Review of Cavalier and Clay

Where There Is Icing

Reviewed by Claude Lalumière



The dawn of the comics industry is a fascinating slice of history. It's an essential chapter in the annals of pop culture, but it's also an important part of American history. For comics aficionados, the details of this history are legendary: the struggles of Siegel and Shuster to get Superman in print, the pageant of talent -- from Jack Kirby to Jules Feiffer -- that passed through the doors of Will Eisner's studio, the disputed origins of Batman, the shameful and exploitative treatment of writers and illustrators, the infamous congressional investigation, the legal war between the publishers of Superman and Captain Marvel, the exploits of Simon and Kirby. Although millions of people read the comic books of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s every month, the stories behind the stories remain bits of trivia known only to a select audience.

Michael Chabon incorporates most of these events in his historical novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and alludes to the others. He creates a fictional scenario in the midst of real history and, with this act of fiction, reveals deeper truths and mysteries that any compilation of facts ever could.

In Prague, Josef Kavalier is a young apprentice to an aging escape artist. As Nazi occupation intensifies, Josef, with the help of his mentor, smuggles himself out of Nazi territory. He eventually makes it to New York City, home of the newborn comics industry. He comes to live with his Aunt Ethel, where he hooks up with his visionary and ambitious cousin, Sam Klayman. The boy geniuses decide to pour their synergistic talents into comic books. They change their Jewish names to Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay. Thus rechristened (so to speak), they create their first comic-book superhero: The Escapist.

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. Like Siegel and Shuster, the pair signed over the rights to their creation for a paltry sum, while the publishers made a fortune off it. The style of The Escapist comics ranges from early Jack Kirby ("It was Joe's battle scenes -- the type of panel or sequence known in the trade as a slugfest -- that first got his work noticed, both in the business and by the boggled young manhood of America. These scenes have been described as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian.") to Spirit-era Will Eisner ("the daring use of perspective and shading, the radical placement of word balloons and captions and, above all, the integration of narrative and picture by means of artfully disarranged, dislocated panels that stretched, shrank, opened into circles, spread across two full pages, marched diagonally toward one corner of the page, unreeled themselves like the frames of a film"). Kavalier, not only a groundbreaking visual storyteller who never doubts his own genius but also a practicing prestidigitator, has more than a little of Orson Welles about him. But such references are just icing -- albeit delicious.

This is the cake: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a magical novel. Its recreation of the golden age of the comics industry is, although cloaked in fiction, picture perfect. Its characters -- Joe and his struggle to bring his family to America; Sam and his complex relationship to his father; Rosa and the depths of both her talent and compassion -- are gripping. This novel's epic sweep is constructed with tender moments of heartfelt intimacy. The story itself is, in many ways, the story of the USA itself: the Depression, the American dream, isolationism, the dichotomy of racism and integration, sexual repression, the Second World War, the paranoid 1950s, nostalgia for often-imaginary golden ages. Not only do the characters live through this history, but their own lives are reflections of these conflicting, schizoid visions of America.

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. The novel's main characters, and even some of the secondary ones, explore the potential and limits of their own personal version of the American dream, finding success and failure, adulation and betrayal, vindication and disillusionment, as well as love and persecution. At the heart of the novel is the story of two friends who believe in their imagination and its power to change their lives and the world -- and of how the course of their lives affects that faith.

Lending the novel yet more poignancy is the fact that Jack Kirby's ghost haunts the whole book. Kirby's imagination has always been an important part of my life. I sensed a kindred soul in Chabon. The novel, despite some superficial similarities between Kavalier and Kirby, is not the story of the late Kirby's life. Nevertheless, one could say that it is the story of Kirby's spirit, from his no-holds-barred hatred of fascism to the relentless and intuitive artistic inventiveness that pushed him to create some of the world's greatest comics. Throughout the book, Kirby's presence is so palpable that, every time I turned a page, I kept expecting him to show up. He is referred to twice, but never appears. And then I read the author's afterword. The last paragraph was, especially after having read Chabon's beautifully uncompromising novel, both illuminating and moving, "Finally, I want to acknowledge the deep depth I owe in this and everything else I've ever written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics." | January 2001

Reading Group Guide
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon

List Price: $26.95
Pages: 659
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0679450041
Publisher: Random House

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About This Book


With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers.

It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun.

The brilliant writing that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov is everywhere apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times about Wonder Boys-and here he has created, in Joe Kavalier, a hero for the century.

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1. Escape, literally and figuratively, is everywhere in this novel. Why do you think Michael Chabon and the characters in the novel place so much importance on it? From what and to what are the different characters in the novels escaping? When is escape good in the novel and when is it bad? Can the character of Joe Kavalier ever quit trying to escape, whether it is from place, like Prague and New York, or from relationships, like Rosa and Sammy? When Sammy leaves for LA, is this an escape, and if so, is it good or bad? Why do characters in this novel seem to be trying to escape relationships, and what are the different types of relationships that can be binding? Does the escaping end at the conclusion of the novel?

2. Compare the theme of escape in the novel to escapist nature of art. In what ways does Chabon explore this in his novel through the art of magic, and painting, and comics? How is the novel THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY an escape itself and the creation of a world unto itself for the reader? Although the novel is clearly fiction, why do you think Michael Chabon goes to such lengths to make it feel real, by adding real historical facts and fictitious footnotes? Why do you think Chabon chose to write about the medium of comics, as opposed to something else like television or the movies?

3. How are love and family portrayed in the novel? What constitutes a family at different points in the novel? What are the different types of love in the novel? How are the families of Joe, Sammy, and Rosa different, and how are these three people able to make a family themselves? What role does family play in Joe's life? Does it unnecessarily bind him to the past? Why or why not? Is there something special about America that allows for unorthodox types of families? Why do you think Sammy married Rosa? Why did she marry him? Are Sammy and Joe both fathers to Tommy?

4. Joe and Sammy create alter egos for themselves and others in their comic books. What is the significance of this? Do the comic book character give us any insight into the real characters in the book which they resemble. Does the character of Luna Moth help us to understand Rosa or Joe more? What does the character of The Escapist tell us about Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay? Why does Joe dress up as The Escapist before reuniting with Rosa and Sammy?

5. A golem, according to Webster's New World Dictionary, is "a man artificially created by cabalistic rites: a robot." Knowing this, what do you think the significance of the golem is in this novel. Why is it so important to preserve the golem, and what is the realization one comes to when the golem is only dirt? Where does the transforming power lie, in the dirt or some other, inexplicable, magic quality? Does the power of the creator die with the creation? Compare the creation of the golem to the creation of The Escapist and other characters by Sammy and Joe and the creation of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY by Michael Chabon.

6. Is this a happy ending? Is Sammy escaping to LA?