Michael Chabon's third novel celebrates the golden age of the adventure comic book, the ‘great, mad new American art form,' which spanned the years between the late 1930's and the early 50's … The cousins' adventures are leavened by buoyant good humor, wisecracks and shtick, but the story never loses its awareness of the tragedy that roils beneath the surface of our everyday lives and the lives of men in tights … The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay fulfills its quota of surprises, but most of its unexpectedness resides, comic-book-style, in its challenging situations, lushly written, in which you know beforehand that the heroes will prevail.
Mr. Chabon has fashioned a big, ripe, excitingly imaginative novel and set it in the world of his grandfather, a New York City typographer at a plant where comics were printed. The book's world is also one of impending crisis, with World War II looming and Joe's Jewish parents and brother still in Czechoslovakia, from which they urged Joe to escape … Even when Mr. Chabon is slipping deftly from realistic narrative into wittily hyperbolic comic-book-ese, as he does to take part in the characters' bursts of creativity each time a new character is invented, the book's essential seriousness and thematic heft are never diminished.
I'm not sure what the exact definition of a ‘great American novel’ is, but I'm pretty sure that Michael Chabon's sprawling, idiosyncratic, and wrenching new book is one … The story Chabon tells is a quirky and yet quintessentially American rags-to-riches-and-beyond tale that manages to include a boat full of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler, an attempt to spirit the Golem out of Prague, the history of comic books, a visit to Houdini's grave, a screening of Citizen Kane, a party for Salvador Dalí, bar mitzvahs at the Pierre, a lower-middle-class Brooklyn apartment and an 'arty' Greenwich Village townhouse, a straight love affair, a gay love affair, Governor Al Smith, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a speedy, nearly effortless read. The action zooms along, with plot twists worthy of a pulp fiction potboiler and characters of delicious pumped-up proportions...delivered in Chabon’s flawless musical prose and punctuated — Bat! Bam! Bif! — with feats of physical prowess and derring-do … Many contemporary issues — homosexuality, the role of women in the arts, censorship, anti-Semitism — are addressed, though never with the cloying revisionism that can bog down books that try to use history as a Parable for Our Time. This is definitely New York, the old-school version.
From comic books to radio, The Escapist (and a host of companion titles) leads Kavalier & Clay to a life of comfort and the love of beautiful people. But life is hardly a brimming bowl of cherries for our heroes. In the midst of their success they do battle with the Aryan League and the vice squad. And of course Joe has a family back in Prague to avenge … Words are certainly the creative mud that runs through the veins of Chabon. A wonderfully lyrical writer, Chabon rattles off one elegiac list after another, paeans to the comic books that sustained Joe during his lean years after the war.
Jewish mysticism meets Americana in his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and we find all this in the comic-book superhero, the Escapist, who is the creation of the wonderful pair of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay … Chabon's greatest skill lies in his combination of imaginative fiction and practical research. His prose, however, is neither fluid nor flawless. Joe's faltering English often seems unrealistically so; some of Chabon's secondary characters blur in the background of comic-book action heroes and artists. But what does make his novel an adventure wholly worth undertaking is the endearing and mysterious Joe, the misunderstood Sam, and their own personal and professional journeys.
Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay are fully imagined fictional characters who are not simply doppelgangers of real people. Yet, Kavalier and Clay do evoke the two great Jewish duos of the early days of comics: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (the creators of Superman), and Joe Simon and Jack Kirby … The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is that elusive holy grail, The Great American Novel. Here, the dreams of that mythical yet all too real land are related, with unerring confidence and great depths of emotion, through the history of its most maligned art form, the comic book, and its even more maligned creators.
Chabon takes us everywhere: to the back streets of Prague, the headquarters of the Aryan-American League, a gay party, an Alaskan military outpost during the war, Louis Tannen's celebrated magic shop, the fictional Long Island suburb of Bloomtown. We meet fretful bigwigs, mournful artistes, two-bit fanatics … Ah, but there are so many good things in this novel, it's hard to limit oneself … Michael Chabon has written a long, lovely novel about the American Dream and about comic books (the two, it turns out, may be much the same thing). It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal – smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read
Chabon’s got an eye for the spine-tingling image and a near-perfect ear … Chabon, who has researched this novel assiduously, is sometimes too eager to show his work. He distracts us from his own performance with a few superfluous flourishes … These are complaints about a writer whose unevenness seems inextricable from his undeniable brilliance. Kavalier and Clay is over 600 pages long, but it’s not an epic novel. Rather, it’s a long, lyrical one that’s exquisitely patterned rather than grandly plotted, composed with detailed scenes, and spotted with some rapturous passages of analysis and others that give lavish accounts of superheroic derring-do. The book is, in a sophisticated way, comic-bookish.
A stroke of sheer conceptual genius links the themes of illusion and escape with that of the European immigrant experience of America in this huge, enthralling third novel … A tale of two magnificently imagined characters, and a plaintive love song to (and vivid re-creation of) the fractious ethnic energy of New York City a half century ago.
This epic novel about the glory years of the American comic book (1939-1954) fulfills all the promise of Chabon's two earlier novels … Well researched and deeply felt, this rich, expansive and hugely satisfying novel will delight a wide range of readers.
