The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
Random House
Michael Chabon's third novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," is an epic period piece that cuts a wide swath through the conscience of New York, America and the rest of the Western world. To set a broad, sweeping story in the largest city of the world's most powerful nation is to take somewhat of a risk. Whether they like it or not, everyone knows New York is meant to represent the nation and that its people are the nation's people.
Like many American stories, Chabon's begins with an immigrant.
The novel follows the trail of Josef Kavalier, a Czech Jew in his late teens when the Nazis invade his hometown of Prague. Using the escape skills he learned from his magic teacher, Joe smuggles himself to Lithuania by hiding inside of a coffin. After a trip from Lithuania through Russia and Japan, Joe makes his way across the United States to New York and the home of his teenage cousin, Sammy Klayman.
It isn't long before Sammy, an employee at a whoopee cushion and novelty company that advertises on the back page of "Superman," discovers Joe's talent for illustration. The two boys, using Joe's flair with a pen and Sammy's knack for crafting a good story, persuade Sammy's boss to give the boys their own chance to break into the comic book business.
Together, the boys' and their protagonist, a blue-clad hero known as the Escapist, wage war against a not-so-thinly-disguised stand-in for Adolf Hitler. In fact, the cover of the boys' debut book shows Hitler himself on the wrong end of an Escapist haymaker.
Kavalier and Clay (Sammy changes his last name) strike it rich, becoming the first comic book artists to let the influence of motion pictures — particularly Orson Welles' Citizen Kane — figure prominently in their layouts. Joe falls in love with an avant garde artist named Rosa Luxemburg Saks, while Sammy wrestles with his sexuality. All the while, Joe squirrels away money, earning his way toward the day when he can safely buy his family free passage out of Hitler's Europe.
Chabon winds and wends his way through the lives of his characters, bringing to life the novel's theme of escapism and rescue through recurring allusions to two Jewish figures: Harry Houdini and the Prague Golem, a giant statue animated by a 16th century rabbi that the Czech Jews in Chabon's novel believe will come to life and once again aid the Jewish people in a time of great need.
We follow Sammy and Joe (and, to a lesser extent, Rosa) from one escape to the next — Joe's flight from Prague, as well as his aid in freeing Sammy from the confines of boredom and underachievement, for example — all the way through to a riveting climax at a well-known New York landmark.
But "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" doesn't just climax and bring things to a hasty close. It takes a good 100 pages for the book's giant red carpet of a denouement to gloriously unfurl. And while attempting to hold a reader's attention for this long is risky business, Chabon proves worthy of the task. Not only will readers continue to follow the narrative once its central drama concludes, they will likely plow straight through to the end in one sitting, even though that end is more than an hour away for even the fastest of readers.
But the best books go beyond simply telling a great story rife with symbolism, meaning and compelling characters both male and female. The very best works capture the essence of a particular place (real or imagined) at a particular time. "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" fits that bill from its bar mitzvahs for children of wealthy Jewish socialites all the way down through Chabon's never-gimmicky parade of famous extras like Orson Welles and Salvador Dali.
That Chabon accomplishes this feat for era in which he did not live is commendable. When Don DeLillo crafted "Underworld" — his decade-spanning, epic novel of New York and the nation, to which Chabon's book has been compared — he was writing about events that he, by and large, had lived through and read about. Chabon, who was born in 1963, hit the books and talked to his elders, as is evidenced in both the his novel's afterword and its dedication, "For my father."
And though Chabon's third novel is not nearly as perfectly powerful as DeLillo's 11th novel, it crackles to life as a terrific bonfire of characterization, drama and metaphor. With its media tycoons, U-boats, radio plays, pulp fiction written under pseudonyms, big band music, baseball games, and the deserted, yet-to-be-torn-down husk of the 1939 World's Fair, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" has the power and scope to propel its maker from the rank of great young novelist into simply that of great novelist.
— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)
