Wot I ave been reeding - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

[angelophile]

I finally finished reading "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" by Michael Chabon. (Although quite a quick read, it's also quite a wordy one, so I've been dipping in and out of it.) The novel deals with two cousins from very different backgrounds meeting in pre-war America and tapping into the ethos of the age to create their comic character "The Escapist".

It's a blend of a tale about the golden era of comics, a tale of intolerance, social change and conflict in the period and particularly the tale of Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia, and his cousin new York raised and sexually conflicted Sam Clay.

Like The Wonder Boys and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel demonstrates an exquisite turn-of-phrase and richness of language that's a strength of the rest of Chabon's work. Like those novels the plot's meandering and designed to explore the richness of the characters within set pieces rather than provide a solid, cohesive narrative. It holds together but the differences between the beginning, middle and end sections to the story can be jarring.

But along the way it's the strong characters that stand out - damaged Joe, equally damaged Sammy, who find a unity in their creativity which is shattered by the events of the war - Sammy's father, circus strongman the Mighty Molecule, B-movie and radio star Tracy Bacon with the lantern jaw and secret leanings, Greenwich Village bohemia Rosa Saks and others. The novel tries to overplay its roots on occasion by casting figures such as Orson Welles, Salvador Dali and Eleanor Roosevelt as supporting characters, a move which feels implausible rather than natural.

However, the book has plenty of strengths - along with Chabon's much celebrated lyricism, many contemporary issues - homosexuality, the role of women in the arts, censorship, anti-Semitism - are addressed, though never with the cloying revisionism that can bog down books that try to use history as a Parable for Our Time.

I suspect, however, in the long term I don't love this book and characters as much as others seem to, including the author. Joe seems like simply too much of a good thing, especially in contrast to Sammy. Just when it seems that there is nothing else that Joe can possibly be seemingly effortlessly good at, something else comes along to prove that assumption wrong. By comparison, Sammy can only come across as a failure, both in his work and his relationships and the book feels unbalanced because of it - terrible things happen to Joe but Sammy feels like the true underdog, in his relationship with his cousin too, and that made me view Joe less sympathetically than I feel I was meant to.

And, giving anything away, the ending feels almost as if Chabon became tired and just wanted to get it over with - and simply brought the book to a close after what felt like a labored latter third to the novel. I can see the reasoning behind this supposed "real life" ending, but after the first third of the novel seems to promise so much, it's rather unsatisfying. Like the 1812 Overture being faded out before the cannonade.

Ultimately, it's a impressively written book rich with beautiful prose, but not a wholly satisfying one as it failed to recapture my interest after the character rich first section in which Kavalier and Clay create The Escapist and explore the Golden Age of comics. About the half way point, where the book leaps off into an unexpected direction, it lands a little heavily after the jump and limps to its conclusion - well meaning but maybe I'm missing something in the conclusion. Unlike other endings deliberately meant to be ultimately unsatisfying and messy, much like real life, that doesn't seem to be the point that's being made, more like Chabon simply ran out of steam.

Undeniably worth reading but I suspect others might put down the novel and go "Huh, well... okay."

Apparently a movie's in development and the comic spin off, some of which was written by Brian K. Vaughan as well as Chabon, won an Eisner award.