Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

[adult book]

Josef Kavalier, trained as artist, magician, and escape artist, flees Prague in 1939 or 1940 for Brooklyn, where his cousin Sammy lives. They have one single marvelous idea: to create a comic book starring a superhero, the Escapist, fighting against tyranny and oppression everywhere. From there, an expansive and very, very long story unfolds: Joe's desperate efforts to bring his family over from Prague, Sammy's issues with his father and with his own sexuality, Joe's love for a beautiful artist. The comics industry of the 1940s, told in marvelous and lurid detail, and how the writers and artists often ended up shafted out of the money they deserved.

This is such an American book. In particular, perhaps, a New York book--for there are only a handful of chapters that take place anywhere else, some in Prague, some in Antarctica. It is about magic, love, art, truth, beauty, freedom; but it is about these things in such a democratic way. They are things that should belong to everyone, must belong to everyone. It treats everything from comic books to the landscape of Antarctica as worthy of serious consideration.

It seems as if even the prose gives serious consideration to everything; it sprawls, it luxuriates in unnecessary detail, it rolls along into unexpected corners and illuminates everything. It almost becomes too much, and at times it drags. But for the most part I love, love, love this book. It's heartbreaking but also intensely hopeful; it's a book that believes in the power of art to save the soul, even when that art's printed on cheap newspring and sold for a dime.