Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed himself 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. Drawing on their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapist, the Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men.
I hope everyone is ready for another nonsensical post in which I ruthlessly try to extract meaning using only my unaided brain. You bring the popcorn, I'll bring the metaphors. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I am only typing out once, and will now abbreviate to K&C which sounds like a baking powder manufacturer,1 is a thick, pulitzer-winning book on comics, golems, jews, homosexuality, WWII, magic, and, most important of all, escapism. I actually read this book because of my overweening curiousity about my family's copy of the book, which was given to my brother many years ago by a young man who was hitting on him. My brother was, at the time, both seventeen and a clerk at the bookstore where it was bought. Customers take note: Don't be gross and hit on the hardworking members of the service industry when they are just doing their jobs to serve you, especially when they're still in high school, you creepoid. Anyway, so this guy gives my brother K&C, which has an inscription that says:
"Apparently this one's a good one for some such as we who are headed to 'The City'. Drop me a line."2
And ever since then, I have been dying to know what the fuck he meant by that. What is "The City"? Who is going there? Why is it capitalized? What does it all mean?!?!?!? and it's only taken me ten years to find out!
Scratch that, I still don't know what it means. There is not, as far as I can tell, a "City" in K&C. There is a city, New York City, in fact, but not a "City". And it's not like my brother going to a real city at the time, he was actually going to be moving out of a city. So I can only assume it was a metaphorical city. Maybe we can take a hint from Captain Hammer of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, who seems like a man who knows his way around a metaphor:
"The hammer is my penis."
Oh, well, okay then. I'm not even sure what I'm talking about anymore, but I think I should get back to the book, which is ostensibly the reason we're all here today.
I think that Kavalier&Clay is a well-written, thoroughly exhaustive book. That's not to say it didn't have problems. But the problems that crop up in a book of Kavalier&Clay's caliber are not the same kind of fun-destroying problems that crop up in, say, "The Sheik's Pregnant Heiress Secretary". I mean, even if you're not swept along in it, at least you won't hate yourself afterwards.
Let's get the story out of the way first: It begins, well, not quite at the beginning, when Josef Kavalier and Samuel Klayman meet for the first time. Then we back track to Josef's daring escape from Prague during the crackdown on Jewish citizens, and moves forward into Kavalier & Clay's partnership, their comic hero the Escapist, and jogging swiftly through the build-up to and entry in WWII, with Josef's struggle to free the rest of his family and their first romantic relationships, before jumping abruptly twelve years later, and the final act.
One of the things I didn't find particularly great about Kavalier&Clay was that I felt that it was one-sidedly plot-driven, rather than character driven. It seemed sometimes like Joe and Sam were blown always by things happening to them, and never by making things happen themselves. It's as though they were little pinballs, wound up and let loose, buffeted by outside forces into changing directions but never themselves making a choice. In the final part, there is a story about Harry Houdini and his wife, no more than a few pages long, and I felt like I got to know the wife better than I knew Joe or Sam. They had quirks, yes, but put them in an unfamiliar situation, and I could not have said which way they would jump. My standards might have been a tad high, since I was also catching up on episodes of Friday Night Lights when I was reading Kavalier&Clay, and that show does character like nobody's business. It does character so well that you actually forget that half of the show is made up of absolutely asinine and/or ridiculous plots like the time they made a sidekick geek high schooler character murder a rapist/stalker who then covers it up and lies to the police about it. Like, this show is about a high school football team, what the shit is that? And yet! That is the beauty of character.
The flipside to this equation though, is that the plot is absolutely stunning. (It'd have to be or else the book would have been mulched). It's very in the spirit of comic book heroism, and Chabon exploits that by setting his characters up, often at the beginning of a chapter or a section, in a weird or wonderful situation, and then later going back to the origins and working up to why, for example, Joe is suddenly threatening to jump off the Empire State Building after a 12 year absence. Haha, SPOILER! It's hard for me to explain if you don't know anything about comics, but it's very !comic book cover! wait, wait, actual story line, things that give the cover context and make it less absurd. Chabon really brings the events to life, and they're also very comic book in that they're larger than life, everything, all the time. Joe doesn't just enlist in the navy - he gets sent to Antarctica, and lives in a snow tunnel and everyone around him dies of carbon monoxide poisoning and then he and his crazy bunker mate make a pact to kill the last person on the continent who is a Nazi, only his pilot gets a burst appendix, so he crashes the plane, and then Joe tries to make conciliatory overtures to the German, but the German gets shot anyhow, and Joe winds up dragging this dead body along the ice for miles, and meanwhile you're like, what the...? How is nothing in that previous sentence made up?! I swear to you, it's true.
My other beef with Chabon is how he thinks I (and you too) am a Special Slow student.3 Yes, it may take awhile for things to sink it, but you don't need to shout, Michael. I am referring, in particular, to the scene in which Sam and Joe dream up the Escapist, and Chabon does this:
Page 119:
Every universe, our own 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 existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat — was, literally, talked into life. Kavalier and Clay - whose golem was to be formed of black lines and the four colour dots of the lithographer - lay down, lit the first of five dozen cigarettes they were to consume that afternoon, and started to talk.
(And side note, how fucking awesome is that? Blew my mind. Chabon can write, no doubt about it. But he doesn't think much of his readers).
And then page 134:
The sound of their raised voices carries up through the complicated antique ductwork of the grand old theater, raising and echoing through the pipes where it emerges through a grate in the sidewalk, where it can be heard clearly by a couple of young men who are walking past, their collars raised against the cold October night, dreaming their elaborate dream, wishing their golem into life.
Like, okay, you were right, I needed that kick in the pants to get it the first time around. They are creating a golem, a creature enlivened by words and given a soul and sent off into the world. I was amazed, I hadn't made the connection. But your insistence on repeating yourself cheapens the effect. It's a golem! I got it! You don't need to bludgeon me with it.
And if that doesn't make you nuts like it did me (I can be tetchy, I admit it), how about their names, Kavalier and Clay? Could you get more anvil than that? Kavalier is not cavalier, exactly, but he is a cavalier, a soldier, a mounted gallant tilting madly at windmills. His whole mission: Escape from Prague: Family Edition embodies that romantic, stubborn era. Meanwhile, his buddy "Clay" over there is the embodiment of solidity, of opaqueness, and also represents the final golem of the book, clay brought to life by his own words, his fatal testimony. It's like Chabon didn't trust us to get it, so he was like, I'll put the fucking clue bus in there, that'll run em down.4 That, to me, is Chabon saying this:
"The hammer is my penis."
Another big theme of the book is escapes. Literal and figurative. The comics are escapism, the hero is called the Escapist, and Joe literally escapes twice: once in Prague to avoid death, once in New York City to avoid life. Sammy only manages to escape by the skin of his teeth, which is a lot more horrible than it sounds, before he escapes a final time, which is not so much an escape as it is a release.
You know what this book actually needs more of? It ain't four dollar words. I think it needs more golem! Now, I will warn you, everything I know about golems I learned from Terry Pratchett (I feel like I said that about something else in this blog, which is either sadly indicative of schools these days, or awesomely indicative of Sir Terry). However. I was more affected by the opening of the golem's coffin than I was by Tommy's death (Caveat: this may have been because I was like Han Solo in the garbage chute, all "I have a bad feeling about this," in regards to Joe's one-man crusade to rescue a boatload of children (not an exaggeration) and I am nothing if not an inveterate ahead-reader when I get anxious about inevitable tragedy). I may have also misled myself (I accept all blame for this) into believing that Kavalier&Clay would involve some sort of golem revenge-rampage, which I think would really have lightened the mood and given us all something to cheer for.
I can't remember if I wanted to talk about anything else, but I will say that it's worth a read, it's work, it won't necessarily be a delight, but I think it's worth the time, and it'll make you feel smarter. It's a unique book, that's for sure, unless there's a whole comic-book-origin-story-spirals-into-madness-and-skinned-dogs subgenre I'm missing out on. Don't expect much depth, but the pop and sparkle are enough to make you forget about it for awhile. Now I have to go breath life into this particular golem, which I hope lurches all over your doorstep, shedding mud everywhere. Get it? I made a golem. Of words. Fine, I'll spell it out for you:
The golem is my penis.
1I pretty much know Where the Red Fern Grows by heart. I mean, how else could Billy have saved up $50 to buy his two pups if not for his trusty KC Baking Powder can?! Does this book still make me cry even though I've read it, like, seventeen times? Am I tearing up right now? YES and YES.
2Although it is not important for this anecdote, you may be interested to know that this gesture might have gone to better effect if my brother were actually gay himself. Moral of the Story? DO YOUR RESEARCH.
3Not that this is relevant at all, but why is the entire text of Up the Down Staircase on some Russian website? Complete with doodles and everything! Sometimes the internet mystifies me. And often it does so while violating copyright laws, so this is a red-letter day all around, I'm sure.
4What's with all this swearing? It's not the heat, it's the humidity; I should have written this yesterday, when it was abnormally cool outside. Instead I'm in here trying to keep my fingertips from sweating.
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