Dead Men Waiting: “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”
Written: Jul 13 '01 (Updated Jul 30 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Complex, deftly-constructed parallel universes of real world despair and comic book fantasy. Catchy, creative, memorable.
Cons: Way too long and occasionally rambling. Editor? Is there an editor in the house?
The Bottom Line: Passages of astounding cleverness and evocative writing, likeable and memorable characters. Also, too much of a good thing that bogs down by its sheer length. But stay with it.
NFP's Full Review: Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalie...
“ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS….
In 1939 Europe black clouds shroud the countryside as hobnailed Nazi boots spread the despair born of ethnic genocide and megalomania.
Meanwhile, back in bustling, rainy New York City, we shift our attention...
"... to a room that lies far beneath the high heels and jack hammers, lower than the rats and the legendary alligators, lower even than the bones of Algonquins and dire wolves – to Office 99, a small neat cubicle, airless and white, at the end of the corridor in the third subbasement of the Empire City Public Library. Here, at a desk that lies deeper in the earth than even the subway tracks, sits Miss Judy Dark, Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes. The nameplate on her desk so identifies her. She is a thin, pale thing in a plain gray suit, and life is clearly passing her by. Twice a week a man with skin the color of boiled newspaper comes by her office to cart away books that she has officially pronounced dead….She is a kind of human umbrella, folded, with her strap snapped tight.”
Ah, but wait! What desires lie within her heart, and what powers can be unleashed from without?
The Goddess of the Night re-molds Judy Dark whenever the powers of Right need help in the face of Evil…. “You will find, Judy Dark, that you have only to imagine something to make it so.”
So on this particular rainy New York night, a group of thieves is confronted by a cowled and mesh-stockinged figure with "nine-mile long" legs “... a crime fighter with the legs of Dolores Del Rio, black witchy hair and breasts each the size of head….the pair of fuzzy antennae hung at playful angles, as if tasting the viewer’s desire.”
….WHAT LIES IN THE HEARTS OF MEN.”
Meet super heroine “Luna Moth” a/k/a Judy Dark, a creation of Joseph Kavalier and Sammy Clay, two imaginary characters in late 1930s and early 1940s New York City based on the very real pioneers of the era’s emerging art form – the comic book. Joe and Sammy occupy a space in the mind where the lines between reality and fiction are as blurred as those separating the yin and the yang of humankind sitting on a Holocaust, and where the details are as painful to fill in as personal demons emerging unspoken from waxen lips.
In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction author Michael Chabon (“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” “Wonder Boys”) has constructed compelling parallel worlds where artifice, imagination and passion override the harsh realities of war abroad, the fallout of the Depression era at home, and the self’s fear and loathing. And just like his heroes, Chabon consistently masks the reader’s sense of where he or she is ... is it real, or is it Comic Book fantasy?
On the surface, “K&C”, as I will call it, contains a lot of pop-cultural sugar and spice. And as we all know from Mom, after the thrilling sugar high comes the exhausting crash – K&C definitely has soporific and overextended moments sprinkled among its hefty 639 pages. I can only assume the editor got so lost in the author’s beautiful imagery that he or she forgot to pull out the red pencil, which is the only reason I didn’t give it a 5-star rating.
But at its core – largely due to Chabon’s deep knowledge of and affection for the original comic book genre – this notable novel is both a true original and a work replete with sections that achieve pure Art. What it lacks in consistency of execution it makes up for the most part in its clever concept, its color and compassion, its inviting characters and mainly its stretches of beautiful writing.
THE BOOK:
K&C is a book about Escape on multiple levels.
Czech refugee Josef Kavalier – a talented art institute student -- daringly escapes to the United States from Nazi-occupied Prague by passing across the border in a casket as a golem (in Jewish legend, a dead creature made of clay that can be brought to life by magical incantations) thanks to some of the Houdini-esque tricks he has learned from an old Jewish master of performance magic.
Josef’s repressed distant cousin Sammy Klayman, with whom Josef eventually ends up living in Brooklyn, escapes from his deathly “gofer” existence at a sweatshop publishing house via his increasingly desperate alter ego Sammy Clay, aspiring comic book writer.
Together on an apartment building fire escape at dusk, savoring a home-made cigarette of lettuce leaves, our young duo of Jewish wannabes forges an unlikely alliance for reaching their own life-affirming liberations through comic books, the hot new thing in New York City art circles. They have a long way to go from the lower class hell that houses their first joint employer, a “likeable but cruel” Jewish immigrant novelty business owner who knows nothing for comics, but knows a buck to be made when he sees one. Chabon’s description of the office building reeks of despair:
“The offices of Empire Novelty Company, Inc. were on the fourth floor of the Kramler Building, in a hard-luck stretch of Twenty Fifth Street near Madison Square. A fourteen-story office block faced with stone the color of a stained shirt collar, its windows bearded with soot, ornamented with a smattering of moderne zigzags, the Kramler Building stood out as a lone gesture of commercial hopefulness in a block filled with low brick ‘taxpayers,’ boarded-up showrooms, and the moldering headquarters of the benevolent societies that ministered to dwindling and scattered populations of immigrants from countries no longer on the map.”
At first, Joe’s figures are caricatures of Hitler being destroyed by “Good” superheroes like the immensely popular “Escapist”, and he hopes the increasing amount of money he makes will help the rest of his family escape from Nazi occupation to freedom in the U.S. But as the war drags on and it becomes clear "The Escapist" will not topple the real Hitler simply from the pages of his magazine, Joe’s optimism flags.
As Joe’s life becomes tangled in personal relationships and in New York’s fickle bohemian art circles, his art work becomes increasingly daring, pushing the new art form’s envelope with the first sexy comic book super-heroine “Luna Moth” modeled on his new artsy socialite girlfriend.
For his part Sammy sees his increasingly fantastic story lines as validation of his aspirations to escape from his suffocating ethnic enclave, and he is more than happy to collaborate with Joe in stretching boundaries and making names for themselves. The more business-savvy of the two, he sees in Joe his meal ticket. And through Joe Sammy comes to terms with his personal identity and nature – a self-imposed locked closet of secrets that he, too, finally escapes from in one of the book’s most touching scenes.
As their fame increases, they hobnob with Orson Welles, cross paths with comic book superstar Stan Lee (creator of Spiderman), and help Salvador Dali escapefrom asphyxiating himself in one of his conceptual art space suits at a socialite party. They fight endless battles with seedy overweight publishers and envious editors in sweat-stained shirt collars for the rights to the material they signed away early on. They watch in amazement (and horror) at what happens to their characters when adapted to the fantastic medium of radio plays.
Just like in their comic books, the lives of Joe and Sammy become one fantastic adventure and fortuitous coincidence after another. And just like their comic book heroes, our duo always lands on their feet, no matter how dire their particular predicament du jour, or how implausible their escapes.
THE NITTY-GRITTY...
At first, part of me was irritated at Joe’s and Sammy’s endless bravado and good fortune, a trend which becomes evident by mid-way through K&C. But that’s part of Chabon’s device. Drown the hope of escape in the realities of statistical probabilities and never-ending fear of Murphy’s Law, Chabon is saying, and who has a chance against either the Aryan Legions of Doom or Fate? In the real world of 1939, the author is reminding us, all Jews were dead men waiting.
Instead, Chabon has us see Kavalier and Clay as the purest form of escape wherein the mind always triumphs over matter, where the post-Depression America of World War II is the land of hope and opportunity on the cusp of the Golden Age. Where the glass is not only always half-full, but is The Goblet of Dreams that Always Come True. In effect, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay IS its own comic book in novel form.
Along the way Chabon does address many serious issues of the time – censorship, ethics, homosexuality, anti-Semitism among them – and allows Joe and Sammy to have experiences with each that, thankfully, manage to stay above clichés.
There is real substance here among the florid, if often run-on, passages, just as there was in the comics of famed real-life comic book artists and writers like Siegel and Shuster, creators of Superman, themselves Jews. (As Sammy says to Joe: “Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.”)
In fact, in his afterword, Chabon touchingly pays homage to the comic book legend who created “The Incredible Hulk” and “Captain America” among other Marvel Comics staples:
“Finally, I want to acknowledge the deep debt I owe in this and everything else I’ve written, to the work of the late Jack Kirby, King of the Comics.”
We, in turn, owe Kirby thanks for helping hatch Chabon. You’ll probably find yourself putting this frustratingly long book down a lot as I did; just make sure you keep picking it up because Chabon keeps delectable morsels hidden in every corner of his overladen dessert tray.
Their infectious opinions – that literally made me call my wife with the order for K&C while she was en route to the book store to buy our vacation reading – is what makes epinions such a wonderful place to …er…escape to.
Action and Adventure Fiction - Michael Chabon, the author of Wonder Boys, comes storming back with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a midcen...More at Barnes and Noble
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