
still later, the reverent editors of fan magazines, Sammy would devise and
relate all manner of origin stories, fanciful and mundane and often
conflicting, but it was out of a conjunction of desire, the buried memory of
his father, and the chance illumination of a row-house window, that the Escapist
was born. As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an
ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs where memory and
desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The
desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense
that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in
part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone
else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and
self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to
locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of
faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the
whole of his life, had finally only learned how to fake.”
There is a great mix of true and invented history here. We
visit with great authors and artists, and New York City of the 1940s is so detailed that it
almost becomes a character itself through Joe and Sammy’s eyes. When I read Chabon’s work, I can always tell
that he has done an immense amount of research, even when he cheekily writes,
“I have tried to respect history and geography wherever doing so served my
purposes as a novelist, but wherever it did not I have, cheerfully or with
regret, ignored them.”
Despite the 600 plus pages, this book maintains the readers’
interest for the most part. It starts to lag towards the end when one of the
characters enlists in the army and ends up somewhere far, far away from New
York City. This section of the book just
doesn’t really seem to fit into the rest of the story. While the segment is
entertaining, it didn’t add anything to the story arc as a whole.
This is a serious book. It’s a novel to savor, not one to
breeze through. That being said, this is a wonderful book with excellent
writing and characters who you will love through all of their failings and
triumphs.
You make it sound wonderful. I have never read anything by Chabon, but I purchased this some time ago in the hopes that i would get a chance to get read it soon. Still hoping. But I will try and read it as soon as possible now. Sounds brilliant
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