The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Summary: This epic novel set in New York and Prague introduces us to two misfit young men who make it big by creating comic-book superheroes. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America the comic book. Inspired by their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapists, The Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men. (639 pages)
About the Author: Michael Chabon is the bestselling author of Werewolves In Their Youth, Wonder Boys, A Model World, and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He lives in California with his wife and children.
Ratings:
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Analysis: There are two themes I noticed while reading Chabon's novel.
First, as indicated by the title, there is a concern for the lives of the novel's two protagonists: Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay. That is, there is a concern for the question of biography; and further, how one is to construct, and therefore understand, the "story" that is one's life. Now one would suspect, again informed by the novel's title, that these two lives have been structured by what could be called the "comic book narrative." This thought is further certified when we remember that our two protagonists are creators of comic books: Joe producing the artwork, Sammy the storylines. And this is of course true. But I believe Chabon wants to challenge us to a "deeper" vision of a life. I would maintain that our author is concerned with that "source" from which the comic narrative springs: mythology; or, as I believe Joseph Campbell once put it, the "mytho-poetic." In other words, what we have in the story of Kavalier and Clay, and possibly in our own lives, is another example of, to make use of Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" (a work greatly influenced by Jung), the "Hero's Quest." To greatly simplify this narrative: a hero, for any number of reasons, is one day ripped out of his everyday life (for Joe, this is the coming of the Nazis to power in Czechoslovakia; for Sammy, this is the coming of Joe into his life in the United States). Now begins a series of struggles on the part of the hero (for Joe and Sammy this is the challenge of surviving in the comic book business, and to create a comic hero, who turns out to be "The Escapist"), always involving some kind of "wounding" (the death of Joe's brother, Thomas, which leaves him with "survivor's guilt;" Sammy's rape), which is for Jung and Campbell a journey towards the subconscious. At the height of the hero's narrative there is both a confrontation and an integration of this subconscious material (Joe's realization and resolution of his self-destructive impulses, which is in fact the manifestation of his guilt, through his senseless murder of a German solider in the Antarctic; Sammy's acceptance of his homosexuality). Now the hero may return to the everyday world, transformed by his experience and able to transform the world through the wisdom he now possesses (Joe's creation of his comic masterpiece, "The Golem;" Sammy's willingness to actively embrace and explore his homosexuality). This integration is the meaning of the returning hero taking rulership of his kingdom. This is the meaning of marriage at the end of Fairy stories and the phrase: ". . . and they lived happily ever after." I am purposeful in my mentioning of marriage because, given this hero narrative, it is now possible to posit the thesis that Joe and Sammy are actually a single character which has now been reintegrated, reunited. Note the ending of the novel: ". . . Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY."
Second, I would maintain that "Kavalier & Clay" is a defense of the comic book. The way Chabon goes about making this case is through the defense of a subject far more interesting and controversial: escapism. For Chabon escapism is not, as some would claim, a "negative" act; an act of "moving away" from as opposed to "moving towards." Escapism is, in fact, a creative act. This is the meaning Houdini, a person mentioned many times in the novel, gave to the act in his "escapes." Symbolically, escapism is personified by the golem, both as a Jewish myth and as Joe's comic character. Now escapism for Chabon performs at least two functions: first, it is a way, a style, of coping with one's world; and, second, it is a way of coping with one's personal, psychological conflicts. We see both of these functions at work in the lives of Joe and Sammy. In this way escapism is an expression of hope, of transcendence. As it is written of Joe: "The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something — one poor, dumb, powerful thing — exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay byeond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigations into comic books always cited 'escapism' among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Escapism here is not a retreat from the world, but a way to more authentically be in the world.
If there is a way in which one's life, taken as a mythic quest (a possibility Joyce realized in almost everything he wrote), and escapism meet, it may be in that it is through the creativity of escapism that one is able to enter the realm of mythos. And that it is through myth, in any of its guises, that our lives reach for a meaning that is beyond itself. Paradoxically, perhaps, this is not to negate our present lives but to fulfill it.
Although "Kavalier & Clay" is not, strictly, a work of science fiction, I believe the above sentiments of Chabon's are those that any reader of the genre can understand.
Henry A. Jimenez
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