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.
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