the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay review

They see the boys’ potential to help them counter the sudden popularity of Superman. With the kind of audacity that only young men possess, they strike a comic book deal with Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy, merchandisers of novelty items and owners of Racy Publications, which produces low quality magazines to flog their low-quality merchandise. He is a prodigiously talented artist, and when he turns up at his cousin’s house to live, Sammy sees his potential.

Joe, having escaped Prague, is anxious to save money to enable his family to also escape Europe before things get too bad for Jews.

(Actually, there’s that scene in which Joe leaps from the Empire State Building, and another where he foils a Nazi bomb plot while performing a magic show, so maybe there is that element of adventure running through the plot, just enough to help us see the point: that the key characters Joe and Sammy create in their comics, especially the Escapist, based on Joe’s hero, Harry Houdini and his mentor Bernard Kornblum, reflect their own lives and times.) In short, the novel is pure entertainment, even if it has things to say about popular culture, sexuality and fatherhood, too. The novel, while long, is varied in scene, with chapters often reading like a self-contained instalment of a long work, much like the serialised stories of comic books. Chabon’s novel does not read like a Boys’ Own Adventure, despite the promise of the title, although there are various scenes in the book which are gripping and adventurous, including Josef’s (Joe’s) escape from Prague to America sharing a sarcophagus with a Jewish Golem, to his period in Antarctica as a radioman listening to Nazi U-Boat signals, where he even mounts a daring if somewhat pointless attack on a lone German geologist in another Antarctic station.

The story centres upon comic book creators Josef Kavalier and Sammy Clay, beginning in the late 1930s and ending with the hearings of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, otherwise known as the Comic Book Hearings of 1954. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a fictional account of comic books during the ‘Golden Age’ of comics.

The amazing adventures of kavalier and clay review