Words&Dirt

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is an exceptional novel by a very smart author who doesn’t know when to shut up. Michael Chabon’s prose is densely literary, rife with cultural references, and brimming with insight and passion. Kavalier & Clay’s 600+ pages read like the internal monologue of the hyperactive lovechild of a comic book geek and an early 20th-century history buff. The story, like all great literary works, nests comfortably in the sweet spot between universal human truth and keen specificity of time and place.

Kavalier & Clay’s beating heart is its eminently lovable protagonist, the enigmatic and talented Joe Kavalier. Joe is an aspiring escape artist whose Jewish family goes to great lengths to smuggle him out of Prague before the Nazi hammer comes down on 1930s Eastern Europe. With dreams of earning enough money to buy his family’s emancipation, Joe teams up with his cousin Sammy Clay, a young New Yorker of comparable age, to write comic books for Empire Comics. Joe and Sammy’s lifelong partnership weathers a variegated storm of triumphs and trials, including a complex and highly unorthodox love triangle. Chabon uses the lives of these two men to explore the idea of escapism in myriad forms, committing himself to a worthy metaphor that clearly deserves attention. Joe Kavalier’s journey reminds us that we are all searching for that perfect escape, the one that sends us soaring through an imaginative cosmos while simultaneously renewing our resolve to confront the insistent hardships of the real world.

Sammy Clay stands out as a symbol for the unexpected ways that regular people acquire a heroic stature in the minds of their loved ones. While seeming at first to be the lucky and somewhat sycophantic beneficiary of Joe’s innate artistic acumen, Sammy slowly proves himself a steadfast source of genuine creativity. This struggle for identity is complicated by Sammy’s homosexuality in a world where to embrace his true self would be a criminal act. Joe quickly achieves superhero status within young Sammy’s narrative play, but by novel’s end Sammy becomes a superman in the truest sense of the word, one deserving Joe’s admiration and gratitude. This shift is Kavalier & Clay’s greatest achievement, revealing an essential and hard-won truth about the ways in which people come to love one another with a deep affection that too often remains unspoken, and therefore unconsummated. Providing the historical backdrop for this interpersonal dynamic is the rise of the superhero as a distinct part of the American consciousness, one that arguably holds as much sway today as in any previous era.

There is one aspect of this novel that prevented me from fully losing myself in its emotional terrain. As clearly gifted and erudite as he is, Chabon writes with an obnoxious affectation that kept me at arm’s length for more paragraphs than I would have liked. Since he is unarguably the real deal when it comes to literary prowess, it would be inaccurate to call Chabon pretentious; still, he exhibits an off-putting need to embellish his language, creating a far more redundant linguistic landscape than his tale requires. His prolix tendencies seem to have been eclipsed by awe in the minds of his editors, and as a result Kavalier & Clay is peppered with overwritten segments that, for all their detail and intelligence, make the reader work harder than necessary to uncover the nuggets of wisdom tucked away inside the purple prose. This is hardly a reason to avoid reading what is otherwise a terrific book, but probably raises the barrier of entry for readers who are inclined to abandon long, wordy novels.

I am grateful to finally understand all the hubbub surrounding Michael Chabon’s apparently well-deserved status as one of our great living writers. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a masterpiece that lays bare elements of our shared humanity through a unique and unforgettable blend of well-known and abstruse moments in American history.

Rating: 9/10