At well over 600 pages, Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning tome, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, makes for a daunting sight. The read, however, is both effortless and captivating. Chabon reveals himself as a literary virtuoso, and writes prose with Orphean lyricism. A sample: "Presently he felt himself slipping toward sleep, pouring into it like sand racing toward the neck of an hourglass." Although some have rebuked him for his baroque sentences and inflated diction, I think that these stylistic choices are brilliantly executed, and are a delight to read. That said, you will most certainly be interrupted when Chabon repeatedly sends you rifling through your bookcases in search of a dictionary!
Set in New York, with brief excursions to occupied Czechoslovakia and Antarctica, the book spans several decades, starting on the eve of the Second World War. But this is not a book about war, which, for the most part, is regarded at a distance, and through an intensely personal lens.
The central theme is escapism; indeed your mind would have to escape its cranial casing in order to identify all instanes of thematic resonance at the levels of word choice, imagery, plot, and structure (because of their ubiquity, not subtlety). The novel itself, I think, can be seen as an escape of sorts: an unshackling of graphic novels from the lower rungs of the hierarchy of artistic virtue. Chabon's central characters are comic book men - a writer and illustrator duo - who labor tirelessly to improve the image of their widely scorned medium. By adopting 'the pulps' as a major plot feature and writing passage after passage that burst with vivid imagery, Chabon recasts the comic book in words. The product is a briskly paced and acutely plot-driven work of high artistry, studded with the occasional footnote (apocryphal, I presume) - moorings that tether his airy fantasy with the more weighty actual.
