Thursday, December 30, 2010

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ***

By Michael Chabon.
Published 2000, by Picador.

636 pages.

I had been waiting to read this book for a longtime, and for the most part I was not disappointed.  I think the ending may have been, albeit slight, a letdown.  After all the epic adventures and events in the book, the ending seemed a little too domestic, though I suppose that ending is the natural order of life.  People become domesticated as they become older.  And this is a story of people's lives through the year.

Though at the start, I was totally intrigued.  Here's the story.  A young boy comes from New York from Prague to escape the Nazis in the 1930's.   The book provides some background into his previous life in Prague, and this is one of many parts that had me intrigued.  He (Joesph Kavalier) is trained as an escape artist a la Harry Houdini.  I liked the feeling of 1930's Europe and the description of his Jewish family and brother as well as the lessons he was learning in the striving for actualization of his desire to be an escape artist.

However the story takes place mostly in New York City with his cousin, Sam Clay.  Sam Clay is a native, 1st generation Jewish American, who has an interest in comics, and has attempted some amateurish attempts at cartooning.  Meanwhile, his cousin from Prague, has training in the fine arts but knows nothing of comics until he meets his American cousin.  Sam works for a novelty company and brings his talented cousin along to convince his employer to start a line of comic books.  They argue that they could give him another Superman type book which was very popular and lucrative at the time.  Sammy's boss reluctantly accepts their idea and signs them on and gives them a contract (which we later find out leaves them out of a lot of the money they could have earned by not giving them full ownership or credit for their characters).  And a career is born and the book then spends the next 20 years chronicling their rags to riches story.

Some of the more interesting events was Joe's hatred of the Nazis and his wish to bring his family to the states.  That leads him to later join the army.  He meets his girlfriend Rosa Sax, a character I really liked.  She was a bohemian, free thinker, and pushed him to push his comic art.  However in his anger over the sinking of a ship that was bringing his younger brother to the states, he angrily left his beautiful , loving girlfriend to go fight Nazis.  He ended up in the Antarctic, doing a whole lot of nothing, though he did get to kill one Nazi, an accident that not only was enjoyable (he was itchin' to kill some Nazis) but was in the end regrettable and sad. And so here's the thing, that doesn't quite sit right with me.  After 4 years in the god forsaken Antarctica, you'd think he would have been eager to get back to his own life.  His brother was long dead and he killed his Nazi, so what was left for him to do? And he wasn't blaming his girlfriend any more ( he was angry at first because she had softened him and took his will to fight the Nazis - even in New York, he was constantly looking for trouble in the German parts of town and picking fights because of his guilt about leaving his family behind.)  I suppose that returning to his old life would not have been much of a story, but I really liked his girlfriend and wanted the two to be together.  He ended up staying away from her and his son for the next 10 or 12 years.

Meanwhile Sammy was discovering his homosexual feelings and that this lifestyle was wholly unacceptable to mainstream society.  So he chose to stay in the closet, like most people did in the 1940's.  This is important though because when it was discovered that Rosa was pregnant with Joe's baby, Sammy decided to marry Rosa and be the father of the boy, Tommy.  So because Joe went off and didn't return, their careers had taken a decline.  Joe was in self imposed exile and Sammy, was doing a variety of odd jobs to support the family.

And then one day, Joe meets his son...Apparently, in his isolation, Joe had been working on his masterpiece and when they were reunited, Sammy saw it and decided it was brilliant and wanted to do something, so now the future looks rosy once again.

That was a rather long summary, but it was a long book.  I suppose that topic of conversation should be about the fact that this award winning novel is about comic books.  The surprise or question being how could a book about a subject as "banal" as comic books be a work of art.  And here we have to entertain the argument of form vs substance.  It's a topic argued in the book itself.

Even in this book, at least these characters were concerned about the "Art" of comics.  Joe was a trained artist and he was concerned about how to make comics an art after a while.  Their book, The Escapist, was supposed to be mainstream and Joe was told to simplify his art.  I would suppose that most comics of this era were pretty stupid, though the way Sammy described his ideas in the book, they sounded pretty cool.  I would argue though that a written description of a scene can be much more detailed than the final comic story.  And they generally were more detailed than the titles of the books they made sounded. ie

So with every form of art that is considered a poorer sister of the fine arts, there are attempts to use that art form for more prestigious and profound concepts.  There is a ton of bad pop music, but being a pop/rock music aficionado, I could point out tons of stuff that to me has artistic integrity.  Just as today, there are some quality, literate comic books out there, most of us know that already, including the tight wearing all powerful super hero (Daredevil is one of my favorites for it's gritty and expressionistic stories) as well as the alternative and adult comics that one would expect to be more literate.

Even this book proves it's case.  It really is a book of pulp fiction.  Joe's escape from Prague with the Golem and his several encounters with life endangering situations in which he becomes the hero because of his escape training. Yet the book has a serious, artistic side.  It speaks on several themes such as the rags to riches story, racism, homosexuality in that period, the art scene as well as the comics business and history.  Some of the language is difficult and yet poetic.  There are some parts which were difficult for me to get through.  True pulp fiction is never"difficult".

So, it's not the form of expression that makes art, it's how that form is being used to express one's art.

Hmmm.... Normally I would attach some videos but there are nothing but amateur book trailers and hour long discussions.