The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk – his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world – as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape.

 -Michael Chabon

This was an incredible novel, despite my initial doubts about the subject matter (comic books?). Michael Chabon’s writing style is not effortlessly elegant, but it moves at a pace that reminds me of children’s books. Slow down, and you’ll catch the details. The outline is, ultimately, just as compelling as the details. I rarely read books with this type of tone - I love lush, meandering prose that describes emotion, art, and life in a way that compresses the surface area of any pore that could absorb it into a compact shape that flits back and forth while maintaining a frighteningly high density.

But Kavalier and Clay was exciting. It sped along like a pulp, but held zero pretensions about its subject matter and infused the prose with a surprisingly rich vocabulary. And, for once, it wasn’t the style that drew me in, but the story. A story that managed to flip my preferences for the various characters as it progressed, a story free of needless vulgarity, a story which modeled itself after the nostalgic sheen of the period, after a zeitgeist that imbued itself with hope rather than narcissism, after how the fleeting, episodic nature of life can add up to only a small flash of recognition. And it restores my faith a bit in books that don’t chart the exact paths of our thoughts in order to evoke a strong emotion. Most of all, I’m glad that, no matter what path one may choose to get there, that sense of emotion will always be the driving factor.