The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 600-page novel about the rise of comic books in the mid 1900's that incorporates extensive explorations into such themes as inherent Jewishness and homosexuality. I loved every gosh-darn second of it; whizzing through the chapters of writer Michael Chabon's distinctive prose, savoring the central characters - Sam Klayman, a Jewish boy with comic-book empire dreams, and his cousin Josef Kavalier, a Czech refugee from Nazi Germany with a brilliant hand and a burning soul - and wallowing in the sheer ecstatic scope of the story. This is not an "epic" story, it is simply a great one (and one the best tales I have read in quite some time); go figure it won the Pulitizer Prize.
The story kicks off in Queens a few years before Pearl Harbor when, quite unceremoniously, Sammy Clayman meets his cousin Josef Kavalier - here to stay away from both Hitler's wrath...and his family, still trapped on the other side. Sammy soon discovers that the newly christened "Joe" has a great eye; Joe soon discovers that Sammy has a great ear. Together the two of them set out to build a dream castle - each hoping to invest in this magnificent structure their respective desires, dreams, and frustrations. For Sammy that means an empire of whizzing superheroes and acres of lean script; for Joe that means an empire of money with which to free his family. When you put these two together, the result is magic - both on the page and off. Soon, "The Escapist" is up and running (his origin story having been provided to the reader via a clever sleight-of-hand).
But that is just the beginning for these two cousins-turned-brothers-in-comics. As the Golden Age of Comics erupts around their ears, romance enters the picture. Joe meets Rosa Saks, a bizarre Surrealist painter who plays a major part of the book's fractured, compelling soul. Sammy meets Tracy Bacon, the handsome actor assigned to voice The Escapist in radio serials. Joe gets Rosa pregnant; Sam gets tired of "shadow games" with Tracy - sacrificing, as he finds out, the first and last true love of his life. But even this isn't the end...or even really the beginning.
No, the true start of Michael Chabon's immensely addictive story begins after Joe Kavalier returns from WWII. Here, in Brooklyn with a child and in the middle of a strange romantic-tangle, the novel thrums along on waves of lyricism, rage, melodrama, and love - replicating, as Chabon says himself, the style of Douglas Sirk. Together with Sammy and Rosa, Joe must try and sort out the pieces of his life - and theirs - while also trying to revive the imperiled "funny-book" genre. It is a surprising metaphor, paralleling the rise & fall of someone's life with that of a comic book, but it works wonders.
It would be unfair to say that this exquisite book is a leanly-written, high-brow affiar. The truth is the prose is unabashedly pulp, "purple" as some say, and it speaks with frankness about everything: sex, religon, love, family. Some may be offended by such out-in-the-open energy but there are other benefits to this style: huge scenes explode with vivid, unrivaled power (like Joe's brief stint in Antartica, or the closing scene of the entire enterprise), characters coil so tightly upon themselves they may almost seem to breathe real air, and the plot becomes almost impermeable to any sense of disbelief - the soft science fiction ideas and the fanciful turns of fortune having become reality
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the work of a magician; a wizard of imagination, scope, invention, and idea. Also like any great magic trick, I'm still not sure how its creator managed to pull the entire thing together (I could have sworn that for awhile, the plot's imminent unraveling seemed certain), but he has. As the reader finishes the final, 636th page, an ecstatic sense of satisfaction is sure to envelop of them. Yet there is sure to be sadness too; after all, here is the end of not just something magical, but also something more undeniably readable and wondrous than just about anything else in recent memory.
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