The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
Eh?I have started reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay with certain expectations - if not great, then at least considerable. I have seen Chabon's name pop up on this site pretty often, reminding me of the fact that I have not yet read anything by him - this seemed like an obvious choice. At 634 pages it stands proudly as the author's magnum opus, and proved to be a critical darling by winning the Pulitzer in 2001. When you can, aim for the greats!So what's the big deal? The book has an engaging premise: it opens in Prague of 1939, where a Jewish teen named Josef Kavalier is fascinated by Harry Houdini and studying the art of escapology to prepare for the biggest trick of his life - flee the Nazi horror which slowly begins to surface in Czechoslovakia. After forming an ingenious plan and successfully carrying it out, Josef arrives in New York City to live with his cousin, Sammy Clay. Although things are awkward at first, the boys quickly hit it off when Sammy discovers Josef's artistic talent and lands him a job as an illustrator at Empire Novelty Company - Josef rebrands himself as "Joe" to sound more American. It's the Golden Age of Comic Books; after the enormous success of Superman the company wants to jump on the bandwagon, and is willing to let both boys prove themselves. The Kavalier & Clay duo creates a new character, The Escapist - an anti-fascist superhero who can perform amazing feats of escapology to fight crime, with Sammy writing the stories and Joe illustrating them. Although The Escapist achieves immense popularity, the boys lives are not free from trouble and worry - with Joe frantically trying to get his family out of Prague and Sammy struggling with the question of his own identity.Chabon's love for the comic book is obvious: Joe's escape from Prague is a heroic attempt which could well find its place in a graphic novel - the theme of escapism is present throughout the book: Joe's literal escape from certain doom and later from his own demons, the character of the Escapist, escaping reality through reading, etc. Chabon's novel is a paean to comic books - set in their Golden Age, a period which has seen the rise of heroes such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America...Chabon's characters face the realities of publishing world at the time - they are mercilessly exploited by the publishers and shunned at by the reading public, as their work is seen as immature fun for children. The creation of The Escapist allows Chabon to have his character ponder what makes superheroes "tick", and their creative energy and joy of creation reflect the author's own enjoyment and love for the subject.The bad thing is that it overshadows almost everything else. There are so many fascinating topics in this book which are barely glossed over and given the most cursory treatment. Josef is a Czech Jew - but you would never guess that if it wasn't explicitly stated. Although the novel opens in Prague during the war, it could be set anywhere in eastern/central Europe - it's only set in Prague because Chabon wants to employ the local legend of the Prague Golem and incorporate it into his work as a clever way for his character to flee the country. The Czechs are wonderful people with a specific and unique culture and a long and interesting history, and their mountainous country is gorgeous (I had the pleasure of visiting it last year so my memories are especially fresh). I have read Czech and Slovak fairytales and fables when I was a boy. There's so much more to the country and the people than the legend of the golem - unfortunately, in this novel an entire nation has been reduced to background decoration for the opening act and discarded afterwards. After Joe's arrival in New York City, nothing more is made of his Czechness and he doesn't even experience any struggle with adaptation to the new country, typical for new immigrants - although he was not happy about leaving Prague for "unimaginable Brooklyn" he adapts to the U.S. literally overnight, and is ready for enormous success the next day - making the character look flat and lifeless.Last year I've read David Benioff's enormously entertaining book titled City of Thieves (reviewed here), set in Leningrad during the German occupation - the deadliest siege in history. Benioff's book has a great sense of place and is compulsively readable - he's a screenwriter by profession and he knows how to use tension and sustain pacing, and at the same time create memorable characters and an engaging narrative, holding true to an outlandish premise but not rendering the whole book flat. That's not the case here - Joe's escape is a small section at the beginning which ends almost immediately after it starts. Joe initially arrives in San Francisco from Japan - but the possibility of an adventure in imperial Japan (and Stalinist Russia before it - have to get to Japan somehow) is completely dropped, as if Chabon couldn't muster the energy to fully develop the possibility of his own creation.Anyone seeking an insightful work of fiction concerning World War 2, the Holocaust and antisemitism will also likely be disappointed. These characters seem to live in an America of complete religious tolerance - somewhat surprising in mid 20th century. as I felt as if the whole background of war was employed because it's a big subject, which is likely to appeal to readers and critics alike (not to mention the Holocaust). It feels exploitative; I was born in a city destroyed during the war and in a country which it damaged beyond repair. My primary school is located on the street named after a member of the underground resistance, who was caught by the Gestapo and put through extremely brutal and torturous interrogation - just a few streets away from where I'm typing these words. He was liberated after a brave attack on the car which was transporting him to prison, but died from injuries inflicted upon him by the Gestapo. People put flowers and light candles under memory plaques, and the streets fill with them - schoolchildren regularly do that to commemorate those murdered by the German soldiers. Joe Kavalier seems to be made a Jew and escape the Holocaust only to have a semblance of personality - after all, how could one call a Holocaust survivor dull?In 1943 Betty Smith wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which is also set in New York although a bit earlier - in the early 1910's. Smith's beautiful book did not win a Pulitzer - it did not win any awards - but remains a timeless classic and a timeless portrayal of the struggles faced by an immigrant family in the Brooklyn borough of Williamsburg. I doubt that any reader would be able to not care for Francie Nolan, the protagonist; Smith effortlessly paints a vivid and detailed picture of Brooklyn and its inhabitants with care and compassion as she herself grew up poor in Williamsburg, making Chabon's portrayal of New York look like a cheap imitation.The relationship between Joe and Sammy resembles the traditional relationship between the Hero and the Sidekick, and since Batman will always be cooler than Robin Sammy gets pushed into the background, and even when Kavalier is not on the stage he always plays the main role. And then there is....(view spoiler)[the fact that Sammy is gay - the struggle with his sexuality is so insignificant that it's barely noticeable, and comes out (get it? ha ha!) as tacked on as yet another big subject to cross of the list - New York? Check. Jewish characters? Check. World War 2? Check. The Holocaust? Check. What did we forgot? Aaaah, a gay character! Check.) (hide spoiler)]
this is a bit of a rant. i liked this book, but it just did not live up to my expectations. what to say. not quite sure. it opens great. sammy's background with his father and joe's escape from prague are a wonderful set up. but in some ways, in particular joe's very adventurous beginning, the beginning is unbalanced. we never really see that kind of adventure again. but nor do we want to, because the beauty of this novel is that "the amazing adventures" of these two men are not super-hero like escapades, but the everyday triumphs, ordeals, and suffering two middle-class men in america might face in that time. they are not saving women and foiling super villains. they are doing the unglamorous and unfullfilling: creating their art of which they do not reap the full benefit, living a lie and losing a chance at love because of others' closed minded views on sexuality, and living with extreme guilt because you live comfortably while your family abroad is killed for no good reason and on top of that feeling powerless to stop it. at times all of that great, everyday desperation comes out. i like that sammy is kind of joe's side-kick in keeping with the comic book theme. though i think not enough attention is given sammy through most of the book. chabon's talent for detail and research or very evident here. the wet streets and smokey dinner rooms of prague, the inky, long hours of the comic business. awsome. but for me the book seems to lose its sturdy ground after the first 200 pages or so and not gain it back until the end. for me too much detail or space was focused in the wrong place. chabon's writing is solid, which comes out is his descriptions of action, work, cities, food. but the writing does not dig the reader deeper into the story, into the characters. so many mini adventures happen in the middle, and they are always easily solved by a phone call to the president's wife or a quick fight. these little adventures are wrapped up faster than a comicbook. many of these take place during the tease regarding thomas's situation. everything's fine, not fine, fine, not fine, then you know...the you know lost it's power for me. the situation from the beginning seemed to rely on a fix that was too quick. i did not get the build up of sweat and ingenuity that put it in place. so when the end of that smaller story came, i did not feel it was earned. this also goes for characters whose background takes up nearly as much space as their actual interaction in the book. for instance the other comic book creators who start with joe and sammy or the american facist who joe stops in one single move. then there is one of the biggest characters of all; cigarette ash. a lot of time was given to describing cigarette ash. and instead detail is missing that builds the relationships between joe and sammy, sammy and rosa, and to a lesser extent rosa and joe. for me it was not until the end where rosa and sammy are married that any real intimacy is conveyed. but even there the relationship is not explored much. not to give it away, but that to me is the most interesting part of the book, the dynamic twist. but we end up knowing little about it's day to day life. which leads me to joe's disappearance. like "to the lighthouse" this could have been an opportunity for change based on an event larger than the story and the event's personal effect it has on the characters causing them to take on new roles, grow if you will. joe's absence set's up rosa and sammy's relationship, but what does it serve. joe does return. and he is the same. we learn very little about what he has been doing, people he has been in contact with, if he has truly come to terms with the holocaust. a fourth of the book is taken up telling about him being stationed in antartica after his attempt to actually fight in the war effort. so he can't do anything about his family? we already knew that. and all the time rosa still loves joe. and sammy still hates having to live a lie about his sexuality and work by selling his soul. joe's disappearence simply serve to createa reunion. but no one changed, which means the drama of the reunion is limited. joe and sammy even want to start doing comics again together. it's like the beginning of the book. last i feel the theme of the golem is never really taken advantage of. certainly their comic hero nor any of the individual characters embody that role. and maybe it is that they are all at times playing that role for each other, taking care of each other. i liked it. but it could have been much better. the book is torn about what to focus on and i think chabon was weighed down by the volume he took on, and simply skimmed the surface of the incredible characters he created.
What do You think about The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay (2001)?
This book might eventually merit a new shelf: stuff I keep trying to read and put aside because while they are good and everyone raves about them I just jump at the chance to read almost anything else. In terms of writing, scope of imagination, and peregrinations of plot, completely deserving of its Pulitzer, but there's a self-congratulatory facility, a "look how I make a marginalized hobby into an academic metaphor for life and growing up in America and I TALK ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST TOO" feeling to Chabon's graphic-novel-sans-graphics. Maybe I've overdosed on hard luck tales of young boys with improbable dreams growing up in America smack dab in the midst of the twentieth century. Recent years have produced enough that they merit their own name: subway novels. They're the ones you can be guaranteed to see at least one person on your car reading every time you commute for about three to six months after they hit the bestseller list, or are reviewed on Oprah's book club or listed as some young but socially conscious actor's favourite in Entertainment weekly. Everyone reads them, reccommends them to friends, and has a paperback copy lying around somewhere. For about a year. And then, other than being referenced on an extraordinary number of Internet networking sites in the little box for "favourite books", they sort of fade out of the cultural lexicon. Does popularity make them any less well written? No. But I can't muster the standard level of enthusiasm for most of them because I don't think it makes them any better written than a great many other books that missed the spin train, and happen to feature someone other than a scrappy but troubled New York boy with Eastern European parents who lusts after some idealized woman or man cultural cut-out with all the personality of a box of crackers. Middlesex also falls in to this category, and, in a sub-section, Everything is Illuminated.
—Katja
The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay is a great American novel about two cousins whose talents, fevered dreams and crazy obsessions make them legends during the Golden Era of comic books. Magician-in-training Josef Kavalier escapes Czechoslovakia in 1939 and is taken in by his aunt and his scrappy cousin Sammy Klayman, who live in Brooklyn. Joe hopes his parents and younger brother Thomas will eventually join him, but as the Nazis gain power, the noose, of course, tightens on Europe’s Jews.Sammy, meanwhile, has his own issues, including the bitter memory of his estranged dad – a former vaudevillian strong man – and his burgeoning sexuality.Both boys find emotional and artistic escape through creating a comic book superhero called The Escapist, who comes to the rescue of people in need around the world. (One controversial cover shows him slugging Hitler.)Those are just some of the themes and narrative strands of this big, bold, exuberant novel, which spans decades and continents and lasts some 650 pages. (Don’t worry: it’s a page-turner.)The book’s not without its shortcomings. The third figure in the book’s triangle – a woman named Rosa Saks – isn't as carefully etched as the other two. And the occasional use of real-life figures (Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt) isn't as gracefully done as it is in, say, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, the obvious comparison. But Chabon’s prose, befitting his colourful subject and era, is entertaining and visceral. It simply soars. There’s also lots of information about the history of comic books. Chabon’s done his research and obviously loves the genre. And there are several memorable scenes(view spoiler)[: the elaborate moving of a coffin (with someone inside it!); an attempted bombing of a bar mitzvah; a very moving look at immigrants arriving from Ellis Island (hide spoiler)]
—Glenn Sumi
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY BY MICHAEL CHABON: Michael Chabon, author of Wonder Boys, brings us the Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. A riveting novel of the comic book world set against the backdrop of the Second World War. Its two heroes, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, fight through the world of color, ink and writing, to compete with the likes of Superman and Batman - the result is an amazing story that has never been told.This is a coming-of-age story for two very distinct characters. One is Sammy Klayman, an aspiring writer trying to make it in New York. Working for Empire Inc., the best he can do, in his diminished capacity, is come up with catchy ad slogans. Though he hopes for so much more, he seems stuck in this rut. During his spare time he draws pictures; though not excellent in skill and look, they are good enough for comics, one of his great loves.Then there is Josef Kavalier: a boy born in the impoverished ghettoes of Prague, where every day is a fight for survival. Taken under the wing of a mentor, Bernard Kornblum, he is taught in the ways of the magician and illusionists - the immortal Houdini. As months pass, he is soon able to break out of any chains, and undo any luck with the help of his small tools (secretly stashed amongst his teeth and gums). Then he performs a might illusion: breaking free of a chained sack that has been hurled into an icy river; he survives barely, but his brother suffers a debilitating accident, and from then on Kavalier will have no more to do with this trickery.His only hope of coming to true fruition is to get to America, where there is insurmountable opportunity. Having failed to get a visa, with the advent of the Germans seizing further control of Eastern Europe, h hides himself in the coffin of a golem and makes it to Lithuania, where he catches a ship bound for New York. There he meets up with none other than Samuel Klayman.The two get together and propose their idea for the first comic book to the head men of Empire Inc. They are given the weekend to come up with the entire comic, and come Monday morning they deliver the first episode of the superhero known as the Escapist - his job: to disperse all evil; there is no lock he cannot pick, no bond he cannot break. And so begins the fulfilling career for these two young mean, covering many years and riches.Chabon is a certified master of the language, taking the reader on sweeps and bounds through imagery set at a new level: "Thunder harried the building like a hound, brushing its crackling coat against the spandrels and mullions, snuffling all the windowpanes."Once the reader finishes this book, they are left with the happy complacency that Amazing Adventure received one of the highest prizes possible. The story is of a quality that is a rarity in the literature of today's world. In short: everyone needs to read this book, be they reader or writer.For more reviews, and author interviews, go to BookBanter.
—Alex Telander
