The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

This book, including the "Odds & Ends" extra content at the end, is 678 pages long. I started reading it on Friday and, after a fiction novel dry-spell of about 6 months in which I only read plays and essays, I finished it this afternoon.

I was given it as a birthday present back in January, but both its length and my skepticism at the possibility of me really loving a novel about a couple of guys who write comic books in the 40s, meant that I put off reading it until now -- and boy, did it ever prove me wrong.


The driving force of this novel was its characters, and the fact that just about every person you meet, however briefly, has been intricately fleshed-out and filled with life. Say what you will about it being self-indulgent at times, or its possibly disorienting time skips, or it being too sentimental or optimistic or fantastical, but that's the point. The point is that the world that Chabon writes about underneath all of this is dark and messed-up in the realest way possible, and the characters he populates this world with are just as messed-up. And the point is they're all trying their hardest to confront and escape from all of it at the same time. It's witty and cheerful and optimistic and it rips your heart out and leaves you wondering what on earth just happened, everything was going so well a minute ago, wasn't it? There's a hell of a lot of death in here for a book called "The Amazing Adventures ..."

Its shiny layer of idealism and resolution is paper thin, and it deals with some really difficult stuff without giving you a bow-tied picture-perfect ending. The way these two things come together creates a kind of paean to hope -- to people's ability to keep going, to (finally, eventually, and not even specifically written out on the page so much as suggested that they're headed in the right direction at last) find happiness.

It had its faults, but it was the first book I've read in a while whose characters I've well and truly fallen in love with, and that was more than enough to keep me riveted through all 678 pages of it. It made me care.

"The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves of dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place." - pg. 339