I decided to finish out the year with Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay because compared to the rest of the books on my 2011 list, it seemed a little less serious. Over the past 12 months I've read heavy-handed titles like Atlas Shrugged and Satanic Verses so in contrast a novel about a couple of young men in the comic book business seemed easy.
I really enjoyed this novel. Spanning close to 20 years in the lives of cousins Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier as they start drawing The Escapist in the late 1930s/early 1940s, it gives us a glimpse into the golden age of comics. This is the time when Superman and all of the rest of the big name heroes were selling hundreds of thousands of copies, comics were being shipped to soldiers overseas along with their chocolates and cigarettes, and every kid wanted to grow up to be a masked man in tights. Comic books have never really left since they were first introduced into American culture, and although they are growing in popularity again it is nothing like what they had after WWI.
While a lot of the story revolves around the comic business, the story is essentially about the lives of the two young Jewish men. Sammy was raised by a single mother, his father a traveling performer who only visited when it was convenient. Joe lived with his parents and younger and brother in Prague, but was able to escape before the Nazis invaded, and came to live with Sammy. The two become fast friends after realizing that Sam excels at storytelling while Joe is an excellent artist and can partner up to create wonderful comic books. They create The Escapist based on Joe's experiences as an apprentice to a magician back in Prague, which goes on to become a best-selling character.
Throughout the novel we see Sam struggle to come to terms with homosexuality, both in his own life an in his comics (there is a huge scandal about the young male sidekicks that accompany nearly all masked heroes and what this insinuates). He spends the majority of his life unhappy after years of hiding his true identity for the sake of his friends and family. Joe, on the other hand, works hard to bring his brother and the rest of his family to America, putting all of time, effort, and money into doing so. He finds love but feels guilty being happy when his family is facing war in Prague. When he learns of his young brother's death he leaves town and joins the war in hopes of killing a German in retaliation, and endures a horrible time stationed in Antartica before coming back and hiding from everyone he knows, believing them to live a better life without him.
There are lots of levels to this novel, and it is written so it might flow together simply and easily. This book reminded me of something else I've read, although I can't put my finger on what. The Blind Assassin? A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? Special Topics in Calamity Physics? This is a wonderful, sweeping book and it is no wonder that it is a Pulitzer Prize winner. I would recommend it to anyone, especially those with a penchant for comic books and their creators.
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