11 April, 2002
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
2000
639 pp
Josef Kavalier is a young Jew who has, through a bit of derring-do and an accident of his birth, managed to escape from Nazi-occupied Prague to New York City in 1939. He's taken in by his American aunt and his cousin, Sammy Clay. Josef (or Joe, as he comes be called) is a talented artist looking for a means to raise a lot of money to help him get his family out of Europe. Sammy's just looking for direction in his life. Seeing his cousin's talent, Sammy comes up with a crazy idea: to convince his boss at the Empire Novelties Company (purveyors of whoopie cushions, hand-buzzers, and Amazing Midget Radios) to go into the comics business, with Sammy and Joe as the chief writing/art team, of course.
They succeed, and the two become writers of The Escapist, a superhero who can escape from any trap, loose any chain, whose goal is to spread liberty throughout the world. The Escapist is the manifestation of Sammy's and Joe's dreams (Sammy's to escape from his humdrum life and fear of failure, Joe's to liberate the family he left behind, trapped in Prague), inspired by Joe's training in Houdini-esque escapistry, and Sammy's memories of his circus-strongman father. It's the beginning of their brilliant careers in the newly burgeoning comics business.
For two years, things go swimmingly for the two young men. Their creation is successful, they make tons of money (although not anywhere near as much as they make for the owners of Empire Comics), Joe meets and falls in love with a nice girl, Sammy meets and falls in love with a nice boy, it even looks like Joe's little brother will make it to America, aboard a refugee ship. It's like they're living in their own personal "Golden Age." Then, two horrible events occur, and the beautiful structure of their lives is shattered like a fragile glass sculpture hitting a stone floor. The rest of the book deals with the consequences of these events (which are completely different, but equally devastating to the lives of the two men), and finally overcoming them.
This is a very engaging, well-written book. The plot moves along at a nice pace, the historical aspects are interesting, and the lead characters are eminently likeable. If the novel was a superhero story, rather than a historical novel, Joe would be the man in tights. He's got a wide assortment of useful skills, confident capability, he's charismatic and good-looking, and to top it all off, he's got an unusual "origin story." He's the sort of person of whom one could be awfully jealous, except that none of that goes to his head. Sammy is his complete opposite in many ways. He's socially awkward, and shy. He's got talent, but it's not a talent which is easily recognised as one. Sammy's greatest skill is the way he's tuned into the pop-culture vibe, and produce perfect plots to attract readers to Empire's comics. He's chronically unsure of himself, and needs a partner like Joe to help bring out his talent.
There's a review of this book on Salon.com wherein the reviewer says, " One feels at times that Chabon is so deeply in love with his characters that he can't bear to do them harm." I think the reviewer must have been smoking crack when he wrote that, or he just plain didn't understand the novel. I can't imagine what he considers "harm," if certain events in the middle of the novel don't count. (What those events are is a spoiler, so I'll put it at the end.)[1] The central theme of the book is the way that these events disrupt the lives of our heroes, and result in their psychological imprisonment in cells of their own construction, and how they finally escape from their self-made prisons. The book doesn't end with "happily ever after"; it ends with a beginning: Joe and Sam have been freed, and have the rest of their lives completely open before them. We don't know specifically what their futures hold, but they're free to pursue the dreams they've each stifled for a decade.
There are a few places where Chabon's pacing seems a little off, at least to me. A tense dramatic scene will be immediately followed by a long descriptive passage, or a discourse on the history of comics. I'd be sitting there, thinking, "Well, that's all very interesting about how the costumed superhero became a popular figure in American comics, but I want to know what happens next!!!" That only happens a few times, admittedly, and the problem might just be with me-- it's been a while since I last read a book this long. (This is, in fact, the longest novel I've read since I started the book log. The Midnight Raymond Chandler has more pages, but it's an omnibus of three novels and four novellas.) Besides, the overall quality of Chabon's prose more than makes up for the occasional slow bit.
In a society which often derides entertainment as "escapism," as if there's something inherently wrong about that, it's nice to read a book where escapism isn't just portrayed in a positive light, it's outright celebrated.
Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history-- his home-- the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joew actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him. from crashed airplanes and an opiate addictionand from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt-- especially right after the war-- a worthy challenge. He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of Betty and Veronica that he had found in a service-station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholy absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waisted goddess-girls, light and dar, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship. The pain of his loss-- though he would never have spoken of it in these terms-- was always with hiim in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic-- not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world-- the reality-- that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.
The whole book isn't this serious; there's plenty of humor and fun, along with the deep stuff. The great thing about this book is that it's both fun to read and meaningful. Furthermore, it covers a whole range of interesting subjects-- the history of comics, life in New York City during the pre-WWII years, the growth of suburbia in the post-war years, Antarctica, the Empire State Building, why it sucked to be gay during the 1940s and 1950s, and more. It's an extremely well-researched book, and all of Chabon's research more than pays off.
(P.S. to Marty: Thanks for lending this book to me!)
[1] SPOILER! The bad events are, in Joe's case, the death of his
beloved brother, just when it seemed like he'd make it safely to
America, free from the Nazis. This is followed by a hellish military
assignment, then a decade of isolation and loneliness. In Sammy's
case, the devastating event is being raped and beaten by a law
enforcement official, followed by a decade of self-denial and
loneliness in the stultifying purgatory of suburbia.