The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
A novel about comic books in the golden age of comic books? Sign me up :D I hope that true to its form, they can make a graphic novel of Kavalier and Clay one day because as advertised, the adventures in this book are pretty surreal. It is a long book, but you can barely catch a breath. This is not to gloss over the density of the book. There is a lot to cover in here than just a story set during the war and its post-hangover period.
After having escaped from Czechoslovakia via Tokyo, Josef Kavalier (echoes of Kafka here) managed to wean his way to New York to live with his aunt and cousin, Sam Clay. With the rest of his family still living under the oppression of Hitler, he schemes to rescue them all across by working his guts out and making money to pay for the safe passage. Being a more than capable artist, he was able to wean his way into the company his company is employed in which specialises in selling practical prank toys. Clay had a better idea on using his cousin’s artistic abilities to exponentially profit from it — he managed to sell the idea for his boss to publish comic books to peddle his goods.
Needless to say, Superman made it big in Action Comics at this time, and everybody else wanted to create their own Superman. Kavalier and Clay’s iteration is “The Escapist” — a hero who manages to squeeze himself out of any tight situations, even defeating a horde of Nazis during the war. With the skeleton key on his chest where the Superman’s “S” is supposed to be, the Escapist is a superhero on his own right. And perhaps it is in the Escapist that we get the driving force of the novel, because Kavalier and Clay first and foremost is a novel about escaping.
Escaping from what? Each character has to escape from different things and therefore require different routes. Initially, Josef had to escape from Czechoslovakia. But when he gets to New York, he has to escape from hopelessness — that he may never see the rest of his family again. Clay had to escape from his sexual orientation and his physical deficiencies. Rosa had to escape from the memories of Josef. Their solutions to escape from their issues may not have actually helped in the long run and may have caused irreparable damage. Escaping it seems, can be a selfish endeavour which may badly ripple to the people close to you.
And us, the readers, what are we escaping from? I can’t speak for myself, but time flew with this book. I love being taken into 1940s New York. The cover of the book is the Empire State Building, which at the time was the tallest building in the world. It is the embodiment of the success of the American Dream — to be a tenant there is to be a part of a clique which has squashed the minnows and the right to light cigars with hundred dollar bills, as Empire Comics had. The bottom line is that the novel is the ultimate escapism.
This book is a lovesong to New York and is the better for it. Who in the world after all, isn’t a little bit in love with New York, even with the idea of it? Aside from the grandiose Empire State Building, we see visions of the hustle and bustle of men drinking with endless tabs in its shoddy bars, of American diners where patrons can sit all day and not be bothered, of parties with celebrities that should and do get out of hand, of conversations with cigarettes by fire escapes while the city buzzes underneath, of the roughness of Brooklyn, of the overbearing polish of Manhattan. The city is beautifully written here, and it is impossible to imagine putting the story in any other city.
In fact, the whole novel feels like an expanded version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, which is set at about the same era when the war is rife — It is about lonely people, though connected to each other they are dreaming alone, as Captain Marlow in Heart of Darkness put it. It is tragic in a way, that no matter how much Sam and Josef, and Rosa loved each other, they cannot resolve each other’s self-imposed nightmares. And the more I think about the tragedy of these relationships, the more I dig this book — call me a sadist. The figures in Hopper’s Nighthawk is barely touching, barely interacting, separated by invisible walls in a darkened New York. I feel that the main characters in this book have traces of the couple in Nighthawks — drinking coffee at midnight for who knows why.
Somehow, all the characters in their own way managed to escape from their own entanglements. For someone who has been running away from something most of his life, I can understand the need for escape which is best summarised in the lines below towards the end of the book:
“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 beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation 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.”
