The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
“Forget about what you are escaping from [...] Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.“
The above quote is so central to Michael Chabon’s (pronounced SHAY-bahn, in case you’re wondering) masterful and thoroughly wonderful, Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This 630+ page novel which, on the surface, is about comic books and Jewish mythology is really about escape—whether it be about escaping from Prague before the Nazis begin their march into control of the city, or the escape from your true self so that you can establish a temporary normalcy, or the escape that so many kids took part in with their comics during and after WWII. I have never read a piece of fiction that deals so magnificently with escape (and doesn’t take place in an all-out fantasy setting).
On the surface, a novel that uses comic books as a way to expand on the themes of escape, of love, of identity—you would be justified in fearing that this book could succumb to a disease of clichés and repetition. One might worry that the comics are used in a manner we are already familiar with: that the superheroes represent virtue and a quest for justice, that the villains are metaphors for daily evils and compromises, that the sidekick represents the idea that a friend is invaluable, etc. What Chabon so brilliantly does here instead is seamlessly lays the world of comic books onto an already established linear story. The idea of comics snaps on to the story, rather than the other way around. And, yes, you do have your clichéd bits about comics here but they are written and handled perfectly. (Considering that Hollywood is going to suck every last drop of blood out of the comics industry by releasing comics-based movie until 2023, let’s just say that it was refreshing to read something about comics and marvel at how well it was handled.)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a story about Joe (Josef) Kavalier and Sammy Clay (née Klayman)—two cousins who are suddenly thrown together when Josef arrives at Sammy’s house one day after fleeing from Prague when the writing was on the walls regarding Hitler’s desire to take over Europe. Sammy is fatherless and mostly friendless; he spends most of his free time reading comics or writing. Sammy is stationary, but would love to go all over the place (his father was an entertainer on the Vaudeville circuit and ultimately chose that over his family). By the time he arrives in New York, Joe has gone many places and done many things that a typical teenage boy probably shouldn’t have to go to or do.
Joe grew up being amazed by the life (and idea) of Harry Houdini. He would eventually become friends Bernard Kornblum, a well-respected elder of the magician/escapist/entertainer world. Kornblum taught Joe how to pick locks so as to escape from such setups like: having your arms chained behind your back while inside of a bag and thrown into a river. He was a mentor and when Joe started showing high proficiency in this field of work, it coincided at a time when Kornblum was asked to find the Golem of Prague and move it so that the Nazis would never find it or destroy it.
From here, the novel continues to explore many more levels on the theme of escape: Joe’s physical escape from Czechoslovakia; Sammy’s escape when dealing with his sexuality; Joe’s setting aside of money so that he can pay for his family to brought to the U.S., and the daydreams associated with that idea; the mental escapes that both Sammy and Joe have to perform in order to come up with characters and story lines for the comics they are creating; the physical escapes that Joe chooses to do during and after WWII.
Kavalier & Clay is a great, nuanced book (I haven’t even gotten to Rosa Saks, the woman who would play a role in Sammy’s and Joe’s lives) that treats its characters and story with real love. It is a book that mixes comedy, heartbreak, wonder, and defeat with ease. Here are two great excerpts that show Chabon’s impeccable writing ability. The first excerpt is a great example of wonder, as you’re reading the back story of Judy Dark, a.k.a. The Luna Moth (a female character based on Rosa Saks). Notice the depth of playfulness and movement, two cornerstones of any story in which a seemingly banal character becomes charged with a great power that can help save humanity:
“So much has been written and sung about the bright lights and ballrooms of Empire City—that dazzling town!—about her nightclubs and jazz joints, her avenues of neon and chrome, and her swank hotels, their rooftop tea gardens in the summertime with paper lanterns. On this steely autumn afternoon, however, our destination is a place a long way from the horns and the hoohah. Tonight we are going down, under the ground, to a room that lies far beneath the high heels and the jackhammers, 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 a 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 young 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 the books that she has officially pronounced dead. Every ten minutes or so her walls are shaken by the thunder of the uptown local racing overhead.
“On this particular autumn night, only the prospect of another solitary evening lies before her. She will fry her chop and read herself to sleep, no doubt with a tale of wizardry and romance. Then, in dreams that strike even her as trite, Miss Dark will go adventuring in chain mail and silk. Tomorrow morning she will wake up alone, and do it all again.
“Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!”
The second excerpt illustrates the bluntness of heartbreak in the book when Joe finds out the ship (the Ark of Miriam) he was able to get his family on headed for the U.S. was sunk by the Nazis shortly after it left a port in Portugal. The first sentence here is what Rosa reads from a paper’s account of the sinking; the remainder of the excerpt is what really happened:
“[...] A German U-boat assigned to one of the dreaded ‘wolf packs’ that were tormenting Allied shipping in the Atlantic had set upon the innocent ship and sent it to the bottom with all hands.
“This account, it later developed, was not quite true. When, after the war, he was put on trials for other crimes, the commander of U-328, an intelligent and cultivated career officer named Gottfried Halse, was able to produce ample evidence and testimony to prove that, in full accordance with Admiral Dönitz’s ‘Prize Regulations,’ he had attacked the ship within ten miles of land—the island of Corvo in the Azores—and given ample warning to the captain of the Ark of Miriam. The evacuation had proceeded in an orderly fashion, and the transfer of all passengers to the lifeboats might have been effected safely and without incident if, immediately after the firing of the torpedoes, a storm had not appeared out of the northeast, overwhelming the boats so quickly that the crew of U-328 had no time to help. It was only luck that Halse and his crew of forty to escape with their own lives. If he had known that the ship carried children, Halse was asked, a good many of them unable to swim, would he still have proceeded with the attack? Halse’s reply is preserved in the transcript of his trial without comment or any notation as to whether his tone was one of irony, resignation, or sorrow.
“‘They were children,’ he said. ‘We were wolves.’”
This is one of the best fiction books I have read, and it is one that everyone should read before they die.
