Book Reviews - Fiction:The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
by Michael Chabon
2001 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"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 charge leveled against comic books, that the 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 shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt - especially right after the war - a worthy challenge. He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of Betty and Veronica that he had found in a service-station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waisted goddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship." p. 576.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is an exploration of the imagination, brotherhood, and, by more than one definition, the art of escapism. Chabon's story follows the lives, or "adventures," of Samuel Klayman, a Brooklyn Jew, and his cousin from Prague, Josef Kavalier. The latter had "escaped" Europe in 1939, having secretly stowed away in the "coffin" of a dressed up Golem (one of the last few treasures his family had still owned) after his passage to America (paid for in advance by the last of the Kavalieri family fortune) was denied.
Shortly after arriving in America and moving in with Sam and his mother, Ethel, the two young boys enter into a partnership, Kavalier & Clay, to take advantage of the skyrocketing comic book industry (thanks to the introduction of Superman in 1938). Binding together Sam's flare for story-telling and Joe's artistic talent, the two pin their aspirations onto their own serialized superhero creation: The Escapist!
"The Escapist is Tom Mayflower, crippled nephew of escape artist Max Mayflower (who performs under the stage name of Misterioso). When Max is fatally shot while performing onstage, he gives Tom a golden key and a costume. As long as Tom is wearing the costume and the key, he finds that he is no longer lame and can perform amazing feats of escapology. Tom uses his powers to fight crime under the guise of The Escapist, especially against the evil forces of the mysterious Iron Chain."To the two young men, the character represented more than just a source of income and looming deadlines during the Depression. To Sam, the Escapist embodied all of his hidden desires. Sam's father, the self-proclaimed "Strongest Jew in the World" known in the circus as the Molecule, had left his child and wife soon after learning that Sam's legs would be permanently crippled after a case of polio, developing issues of abandonment and an inferiority complex in the small boy which would persist the rest of his life. The Escapist was everything Sam believed he was not: tall, handsome, athletic, confident, and competent. Feeling a large void in his life, Sam thus sought to live vicariously through the fictional character in his fictional world where finding magical keys could solve all of a young man's problems. To live in this world of amazing feats and beautiful people, Sam immersed himself into his work, that is, until he met Tracy Bacon, the radio voice actor, and virtual clone, of the fictional master of "escapology" himself, with whom he began his own exploration of reality, a reality he would have trouble believing he could ever truly feel like he was a part of. Sam, it would appear, is destined to repeat the sins of his father and abandon the live he constructs after the war. The only questions is: Is he escaping from or to the life he wants?
To Joe (with some guilt, Josef chose to Americanize his name to be a reflection of his new life), the comic book medium represented not only a means to money for the purpose of buying his family's safe passage to New York, but also (in the short term) an opportunity to generate support among the American public for enterring into the war against the Axis Powers, particularly Germany: the oppressors of his homeland and the principle villains of his stories. The preoccupation with "escapism" originated in Prague, where Joe had come under the tutelage of Bernard Kornblum, a world-reknowned Houdini-esque escape artist and magician, who eventually became one of the inspirations for his and Sam's amalgam creation. Despite his obsession with his work and his desire to see his family again, Joe met and fell in love with Rosa Saks, an eccentric young artist, and became conflicted over his guilt for no longer spending every waking moment working to save the family that had sacrificed everything they had for his ticket to America. Gradually, he began to think of his family less and less, and began to make a life of his own in his adopted country, at least, until everything he had been workings towards had crashed down upon him, after which he succumbed to his own grief and escaped into the war to try to kill Germans for real.
Drawing parallels with the twists and turns in the lives of the two comic book creators, Chabon wonderfully traces the early history of the comic book industry's golden age, it's unimaginable success, and it's downfall. But above all, it is a story about two men who grew up amidst the Depression, WWII, and the subsequent decline of the superhero genre, but somehow were able to not let go of their boyish dreams. Picking up the book, I could never have imagined how poignant and insightful this story turned out to be, and I would recommend it to anyone, including those who are unfamiliar with comic books. A-
Past Reviews:
State of Fear (2004) by Michael Crichton
Interpreter of Maladies (1999) by Jhumpa Lahiri
Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole
