The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I like the writing in this book. I like the characters in it. It took me to a different time and place. The characters are rich and complex. I cannot, however, recommend this book. It has many sub-stories within its main storyline. Many of them are never resolved. They just fade away. The book zig-zags all of the place. I finished four-fifths of the book and gave up. I got tired of twists and turns that ended nowhere.

Kavalier and Clay are Jewish cousins, Clay (morphed from Klayman) a short New Yorker crippled by polio, Kavalier a tall brooding escapee from Europe just before Hitler locked the gates and opened the extermination lines. The day after Kavalier's surprising arrival in New York, after his amazing escape from Europe via Japan and San Francisco, Sam and Joe launch the multi-million dollar earning Escapist comic book line in a combination of daring, talent, and brinksmanship bluffing.

The rest of the book is the story of how they survive success and conquer failure. The book reads quickly, with only an uncomfortable homosexuality subplot to ruin the enjoyment of the interaction between the cousins and the bubbling potboiling excitement of the early days of comic books in the 1930 and 1940s.

I listened to the abridged version of this, which made me miss some of the exposition that Chabon loves to engage in. Kavalier and Clay's lives and the juxtaposition of New York as a city in those lives was very well done. NYC was almost like a third main character. Chabon also did a good job of describing the golem and other Jewish traditions without bogging down the story. Towards the end, a melancholy that stuck with me after the book ended set in. Kavalier and Clay live on, but their lives have gone from marvelous to ordinary.

This is an amazing book. There are so many novels being published today that are written so simplistically they are more screenplays than literature. What is special about Kavalier and Klay is the depth and beauty of the visuals. About the golden age of comic books and other exceptionally significant parts of the twentieth century you are carried away by the perfect, constant descriptions of place, atmosphere and human emotion and it is in this way that the book reads like the very best aspects of the very best film. I literally look forward to the film that demands to be made to bring this incredible work of fiction to life.
I see Adrian Brody as Kavalier, Elijah Wood as Klay and Zoey Deschanel as Rosa but that's just me.

First off, this novel never gets boring, which is quite an achievement for something so long. Chabon does an impressive job of telling the tale of two cousins with different backgrounds. Yet while the story and delivery are first-rate, there isn't exactly a literary message per se beyond keys, locks and imprisonment, be this last of the physical, social, mental or emotional sort. Sure, you could go back and write a book report about that sort of symbolism, but you don't really come away from the novel the same way you might with "Catcher in the Rye," "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," "Elmer Gantry" or "The Great Gatsby," but then those have weathered the test of time and "Kavalier and Clay" might suffer from being a work of contemporary fiction in that regard. What author who writes today really attains that kind of status in the here and now? Irving, Updike and Cormac McCarthy . . . maybe.