The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
Summary
In 1939 Josef Kavalier is smuggled out of Prague in a coffin, alongside the Golem, by the escape artist who trained him. He arrives in his aunt's apartment in Brooklyn and wakes his cousin Sammy Klayman, who has been waiting his whole life for something to happen.
Sammy talks their employer, a novelty goods manufacturer, into publishing comic books, and the two of them invent the Escapist, a stage magician who breaks every chain and spends 1940 punching Nazis on the cover while the United States is still neutral. The comic sells in the millions. The two of them are paid a flat rate and sign away everything, which is exactly what happened to the men who created Superman.
Joe sends every dollar he earns to a rescue committee trying to get his younger brother out of Europe. Sammy, who writes about a hero nobody can hold, is closeted in a country that will shortly hold Senate hearings about what comics are doing to boys.
There is a third figure, Rosa Saks, an artist in Greenwich Village who pulls Joe into a world of surrealists and refugee committees, and the three of them make a family that the war and then the 1950s take apart in ways nobody planned.
It runs past six hundred pages, it is exuberant and funny and stuffed with digressions on stage magic, radio, model rockets and the golem legend, and it earns a genuinely painful middle stretch involving a ship, a rescue that does not happen, and an enlistment in Antarctica.
Chabon writes long, ornamented sentences that some readers love and others find effortful. The comics scholarship is real and worn lightly. Best for readers who want a big generous novel that takes popular art seriously, whether or not they have ever opened a comic.
Historical Context & Significance
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, ahead of finalists Joyce Carol Oates for Blonde and Joy Williams for The Quick and the Dead. It was Michael Chabon's third novel, following The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys.
The industry it describes is documented history. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold Superman outright for a reported one hundred and thirty dollars and spent decades trying to get credit and money back, and the Senate subcommittee hearings of 1954, prompted by Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, produced the Comics Code that ended the era the novel celebrates.
The Escapist has since escaped the book. Dark Horse published actual Escapist comics by working comics writers and artists from 2004, so a superhero invented inside a novel now has his own back issues.