The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Review
Past KEN KALFUS
ichael Chabon'due south tertiary novel celebrates the golden age of the adventure comic book, the ''great, mad new American fine art grade,'' which spanned the years betwixt the late 1930's and the early 50'due south. It was a thriving fourth dimension for pop civilization, and Chabon vividly recalls the swing music, the pulp novels, ''Denizen Kane,'' the bars of midtown New York, the bar mitzvahs of midtown New York, men's bulky suits and the patriotic kitsch inspired by the Second World State of war. Although suffused with tragedy, ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay'' proves to exist a comic epic, generously optimistic nigh the man struggle for personal liberation.
As in his acclaimed offset novel, ''The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,'' Chabon paces his story with the throttle open. The novel's perversely rollicking first 65 pages, set in Prague during the Nazi occupation, innovate its two interrelated themes: escape and the mystery of the Prague golem, a legendary automaton-giant created from mud by a 16th-century rabbi. For the purposes of the novel, Chabon offers the conceit that the golem actually existed and was hidden in a Prague apartment house, where it awaits the 24-hour interval it will deliver the Jews from their enemies. Every bit the noose tightens effectually the city's ghetto, 18-twelvemonth-one-time Josef Kavalier makes a daring flight abroad in which he abets the removal of the golem before it can exist plant by High german anthropologists and shipped to a Berlin museum. The inanimate figure is given a new hiding place in Republic of lithuania, simply it is recalled repeatedly in the novel, every fourth dimension one character provides another with the passage to freedom.
The next escape occurs upon Joe'due south arrival in America, when he immediately rescues his cousin Sammy Clay, ne Klayman, who has been ''sealed and hogtied within the closed vessel known as Brooklyn, New York.'' Seventeen-year-old Sammy, an gentleman of Houdini and a would-be commercial artist, has been trying to draw his way out of the stock room of the Empire Novelty Company. Joe also has artistic ambitions. His drawings win Sammy'south adoration, and a promise from him to ''get us into the big money,'' which Joe hopes will permit him to bring his family to America. On Joe's first day in New York, they approach Shelly Anapol, Sammy's finagling boss, who advertises his wares (whoopee cushions, amazing midget radios) on the back pages of Superman comic books. They advise that he publish his own comics and save the cost of advert. For Anapol, the cousins invent and draw a new superhero, the Escapist, inspired by their fantasies of liberty and power.
In naming one of the cousins Clay, Chabon gently points to the novel's mainspring: the character's intensely dependent, synergistic relationship. Sammy Clay, the Brooklyn golem, lies inanimate until Joe arrives (indeed, Joe outset meets him in the bed they're forced to share). And soon Sammy, a protean storyteller, has vivified his friend and partner Joe, who turns into a kind of superhero himself, as if conjured from his cousin's imagination: he is agile, good-looking, suave and deft at drawing, language, dancing and sleight of mitt.
Sammy too appears to take conjured for Joe the flamboyant Rosa Luxemburg Saks, an avant-garde creative person who inspires the cousins' girl hero, Luna Moth, a crime-fighter ''with the legs of Dolores Del Rio, black witchy hair and breasts each the size of her caput. . . . The pair of furry antennae hung at playful angles, as if tasting the viewer'southward desire.'' Joe loves Rosa; Sammy loves her as well, but without a touch on of antennae-quivering want. Sammy is slow to realize that he is what in those days was called, with nearly universal disgust, a ''fairy.'' Once the conclusive discovery takes identify, in one of the novel's most moving scenes, his sexuality becomes the box from which the forlorn Sammy needs to escape.
For mere mortals, the process of escape is oftentimes dependent on transformation, and New York, ''the metropolis of freedom and swing,'' is the identify in the 1940's where immigrants go Americans and orphans become superheroes. In Chabon'due south telling, prewar New York, freeing itself from the shackles of the Depression, abounds with raw, confident energy. Popular civilization runs rampant, and the months before Pearl Harbor rank as ''a moment unsurpassed in this century for verve, romanticism, polish and a droll, tidy multifariousness of soul.'' American big-band music spills off the novel'due south pages, in moving counterpoint to Joe's increasingly frustrated attempts to get his family out of occupied Europe.
The cousins entertain few illusions nearly the trashiness of the comic book genre and its imitative heroes and stories, almost of them ''Superman'' knockoffs. In their frustration with America's prewar neutrality, Kavalier and Clay fourth dimension and over again ship the Escapist into battle against Hitler, thinly disguised as Attila Haxoff, whose Razis and Iron Chain cabal occupy Zothenia, Gothsylvania and Draconia. (Anapol, quite ridiculously, fears existence sued.) The cousins know that, even as propaganda, the Escapist throws lame, errant punches confronting fascism. Furthermore, Joe sadly fears that his comic book superheroes represent a ''mirror-image fascism . . . assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered merely strength and domination.''
Despite the creative straitjackets within which the cartoonists worked, Chabon plausibly identifies in the successful comic book many of the qualities of 18-carat artistry: craftsmanship, provocative themes and the artist'due south personal investment. Its pioneers were men of bully talent and ambition. Stan Lee, Spider-Man'due south esteemed progenitor, has a cursory walk-on; Chabon makes warm references to Batman, Superman and all the other menschen dreamed up past young, mostly Jewish cartoonists. (Sammy muses: ''Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the former country, changing his name similar that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would selection a name like that for himself.'') The era's comic book artists are depicted as working in a hotbed of graphic invention, flitting in and out of a maverick flat house in the West 20's that served equally a pen-and-ink Can Pan Aisle.
These halcyon days lasted barely a decade. Comic books suffered with other forms of popular culture in the large chill of the early 1950'south, when the forces of reaction repressed and infantilized our music, films, politics and personal behavior. Estes Kefauver, the Tennessee senator who led an investigation of the comic book manufacture, also makes a cameo appearance in the novel, rather balefully, at the end.
The cousins' adventures are leavened past buoyant good humor, wisecracks and shtick, just the story never loses its sensation of the tragedy that roils beneath the surface of our everyday lives and the lives of men in tights. Batman's parents were murdered. Superman'due south planet was destroyed as thoroughly as any shtetl. Some enormous heartbreak awaits the cousins as the Kavalier family unit in Prague succumbs to the Nazi terror and the earth goes to war. Chabon reflects on the superhero and his precursor, the golem. ''It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something -- one poor, impaired, powerful thing -- exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties and inevitable failures of the greater Creation.''
According to some legends, a golem tin be activated by saying the Hebrew word emet (''truth''), which was inscribed on its forehead. Despite Chabon'due south enthusiasm for narrative-linked-with-paradigm, he e'er returns to the incantatory power of the word: ''Every universe, our ain included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into being through linguistic communication, through murmuring, recital and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.'' Chabon talks his novel into life with passionate, expressive language and occasionally recherche words that have forced me to rechercher the dictionary myself, words such as ''omniveillant,'' ''ruelle,'' ''aetataureate'' and ''nudzhing'' -- well, O.K., ''nudzhing'' I knew. In ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,'' Chabon may romanticize the comic book, only it's unillustrated prose that he makes love to.
Novels conventionally draw a good deal of their power from surprising plot turns. ''The Astonishing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay'' fulfills its quota of surprises, but almost of its unexpectedness resides, comic-book-manner, in its challenging situations, lushly written, in which y'all know beforehand that the heroes will prevail. Information technology would make a overnice comic volume series -- the cousins square-jawed and ham-fisted -- merely the depth of Chabon's thought, his sharp language, his inventiveness and his ambition make this a novel of towering accomplishment.
Ken Kalfus is the author of two curt story collections, ''Thirst'' and ''Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies.''
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/24/reviews/000924.24kalfust.html
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