I know I love a book when I end it slowly, savoring the luminous, maudlin feeling of saying goodbye to a new friend I’ll never see for the first time again. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay put me in that dream world only possible with a long immersion in someone else’s real made up world.
Chabon, in this and other novels like The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, brings his power from the three cardinal elements of story telling: a clear, vibrant and engaging narrative; characters who are real, alive, and changing (some you like, and some you don’t); and a surfeit of surprising words and audacious phrases.
From these tools he crafts a doorway into a world foreign but, by story’s end, familiar and edifying. That world is set in the real time and place of New York, circa 1941 and 1954. The world centers on Josef Kavalier and Samuel Klayman. Cousins, born just after the Great War, they meet when Joe arrives one night to thrust into he unsuspecting Sammy’s bed by Mrs. Klayman, having arrived on a harrowing journey from Prague, escaping the tightening noose around all Jews in Central Europe.
Of K & K’s 638 pages, only 90 are spent out of New York, both involving Joe’s Adventures. His escape from Prague is mesmerizing, starting with his apprenticeship to Bernard Kornblum, one of Europe’s greatest illusionists. Several years after learning from Kornblum how to pick locks, hide cards, and escape from bags, boxes, and watery depths, Joe’s family pools all its money for bribes, only to have him stopped at the border by guards, tipped off by the corrupt officials who allowed him to leave in the first place. Too embarrassed to return to his family, he seeks shelter with his former mentor, who happens to be charged with secreting the Golem of Prague to Lithuania.
In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated anthropomorphic being created entirely from inanimate matter. This one is made of clay from the banks of the Moldau (Vltava) as it flows through Prague. Legend has it he was animated by rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel to fight the persecution and sequestration of the Jews into at ghetto at that time. 400 years later, he is unable to save all the Jews, only helping one young man escape inside the rigged coffin which carries him to the Baltic.
Sammy is introduced through his relationship with his father, the Mighty Molecule. Sort of a Jewish Jack LaLanne, the diminutive Alter Klayman travels around the country performing amazing feats of strength, sending money but not his love, periodically back to his abandoned family. Sammy suffers from the after effects of polio, with withered weakened legs and a shambling gait.
Joe had spent his time after Kornblum in art school. Sammy notices his drawings, and immediately conceives a partnership to jump on the comic book superhero bandwagon, just then building steam across the country on the backs of Superman and others. Their character, the Escapist, models Joe’s intense desire for revenge against the Germans and the Nazis, and brings millions to his owner, Sammy’s boss Sheldon Anapol and his brother-in-law, Jack Ashkenazy. Sam and Joe are paid well, but sign away their rights to their creations in the initial contract. Being young and eager, they see this as a good bargain at the time.
Their search for artists to fill in the panels of their books entangles them with Rosa Luxembourg Sax, a young bohemian living in Greenwich VIllage with her father, who has renamed himself Longman Harkoo. The walls of his home’s three flights of stairs are lined with 7000 snapshots of himself. He wears a Brownie camera around his neck, and, whenever he meets someone new, he insists on posing for a picture, seeking the inner being of the photographer in his own portrait.
Rosa and Joe hit it off, while Sammy finds his own path to love. But on the night of December 6-7, separate personal tragedies afflict them both. Coupled with the attack on Pearl Harbor, this sends Joe into the Navy and Rosa and Sammy, eventually, to Levittown (named Bloomtown in the novel).
While in service, Joe ends up in Antarctica. In another 50 pages of powerful evocative story telling, Chabon crams an entire world of polar adventure, tragedy, and redemption.
A mad pilot, suffocated dogs, a German geologist, and an endless, sunless winter contrive to send Joe back home, 12 long years later, to reunite with Rosa and Sammy.
This novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and it’s easy to see why. Chabon is in total control of his craft and the world he creates. Despite the funny, adventurous tone, and the setting in a childish genre – comic books – Chabon is writing for adults who gain pleasure from multiple levels of meaning. At its core, this is a story of self-made men, who literally re-build themselves from their own clay. To emphasize, Chabon juxtaposes the Golem of clay with Sammy, who changes his name, for artistic purposes, from Klayman to Clay. And Joe, throughout his adventures, remains self-confident, almost cavalier.
If you haven’t met up with Chabon before, try this or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. He’s also responsible for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys (movie of the same name), and Summerland.