The Amazing Michael Chabon Pens a Novel That Goes Bif! Bam! Pow!

If, as Francis Bacon said, some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested, then have your knife and fork ready to dig into Michael Chabon’s delicious novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This is the best literary feast to come along in years.

On the menu: comic book heroes, Nazi villains, Jewish golems, Harry Houdini, the Golden Age of radio, pulp tales and the world’s funniest suicide attempt.

Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year, neatly taking his place beside names like Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Bellow, Cheever and Steinbeck. He was nominated for a heap of other lit prizes as well. The only surprise is that he didn’t take them all home. If ever an author and a book were deserving of the right to back a semi up to the loading dock and fill it with all the glittery awards this world has to offer, then Michael Chabon and his amazing Amazing Adventures is it.

I think the last time I was this excited about a book was when I read John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Before that, I guess you’d have to reach as far back as the first time I read the Bible.

The comparison with Irving’s tough-muscled, graceful-as-ballet prose is not a casual one. Chabon (who also wrote The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys) shares many of the New England lit-meister’s finest qualities: memorable characters, funny-sad plots and the kind of language that rises from the page like the scent of fresh-baked bread.

From the first paragraph, we know we’re in territory staked out by the likes of Irving and Don DeLillo, when Sam (the Clay of the title) declares that as a boy living in Brooklyn “he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini,” and that they were “the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.”

But it’s a bit of a lie, actually. Those dreams of escape rightfully belong to his cousin Joe (the Kavalier of the title), a refugee from Prague. Joe, easily the year’s most memorable character in fiction, is a magician and comic book artist extraordinaire and, on the second page of the book, he makes this marvelous entrance one night in 1939 when

Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question mark against the door frame, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his face.

Thus, the soon-to-be-famous comic book team of Kavalier and Clay is born. What follows in the next 634 pages of Chabon’s generously-plotted book is indeed a series of amazing adventures. Like Irving before him, Chabon bravely goes where few authors dare: delving into the kind of epic that covers decades but never gets blurry with too many characters or tangled with multi-strands of plot. Holding our breath, biting our lower lip, we hang on every word as we follow the cousins through Chabon’s increasingly engaging labyrinth: all the way from their quick rise as comic book artists, to playing two sides of a love triangle with a beautiful girl named Rosa Saks, to service in World War Two at a lonely outpost in Antarctica, to middle-age despair, to painful Senate hearings condemning the immoral influence of comic books, to the top of the Empire State Building where one character attempts a suicide leap, and finally to the graceful climax which is filled with such love, forgiveness and hope that there’s a very good chance you’ll find yourself blinking back tears. Not many writers attempt such ambitious novels (nor ambitious sentences like that last one of mine). Or, if they do, the pleasure they’ve generated in the first pages often falls flat and cold by mid-book.

Not so Mr. Chabon. With as much confidence as a Houdini about to slip his manacles, the author delivers (and sustains) awe-inspiring magic on every page. I cannot recall a single moment when my interest flagged while reading this book. As further proof of how much I enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: it took me nearly three weeks to finish it. Oh sure, I could have gulped it down in three days—but why rush it? I’d much rather savor every morsel of the meal.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is not, however, merely a good work of fiction; it is also a thoughtful meditation on what makes America great (and, by the same token, not-so-great). Most of the story is set in what we like to look over our shoulders and call “the Golden Age.” Radio was live, comic books were cheap and, despite the war clouds gathering in Europe, you could taste the optimism in the air like vaporous cotton candy. Sammy and Joe find themselves at the right place at the right time. Creators of a character called the Escapist (“to all those who toil in the bonds of slavery and the shackles of oppression, he offers the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!”), they tap into that adventure-seeking gland buried in young boys’ brains. The Escapist is a superhero clad in blue long underwear, sporting a golden key on his chest, and empowered with the ability to slip from the grasp of even his strongest enemies. Oh yeah, and he also has a mean right hook which, on one comic book cover, he applies to Adolf Hitler’s jaw. A dash of Robin Hood, with a sprinkling of Albert Schweitzer, the Escapist is the fantastic fellow all Jewish kids dream about. It should come as no surprise that Joe creates him out of the fury and frustration he feels at the fact that he can’t help his family escape from Nazi-occupied Europe.

Joe consoles himself with the fantasy that “somehow a copy of this comic book might eventually make its way to Berlin and cross the desk of Hitler himself, that he would look at the painting into which Joe had channeled all his pent-up rage and rub his jaw, and check with his tongue for a missing tooth.”

Sammy, the business-savvy half of the duo, adores his cousin’s confident talent and rides the coattails of that talent all the way to the bank. Joe is a Michelangelo with the pen and ink, while Sammy cranks out the B-grade plots for the adventures. Sammy is a sad figure, always reaching for the brass ring, always trying to find someone to fill the void created by his father, a vaudeville performer known as the Mighty Molecule who abandoned the family soon after Sammy’s birth. Chabon does another neat trick in his novel: as you’re reading, you’re convinced that it’s the enigmatic and tragedy-prone Joe who will break your heart; but, when you read the last sentence on the last page, it’s Sammy who crushes your chest with nearly unbearable emotion.

To be honest, I find myself in a bit of a quandary as a book reviewer. I’m struggling very hard to find something bad, something even the slightest bit nit-picky to tell you about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. But it’s no use. This is that rare thing which only comes around once every couple of publishing seasons: The Perfect Novel.

[Okay, after scraping around the inside of my brain a bit, I did find something negative about this book: as beautiful as its contents are, the cover art on the hardcover version is simply the worst I’ve seen inhabiting a bookstore lately. Behind large, white typeface, we see an enlarged panel from the Escapist strip—the one where the hero is decking Hitler. It’s busy, drab and thoroughly uninviting. So, while you’re reading the glorious innards, feel free to strip off the dust jacket and set it aside.]

I’ve never been much of a comic book reader, but Chabon’s enthusiasm for the art form is infectious and there is one particularly enjoyable, four-page detour as he delivers a treatise on the early history of comic books—a passage which starts out with these nifty lines:

In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant. It aspired to the dimensions of a slick magazine and to the thickness of a pulp, offering sixty-four pages of gaudy bulk (including the cover) for its ideal price of one thin dime. While the quality of its interior illustrations was generally execrable at best, its covers pretended to some of the skill and design of the slick, and to the brio of the pulp magazine. The comic book cover, in those early days, was a poster advertising a dream-movie, with a running time of two seconds, that flickered to life in the mind and unreeled in splendor just before one opened to the stapled packet of coarse paper inside and the lights came up.

And so on, ad pleasurium. For you comic book buffs out there, you’ll be happy to learn that legends of the field like Stan Lee (Spiderman), Gil Kane (Green Lantern), and Bob Powell (Sheena of the Jungle) make cameo appearances in these pages. As do Orson Welles and Salvador Dali. This book teems with characters.

On the surface, Chabon’s novel might be frosted with the kind of writing that makes struggling scribes’ mouths water with envy (for instance, phrases like these succinct, vivid character descriptions:
a man with skin the color of boiled newspaper, and
She is a kind of human umbrella, folded with her strap snapped tight and
He has thick, shining hair, glossy as a squirt of black paint),
but it is the gargantuan heart that beats at the center of the book that will, ultimately, break your own heart with all the joy and sorrow that great literature in its finest hour can produce.