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livAuthor: Michael Chabon
Details: (c) 2000 Michael Chabon; Pub Picador 2000; ISBN 0-312-28299-0
Verdict: The amazing adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a powerful mixture of absurd and serious.
Reasons for reading it: I was really impressed with The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and in addition the hype about tAAoK&C made me very keen to read it.
How it came into my hands: I bought it while on a book shopping spree in America the summer before this one. Andjack borrowed it, and with the amount of moving around and being short of book space that's been going on since then, I never got round to asking for it back until a few weeks ago. Although it's very good and very thrilling, it took me a long time to get through it, partly because it's really long, and partly because the book is so physically big that I never really wanted to carry it around with me to read it.
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a really dense, complicated book. It's about a lot of different things, and could almost be a series of novellas about the eponymous characters rather than a single work. A lot of it is wacky, almost surreal (and indeed part of the story is set in a specifically Surrealist milieu), but there's a series of sudden twists which are really wrenching, and they keep building up, so that by the end it's heartbreaking, but still absurd.
It's hardly as if I would expect to read a book set in the 40s, with Jewish and gay protagonists, and expect everything to be bunnies and rainbows, but it really does capture the sense of living in the US, with the horrors very much in the background, yet normal life still going on and people growing up and falling in love and pursuing their dreams and an economic and cultural boom. I'm not a historian, but the book did seem to create a very plausible sense of period (though obviously I don't know how accurate it is). I think part of the cleverness is that Chabon is writing for a modern audience who can be expected to sympathize with gay and Jewish characters, but still realistically portrays a context where it's perfectly normal to regard Jews as vaguely weird and vaguely inferior, and "fairies" as horrible disgusting perverts. The detailed portrait of homophobic violence is really shocking, but of course anything less would have been sugarcoating the real history. As with The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Chabon is really successful in conveying the Holocaust as something horrific, not just the same old story you've heard over and over again, but without setting the story directly in wartime Europe. Interestingly there doesn't seem to be any explicit connection drawn between American homophobia and the persecution of gay people in the Holocaust, but perhaps Chabon just expects the reader to figure that out for themselves.
It's an upsetting book; sometimes I just had to stop reading because it was too painful, but it's in no way a depressing one. There's a lot of subtle humour, and a lot of outright farce, and a lot of positivity and romance. The one thing that did disappoint me was the conclusion of the romance arc; the last section of the book gets all Radcliffe Hall with the tragic yet noble gay character sacrificing himself so that his true love can be all happy and heterosexual, and I found that considerably icky. But ending aside, there's really a great deal of impressive and original stuff in tAAoC&K.
I don't even care about superhero comics, but that theme was so well handled that it became interesting. I would say that tAAoC&K is successfully slipstreamy; it has many of the good qualities of both litfic and speculative / AH stuff, would definitely appeal to both geeks and literary snobs. I think the style works well because Chabon is unashamedly a geek, he's not writing SF while at the same time pretending to be too good for that.
Details: (c) 2000 Michael Chabon; Pub Picador 2000; ISBN 0-312-28299-0
Verdict: The amazing adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a powerful mixture of absurd and serious.
Reasons for reading it: I was really impressed with The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and in addition the hype about tAAoK&C made me very keen to read it.
How it came into my hands: I bought it while on a book shopping spree in America the summer before this one. And
jack borrowed it, and with the amount of moving around and being short of book space that's been going on since then, I never got round to asking for it back until a few weeks ago. Although it's very good and very thrilling, it took me a long time to get through it, partly because it's really long, and partly because the book is so physically big that I never really wanted to carry it around with me to read it. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a really dense, complicated book. It's about a lot of different things, and could almost be a series of novellas about the eponymous characters rather than a single work. A lot of it is wacky, almost surreal (and indeed part of the story is set in a specifically Surrealist milieu), but there's a series of sudden twists which are really wrenching, and they keep building up, so that by the end it's heartbreaking, but still absurd.
It's hardly as if I would expect to read a book set in the 40s, with Jewish and gay protagonists, and expect everything to be bunnies and rainbows, but it really does capture the sense of living in the US, with the horrors very much in the background, yet normal life still going on and people growing up and falling in love and pursuing their dreams and an economic and cultural boom. I'm not a historian, but the book did seem to create a very plausible sense of period (though obviously I don't know how accurate it is). I think part of the cleverness is that Chabon is writing for a modern audience who can be expected to sympathize with gay and Jewish characters, but still realistically portrays a context where it's perfectly normal to regard Jews as vaguely weird and vaguely inferior, and "fairies" as horrible disgusting perverts. The detailed portrait of homophobic violence is really shocking, but of course anything less would have been sugarcoating the real history. As with The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Chabon is really successful in conveying the Holocaust as something horrific, not just the same old story you've heard over and over again, but without setting the story directly in wartime Europe. Interestingly there doesn't seem to be any explicit connection drawn between American homophobia and the persecution of gay people in the Holocaust, but perhaps Chabon just expects the reader to figure that out for themselves.
It's an upsetting book; sometimes I just had to stop reading because it was too painful, but it's in no way a depressing one. There's a lot of subtle humour, and a lot of outright farce, and a lot of positivity and romance. The one thing that did disappoint me was the conclusion of the romance arc; the last section of the book gets all Radcliffe Hall with the tragic yet noble gay character sacrificing himself so that his true love can be all happy and heterosexual, and I found that considerably icky. But ending aside, there's really a great deal of impressive and original stuff in tAAoC&K.
I don't even care about superhero comics, but that theme was so well handled that it became interesting. I would say that tAAoC&K is successfully slipstreamy; it has many of the good qualities of both litfic and speculative / AH stuff, would definitely appeal to both geeks and literary snobs. I think the style works well because Chabon is unashamedly a geek, he's not writing SF while at the same time pretending to be too good for that.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-19 10:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-19 11:04 pm (UTC)(Funny; I was just talking about this book over at
I can see how the romance arc might have disappointed you. There are things I found suboptimal about it too. In my head, the three of them have a different ending, but I'm content to let that be in my head (or in fanfic :-) rather than on the page...