The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

When I was a really young kid, my dad worked shifts. And when he'd do overnight ones, he'd always come home at 7 in the morning, just as Sam and I were getting up and ready for school. Dad would always have something in hand when we swarmed him at the door--sometimes donuts (the sprinkled kind, of course), but more often comic books. I loved them. For me, Dad usually picked the girly ones. Casper, Archie and company, and the occasional Wonder Woman. Sam got all the traditional "boy" ones. But four-year-old Sam wasn't really the reading type, so I was the one who ended up devouring all the comics as soon as they came in--Betty, Veronica, and Spider Man alike.

That was more than twenty years ago, though, and I can't say I've thought much about superhero comic books since. That's probably why I didn't expect to feel super-connected to the subject matter of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I picked up the book based on the idea that I should be reading Michael Chabon, combined with a shiny Pulitzer sticker on the cover. ('Cause I'm a cover sticker sucker, let's face it.) But I ended up loving it.

The novel moves around Sammy Klayman, a 19-year-old Brooklyn polio survivor with tons of comic book ideas but no way of cashing in on them; and his cousin Josef Kavalier, a Czechoslovakian immigrant sent to America by his parents just as the Nazi occupation hit Prague. Joe's talents include magic tricks and Houdini-esque escape tricks, but his only marketable skill when he shows up at Sammy's door is a significant drawing talent. Soon, the "boy geniuses" are pitching their respective drawing and writing skills to Sammy's boss, the owner of a company that sells novelties like whoopee cushions and tiny defective radios. 1939 New York is their oyster, as the Amazing Midget Radio Comics are quickly outshone by their star, the boys' creation: the Escapist.

The Escapist becomes a huge, Superman-like hit. The former whoopee cushion salesman makes millions off the copyright while the boys make a tiny fraction of that, but they're content enough as the brains and minor celebrities behind Empire Comics. Nothing is particularly solid, however, in an industry dependent on the whims of American kids. And the guys have their own self-destructive streaks. Sammy struggles with his homosexuality, not the easiest thing in the pre-war era. And Joe feels massive guilt about abandoning his Jewish family to the Nazis' mercy. He sublimates the guilt by saving money to bring them over, and by picking fights with every German he can find in the five boroughs. Any pleasure he finds wracks him, even his sweet relationship with a spunky young artist. So yeah. The party doesn't last long, but somehow it keeps Kavalier and Clay going, through the War and into the bleak 1950s.

Probably the best part of the book is the translation of comic book style into the novel format. The whole thing is highly episodic, from Joe's complicated escape-from-Czechoslovakia story (it involves the Golem of Prague, but not in a way you might expect); to Sammy's, umm, awakening in the ruins of the World Fair with a handsome actor who plays the Escapist on the radio; to Joe's wartime antics as a prototypical soldier-with-nothing-to-lose. The language is highly illustrative, without a single picture anywhere in the book. And the pacing is amazing: the timeline skips around enough so that everything moves along, but Chabon gives so much descriptive detail that you don't feel like you're missing anything. The result is page-turning tension, without being overwrought.

It's not just the structure. The story itself is heavy on comic book mythology: the wish-fulfillment of costumed superheroes who overcome physical weakness (which Sammy can't do) and save the world's persecuted from evil (which Joe can't do). It adds a neat heft to all the characters.

At the same time, it's a shout-out to all the guys who really did bring characters like the Escapist to life. All of Empire's comic book competitors are real (everyone wants the next Superman), and names like Stan Lee pop up every now and then. Orson Welles is there briefly. So it's a cool picture of underground artistry in 1930s/40s New York, too.

Anyway, this is another one I could talk about endlessly if given the chance (where's the book club when you need it?), but who's got the time? I might have a night full of heroic crime-fighting ahead of me.

Parts I liked:

"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 when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation....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 learned to fake."

[on watching the sudden appearance of "the Escapist" on the outside of the Empire State Building]
"There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dull, dark submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was filled with a kind of crippling nitrogen of wonder."