The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY (Michael Chabon) - Three Stars
Czech Jew Josef Kavalier escapes Europe in the face of Hitler's onslaught and flees to the United States to live with his cousin, Sammy Klayman. Sam, a somewhat spacey young man with a vivid imagination, notices Josef's skill at drawing and two go on to leave an indelible mark on the history of American comic books.
Michael Chabon's writing style is immensely frustrating, because he offers glimpses of greatness without any consistency. He writes like he was the offspring of Vladimir Nabokov and V.C. Andrews. One section of the novel will be written so beautifully you have to pause and savor it immediately after reading, and the passage right after that will make you wrinkle your nose in disgust. Half this novel belongs in the Library of Congress, the other half in San Jose State University's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
Another frustrating aspect is the inconsistent creativity. Chabon has many very original sections in the novel (the sequence of events in Antarctica, the story of the Escapist in Chapter 8, aside from that execrable first half-paragraph), but there are times when this drops off and his literary influences are very clear (E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime had more than a little influence on this novel).
But, now that I've thought more about it, I think my main problem with the novel was that one of the main characters, Sam Clay, was a boring character. Josef Kavalier was an interesting character (and, quite obviously, the "prime" character from page one onward) and Rosa Saks was a VERY interesting character—I think there was far more material that could have been plumbed from the interaction between those two—but Sam Clay really was not. In many ways, he seemed a bit of a cliché to me, and his many secrets and neuroses were pretty easy to figure out (e.g., the Tracy Bacon sub-plot). "The Amazing Adventures of Josef Kavalier" would have been a better novel.
Czech Jew Josef Kavalier escapes Europe in the face of Hitler's onslaught and flees to the United States to live with his cousin, Sammy Klayman. Sam, a somewhat spacey young man with a vivid imagination, notices Josef's skill at drawing and two go on to leave an indelible mark on the history of American comic books.
Michael Chabon's writing style is immensely frustrating, because he offers glimpses of greatness without any consistency. He writes like he was the offspring of Vladimir Nabokov and V.C. Andrews. One section of the novel will be written so beautifully you have to pause and savor it immediately after reading, and the passage right after that will make you wrinkle your nose in disgust. Half this novel belongs in the Library of Congress, the other half in San Jose State University's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
Another frustrating aspect is the inconsistent creativity. Chabon has many very original sections in the novel (the sequence of events in Antarctica, the story of the Escapist in Chapter 8, aside from that execrable first half-paragraph), but there are times when this drops off and his literary influences are very clear (E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime had more than a little influence on this novel).
But, now that I've thought more about it, I think my main problem with the novel was that one of the main characters, Sam Clay, was a boring character. Josef Kavalier was an interesting character (and, quite obviously, the "prime" character from page one onward) and Rosa Saks was a VERY interesting character—I think there was far more material that could have been plumbed from the interaction between those two—but Sam Clay really was not. In many ways, he seemed a bit of a cliché to me, and his many secrets and neuroses were pretty easy to figure out (e.g., the Tracy Bacon sub-plot). "The Amazing Adventures of Josef Kavalier" would have been a better novel.
posted by Kevin at 11:52 AM
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