lights mistaken for habitation: michael chabon's "the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay"

some books stay with you for what feels like half of a lifetime. and i'm not talking about some priceless wisdom you obtained from the pages of a novel that'll forever be there to guide you through the torrents of your miserable existence - i'm being literal: some novels just sit and sit and sit on the shelves, to be taken down semi-annually in order for you to have yet another go at trying to conquer the vast amount of words printed on what seem to be far too many pages. which doesn't necessarily mean that the book in question needs to be dull: when i was a kid, for example, it took me approximately 3 years and at least ten tries to get over the first 100 pages of "the lord of the rings." once i managed to plough through the tedious initial descriptions of hobbit life, though, i could see it had been well worth the effort. when i decided to tackle "dr. faustus" by thomas mann in my twenties, it was a scattershot affair of inverse stop'n'go reading, too. in that case, i couldn't even pinpoint the reasons for the struggle, since i found the book to be fascinating and involving from the very first page.

a more recent novel that took its time is michael chabon's the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay. i bought it in 2002, and only now have i finally finished it. so, without further ado, let's get down to business:



sammy klaymann and joe cavalier are two jewish kids near the end of their teenage years around 1938, the first being a closeted champion of american-dream-style self-improvement living in brooklyn with his mother, the latter his cousin and a refugee who barely escaped prosecution in german-occupied prague. they decide to pool their knack for low-brow pulp storytelling (sammy) and drawing (joe) to create a successful comic series centred around the escapist, a superhero styled after harry houdini who is engaged in a ferocious battle against thinly-veiled nazi figures. this, of course, also serves as an instance of wish fulfillment (or "wishful figment," as another character in the book has it) on joe's part, who desperately tries to get his remaining family members out of europe and channels his rage at hitler's regime through the extremely violent panels of his comic books.

it is impossible to list every quasi-miraculous turn of events in chabon's novel which involves, for example, the golem of prague, a micro-scale war on the ice of the antarctic and many, many other narrative strains that fill its 600+ pages. and while the text has many merits (more of which later), one thing's for certain: it is, quite plainly, far too long. here's why: there is a tendency in recent american fiction towards the weighty tome, whose practitioners wedge encyclopedic knowledge on every topic imaginable, diverse literary traditions and a huge array of narrative trickery between the cover sheets, which can sometimes be quite frustrating for the reader. the critic james wood labeled this strain of writing "hysterical realism," and - while not talking about chabon in particular - offers harsh criticism that, though to a lesser degree, might also be levelled against "kavalier & clay":

"the big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. it seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. [...] bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation. [but] what are these busy stories and sub-stories evading? one of the awkwardnesses evaded is precisely an awkwardness about the possibilities of novelistic storytelling. this in turn has to do with an awkwardness about character and the representation of character in fiction, since human beings generate stories. it might be said that these recent novels are full of inhumane stories [...]"

putting it more simply: too much stuff happens. too many characters are painstakingly introduced, then suddenly abandoned. the novel knows too much (e.g. about new york in the 40s, the history of comic books, the second world war, jewish mythology etc.), at the expense of characters whose motivations and aspirations go beyond predictable cliches.

however, it is still a good, if not great book. why? because of chabon's writing. he must certainly be one of the most skilled stylists in literary prose working today, and his epic novel contains so many imaginative, often awe-inspiring passages that it is a near-futile undertaking to single out any specific example. b.r. myers, another critic of the weighty tome, accuses contemporary authors - among many other things - of unimaginative symbolic language, a feat he feels earlier writers were able to pull off far more convincingly:

"when vladimir nabokov talks of [...] the 'square echo' of a car door slamming, i feel what philip larkin wanted readers of his poetry to feel: 'yes, i've never thought of it that way, but that's how it is.'"

well, then, consider chabon's rendering of sammy's mother's smell: "the natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings." at least to my mind, this more than holds up to nabokov's "square echo."

alright, now i've exhausted our collective energies for today, dear imaginary audience. i wonder if i'll ever review a book here where i feel the characters are well-constructed and believable... it's becoming more and more apparent to me that this is really one of the central aspects in writing that i'm on the lookout for whenever i start a book. we'll see what the next novel brings.