The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon is a novel that goes into wondrous detail about the lives and loves of a Golden Age comics team in the spirit of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, or Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Chabon has used the backdrop of the comics industry from its very beginnings to create an eloquent statement of how we all speak to the world through our art, whether we wish to or not.
It's impossible, at this late date, for me to discuss this book without bringing up its most obvious analogue in the world of film. Anyone who thinks the profoundly dull and disappointing film Unbreakable was this year's best entertainment using comics as a jumping-off point needs, very seriously, to read this book. It succeeds as entertainment, and as an argument for the survival of comics. I don't mean to say Chabon is writing a polemic here, though -- the case he makes for comics comes shining through as an organic part of his greater, overall story. Unbreakable, sadly, was a crashing failure as entertainment, and certainly had nothing good to say about comics. I have come to conclude that the movie's success with some comics fans comes merely because it features comics, not because of anything positive it has to say about the artform. That would be impossible, since the film says nothing positive at all.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, on the other hand, tells a winningly involving tale of two men, Josef Kavalier and Thomas Klayman, who in the time-honoured manner of comics writers of the Golden Age, changes his name to Sam Clay. The story is almost equally about the woman they both (in very different ways) come to love, Rosa Saks, and the child they all create together. This is a sprawling, epic tale of their intertwining lives, showing us how very different people can be brought together by an era, by family ties, and by a need to create comics to express, variously, their subtle dreams and driving obsessions.
Chabon clearly did his homework on the history of the American comics industry, with scenes and bits of information lending a delicious verisimilitude to the story. Make no mistake, though -- you do not need to be a comics fan to enjoy this book, and unlike Unbreakable, non-comics readers might come away from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay thinking comics is an artform worth investigating. Maybe even worth preserving for future generations.
The best example of that comes shining through in an inner monologue experienced by Josef late in the book (beginning on page 575); he ruminates on a peaceful half-hour he had once spent reading an issue of Betty and Veronica, a perfect moment he carries with him the rest of his life, as he celebrates the ability of comics to give joy, to provide escape for those who need it. The sequence is an elegant defense of an artform that shouldn't need one, and yet so desperately does, now more than ever:
Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history -- his home -- the usual charged leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shacklesfrom countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent oin causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt, -- especially right after the war -- a worthy challenge.
Escape, obviously, is a major theme of the novel, from Josef's perilous flight to the new world as his people's extermination begins in Europe, to the final escape in the book as one of the major characters finally accepts the reality of his life and bolts for yet another new world. Kavalier and Clay's greatest comics creation, in fact, is the superhero the Escapist, whose Houdini-like skills speak to Kavalier's existence while his alter-ego illuminates Sam Klayman's somewhat charming inability to quite realize who and what he really is.
This is, primarily, about a family of three people, Joe, Sam, and Rosa, and the family they create that might have seemed scandalous in the 1940s and 1950s, but which today seems a minor miracle; above all, they are united by love. For each other, and for the little boy who ends up coming into the world because of their love.
Rosa gets the least attention from Chabon, but she is a complete and compelling character, one who seems entirely deserving of the passion of Joe Kavalier. I was charmed by her bohemian personality, and touched by how her rebel spirit was uncrushed even as she settled into a 1950s Long Island lifestyle.
Joe disappears from the lives of Sam and Rosa for years after World War II, and their eventual reunion is one of the most gratifying and emotional sequences of the tale. Chabon masterfully depicts the emotions of his characters, until they seem utterly and completely genuine. These are people who deserve happiness, and yet war with themselves so much over their flaws and failures that they seem determined to forever deny their own most noble needs.
In the end, Chabon leaves us with a sense of closure, but also a sense that, for Joe, Rosa, Sam and Tommy, the best is yet to come. I don't know if there will ever be a sequel to this story, and I don't know that I'd even want one. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a luminous saga, full of flawed heroes and unexpected plot twists. It's a wonderful piece of escapist entertainment, that does not sacrifice quality or craft to make the case for comics as a legitimate artform, despite the injustices large and small perpetrated by commercially-motivated publishers. Chabon rightfully remembers Jack Kirby in his notes at the end, reminding those of us of where the true heart of American comics came from. The hopes and dreams of regular, ordinary working men (for the most part), and one special, gifted man in particular to whom we all owe a debt that can never be repaid.
The book pulls no punches about the comics industry, or about the very human characters at its heart. I love this book. You will, too.