Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions


The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon, 2000
MacMillan Picador
656 pp.

In Brief
It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat—smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book.

Inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapist, the Monitor, and the Otherworldy Mistress of the Night, Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men. The golden age of comic books has begun, even as the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a stunning novel of endless comic invention and unforgettable characters, written in the exhilarating prose that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to Cheever and Nabokov. In Joe Kavalier, Chabon, writing "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times), has created a hero for the century. (From the publisher.)

top of page


About the Author

• Birth—May 24, 1963
• Where—Washington, D.C.
• Education—B.A., University of Pittsburgh; M.F.A., University
   of California at Irvine
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 2001 (for Kavalier and Clay)
• Currently—Berkeley, California


In 1987, at 24, Michael Chabon was living a graduate student's dream. His masters thesis for the writing program at UC Irvine, a novel called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was not only published—it was published to the tune of a $155,000 advance, a six-figure first printing, a movie deal, and a place on the bestseller lists. Mysteries, a coming-of-age story about a man caught between romances with a man on one side, a woman on the other, and the shadow of his gangster father over it all, drew readers with its elegant prose and an irresistibly cool character, Art Bechstein, racing through a long, hot summer.

Following this auspicious debut, Chabon penned a follow-up short story collection, then hit a serious snag. After five years of fits and starts, he abandoned a troublesome work in progress and began work on another novel, a wry, smart book about, natch, an author hoplessly stuck writing his endless, shapeless novel! With 1995's Wonder Boys and its successful film adaptation by Curtis Hanson, Chabon found both critical praise and a wider audience.

In the year 2000, Chabon rose to the challenge of attempting something on a more epic scale. That something was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the story of two young, Jewish comic book artists in the 1940s. Like Chabon's other books, it explored a relationship between two men and dealt with their maturation. But unlike his other books, the novel was grander in scope and theme, blending the world of comic books, the impact of World War II, and the lives of his characters. It won a Pulitzer, and secured Chabon's place as an American talent unafraid to paint broad landscapes with minute detail and aching emotion.

In 2007 Chabon published The Yiddish Policeman's Union, followed two years later by Manhood for Amateurs, a memoir and his first non-fiction. Both works received high praise.

Chabon's ability to capture modern angst in funny, intelligently plotted stories has earned him comparisons to everyone from Fitzgerald to DeLillo, but he has fearlessly wandered outside the conventions of the novel to write screenplays, children's books, comics, and pulp adventures. Clearly, Michael Chabon views his highly praised talent as a story that hasn't yet reached its climax.

Extras
• Chabon usuallywrites from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.

• He has a side interest in television writing, having written a pilot for CBS (House of Gold) that did not get picked up, and a second one for TNT.Chabon also has an interest in screenwriting; he was attached to X-Men but dropped from the project when director Bryan Singer signed on. Now he is adapting The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for the big screen.

• After slaving for five years on a book called Fountain City (parts of which can be read on his web site), Chabon finally decided it was not going to jell and abandoned it. At a low point, he switched gears and began Wonder Boys, the story (of course) of an author hopelessly stuck writing his endless, shapeless novel. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

top of page


Critics Say. . .
The depth of Chabon’s thought, his sharp language, his inventiveness and his ambition make this a novel of towering achievement.
Ken Kalful - The New York Times Book Review


...the themes are masterfully explored, leaving the book's sense of humor intact and characters so highly developed they could walk off the page...Chabon has pulled off another great feat.
Newsweek


This epic novel about the glory years of the American comic book (1939-1954) fulfills all the promise of Chabon's two earlier novels (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; Wonder Boys) and two collections of short stories (A Model World; Werewolves in Their Youth), and nearly equals them all together in number of pages. Chabon's prodigious gifts for language, humor and wonderment come to full maturity in this fictional history of the legendary partnership between Sammy Klayman and Josef Kavalier, cousins and creators of the prewar masked comic book hero, the Escapist. Sammy is a gifted inventor of characters and situations who dreams "the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape." His contribution to the superhero's alter ego, Tom Mayflower, is his own stick legs, a legacy of childhood polio. Joe Kavalier, a former Prague art student, arrives in Brooklyn by way of Siberia, Japan and San Francisco. This improbable route marks only the first in a lifetime of timely escapes. Denied exit from Nazi Czechoslovakia with the visa his family sold its fortune to buy him, Joe, a disciple of Houdini, enlists the aid of his former teacher, the celebrated stage illusionist Bernard Kornblum, in a more desperate escape: crouched inside the coffin transporting Prague's famous golem, Rabbi Loew's miraculous automaton, to the safety of exile in Lithuania. This melodramatic getaway--almost foiled when the Nazi officer inspecting the corpse decides the suit it's wearing is too fine to bury--is presented with the careful attention to detail of a true-life adventure. Chabon heightens realism through a series of inspired matches: the Escapist, who roams the globe "coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains," with Joe's powerlessness to rescue his family from Prague; Kavalier & Clay's Empire City with New York City in the early 1940s; and the comic industry's "avidity of unburdening America's youth of the oppressive national mantle of tedium, ten cents at a time," with this fledgling art form's ability to gratify "the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves." Well researched and deeply felt, this rich, expansive and hugely satisfying novel will delight a wide range of readers. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Publishers Weekly


Joe Kavalier, a young artist and magician, escapes pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, making his way to the home of Sam Clay, his Brooklyn cousin. Sam dreams of making it big in the emerging comic-book trade and sees Joe as the person to help him. As the cousins gain success with their masked superhero, the Escapist, Joe banks his earnings to bring his family from Prague and falls in love with Rosa Saks, daughter of an art dealer. But when the ship carrying his brother to America is torpedoed, Joe joins the navy and is posted to Antarctica. Half-insane, he returns to a wandering life that leads back to Rosa and now husband Sam in 1953. What results is a novel of love and loss, sorrow and wonder, and the ability of art to transcend the "harsh physics" of this world and gives us a magical glimpse of "the mysterious spirit world beyond." Recommended.
Library Journal

top of page


Discussion Questions
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a novel about magic, manhood, superheroes, and growing up in America in the 1930s and 1940s. Sammy Klayman is a young man from Brooklyn, struggling with his sexual identity, with a love for pulp fiction and comic books. Josef Kavalier is an apprentice magician and an artist who escapes Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia by hiding in a coffin along with the Golem of Prague. The novel traces the two cousins from 1939 to 1954 as they break into publishing and confront love, war, and loss. As Kavalier and Clay hit the pinnacle of their success, the two cousins each have romantic liaisons: Joe with a woman named Rosa Saks, and Sammy with the actor Tracy Bacon. In the guise of his fictional creation-the Escapist-Joe goes to battle against Carl Ebling, president of the New York Chapter of the Aryan American League. With the World's Fair commencing in Queens, and a world war raging in Europe, Joe takes the stage as magician in an act billed as "The Amazing Cavalieri." After experiencing a horrible loss, Joe escapes to the Navy. Then, in an Antarctic naval station where he has been stationed, Joe survives the war against all odds. The final section of the novel is set with the backdrop of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which is mounting a war against the comic book industry, and to which Sammy is subpoenaed. Joe has secretly returned to New York where he has holed himself up in an office in the Empire State Building, putting finishing touches on a mammoth graphic novel about the Golem.

1. When we are first introduced to Sammy Klayman, we are told: "Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable... He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money." Discuss this description. What does this portrayal suggest about growing up in urban America in the late 1930's?

2. What is the appeal of Houdini to Sammy and Joe? How is that appeal common to boys growing up during the depression? To boys of any era?

3. The theme of escape runs throughout the novel. What are Sammy and Joe escaping from? What are they escaping to?

4. Discuss how the following passage draws an analogy between the creation of the Golem and the writing of superhero comics: "Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat—was literally talked into life. Kavalier and Clay—whose Golem was to be formed of black lines and four-color dots of the lithographer—lay down, lit the first of five dozen cigarettes they were to consume that afternoon, and started to talk."

5. What role does the Golem have in the story? What does the Golem signify? Why did Chabon include this legend in his novel?

6. What is a superhero? Are superhero stories mythological in nature? What is it about the experience of young men that inspires superhero stories?

7. In what ways are the experiences of Joe Kavalier parallel to the events in the Superman myth?

8. After the tragedies at the end of "Part IV: The Golden Age," Rosa is left, quite literally, holding the baby. When we see her next, ten years have passed. What decisions was Rosa forced to make? How does she represent stability and security in the novel? Is she in control of her own destiny, or is she subject to the needs and whims of the men in her life? Is there anything that she is escaping from or to?

9. What is the significance of names and name-changes in the novel? How are names significant in the legend of the Golem?

10. How are Joe Kavalier's life and longings reflected in his fictional hero the Escapist?

11. Sammy has a relationship with an actor named Tracy Bacon. What is the attraction between the two men? How does Tracy-in name and person-represent a forbidden fruit to Sammy?

12. In Part I, Joe was able to escape the encroaching Nazi threat by hiding in a coffin. Having avoided the horrors of the war, why did he enlist in the Navy (Part V)? How was his escape from Czechoslovakia mirrored in his survival at the Antarctic Naval station? In what ways were these two escapes similar? What did Bernard Kornblum represent in each case?
(Questions issued by publisher.)