The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The book follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Czech artist Joe Kavalier and Brooklyn-born writer Sammy Clay, before, during, and after World War II. In the story, Kavalier and Clay become major figures in the comics industry from its nascence into its Golden Age. Lengthy, Kavalier & Clay was published to "nearly unanimous praise"[1] and became a New York Times Best Seller.
 | This article's lead section contains information that is not included elsewhere in the article. (September 2024) |
 First edition cover depicts The Escapist punching Hitler in the jaw | |
| Author | Michael Chabon |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical fiction |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | September 19, 2000 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 639 |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction |
| ISBN | 0-679-45004-1 |
| OCLC | 234094822 |
| 813/.54 21 | |
| LC Class | PS3553.H15 A82 2000 |
The novel's publication was followed by several companion projects, including two short stories published by Chabon that consist of material written for the novel but not included: "The Return of the Amazing Cavalieri" in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (2001), and "Breakfast in the Wreck" in The Virginia Quarterly Review (2004). In 2004, a coda to the novel was published separately under the title "A Postscript" in Zap! Pow! Bam! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938–1950.[citation needed]
From 2004 to 2006, Dark Horse Comics published two series of Escapist comic books based on the superhero stories described in the novel, some of which were written by Chabon. Dark Horse Comics also published a comics-format "sequel" to the novel: The Escapists, written by Brian K. Vaughan, and illustrated by Jason Shawn Alexander and Steve Rolston.[citation needed]
Plot
The novel opens in 1939, with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman in Brooklyn. Joe, trained as an escape artist, and Sammy, an aspiring writer, bond over their shared love of art and comics. As the story unfolds, they find their creative niches: entrepreneurial and artistic. Together, Joe and Sammy create the Escapist, an anti-fascist superhero that becomes hugely popular. Despite their success, their employer, Empire Novelty, reap the most financial rewards.
Joe is primarily concerned with rescuing his family, still trapped in Prague. As he becomes romantically involved with Rosa Saks, a bohemian with her own artistic aspirations, Joe's drive to help his family shows through in his work, which remains anti-Nazi despite his employer's concerns. Meanwhile, Sammy grapples with his sexual identity, eventually entering a secret relationship with Tracy Bacon, the handsome actor who voices the Escapist on the radio.
Joe's efforts to bring his family to the States culminate in securing passage for his younger brother Thomas on the ship The Ark of Miriam. On the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, Thomas's ship is sunk by a German U-boat. Devastated, Joe abruptly enlists in the Navy, hoping to fight the Nazis, but is instead sent to a secluded naval base in Antarctica. An obstructed chimney fills the base with carbon monoxide, leaving Joe as one of only three survivors.
Parallel to Joe's experiences leading up to the United States' entrance into the war, Tracy is cast as the Escapist for a film adaptation. Sammy moves with him to Hollywood. While there, they attend a private gathering of gay men at a friend's beach house in New Jersey, which is raided by the local police. During the raid, all the men at the party are arrested – except for Sammy and another man, who manage to hide under the dinner table. However, the off-duty FBI agents conduct a final sweep, find them both, and sexually abuse them. This leads Sammy to end his relationship with Tracy out of fear of homophobic persecution.
Upon returning to New York, Joe avoids Rosa and Sammy, who have married and are raising Tommy, Joe's son, who was born after he left for the war. Tommy, unaware of his father's true identity, encounters Joe and begins to secretly take private magic lessons from him in the Empire State Building. This leads to a gradual reunion with Sammy and Rosa, who welcome Joe back into their lives. However, peace is disrupted when Sammy's homosexuality is publicly exposed during a Senate investigation into comic books. Despite Joe's attempts to rebuild their family (and his purchase of Empire Comics), Sammy decides to leave for Los Angeles to start a new life as a television writer, leaving Joe, Rosa, and Tommy to navigate their complex relationship.
Inspiration
Many events in the novel are based on the lives of actual comic-book creators, including Jack Kirby (to whom the book is dedicated in the afterword), Bob Kane, Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Joe Simon, Will Eisner and Jim Steranko.[2] Other historical figures play minor roles, including Salvador Dalí, Al Smith, Orson Welles and Fredric Wertham. The novel's period roughly mirrors that of the Golden Age of Comics itself, starting from shortly after the debut of Superman and concluding with the Kefauver Senate hearings, two events often used to restrict the era.[3]
Cultural references
In the novel, one of the early comics' covers has a painting of The Escapist punching Adolf Hitler in the jaw (on some editions of the book itself, this is also the cover art). This is a reference to the real-life comic book series Captain America Comics, which showed the protagonist punching Hitler on the cover of its first issue, published a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor.[4][non-primary source needed]
Josef "Joe" Kavalier is referred to in the 2006 novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. The novel describes the friendship and rivalry among pulp writers of the 1930s; it also includes Lester Dent, Walter B. Gibson, and L. Ron Hubbard.[5][unreliable source?]
Printed editions
- U.S.: 2000, Random House, hardcover, ISBN 0-679-45004-1.
- U.S.: 2001, Picador, paperback, ISBN 0-312-28299-0.
- U.S.: 2012, Random House, paperback and e-book, ISBN 978-0-8129-8358-6. This edition includes a reader's guide and an "Odds & Ends" section containing additional pieces by the author: "Breakfast in the Wreck", "The Return of the Amazing Cavalieri", "The Crossover", and "Fifty Dollars Takes it Home".
Reception
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001[6] and garnered widespread acclaim from critics.[1][7][8] The New York Times's Ken Kalfus described the book as "a novel of towering achievement", praising its pacing, language, and inventiveness, and describing it as "a comic epic, generously optimistic about the human struggle for personal liberation".[9] Also in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called Chabon's book "a big, ripe, excitingly imaginative novel" set in the world of the author's grandfather, "a New York City typographer at a plant where comics were printed". Maslin noted that the novel's "essential seriousness and thematic heft are never diminished".[10]
Writing in New York Magazine, Daniel Mendelsohn remarked that while he's unsure of the exact definition of a Great American Novel, he is "pretty sure that Michael Chabon's sprawling, idiosyncratic, and wrenching new book is one". He said that the novel is preoccupied with "vast and sober American themes: the meaning and mechanics of cultural assimilation, the search for moral and emotional identity in an indifferent world, the transformative role of popular entertainment in the lives of individuals and the nation itself", as well as "love, death, guilt, and redemption". Mendelsohn concluded that Kavalier & Clay had him "hooked from the first, wistful, epic-tinged sentence to the final poignant line".[11]
Similarly, in January Magazine, Claude Lalumière wrote that the book "is that elusive holy grail, The Great American Novel". He described it as "a magical novel", noting that "its recreation of the golden age of the comics industry is, although cloaked in fiction, picture perfect. Its characters are gripping. This novel's epic sweep is constructed with tender moments of heartfelt intimacy. The story itself is, in many ways, the story of the USA itself: the Depression, the American dream, isolationism, the dichotomy of racism and integration, sexual repression, the Second World War, the paranoid 1950s, nostalgia for often-imaginary golden ages". According to Lalumière, the characters' lives "mirror these conflicting, schizoid visions of America".[12]
In 2006, Bret Easton Ellis declared the novel "one of the three great books of [his] generation",[13] and in 2007, The New York Review of Books called it Chabon's magnum opus.[14] Stephanie Merritt, in a contemporary review for The Guardian, praised the novel, saying it "deserves a place alongside the best of recent American fiction".[15] Entertainment Weekly featured The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, complimenting the book for its unique blend of comic books, Jewish mysticism, and American history.[16] In 2019, The Guardian included the novel in its list of the best books of the 21st century, placing it at 57th.[17]
In a 2024 survey by the New York Times Book Review, which polled hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, and academics, the novel was ranked 16th among the 100 best books since 2000. One respondent, Andrew Sean Greer, referred to the Kavalier & Clay as "the century's first masterpiece".[18]
The novel received nominations for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award[19] and the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[20]
Adaptations
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Film
Producer Scott Rudin bought the screen rights to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for Paramount Pictures based on a one-and-a-half page pitch before the novel had been published.[21] (Rudin was involved with the novel so early on that his name appears in the acknowledgments to its first edition.) After the book was published, Chabon was hired to write the screen adaptation. In July 2002, it was reported that the process had taken 16 months and six drafts, none of which pleased Rudin. "It's like those arcade games where a gopher head pops out", Chabon said at the time. "I fix this and then another head pops out."[21] Rudin explained that his problems with the drafts often derived from scenes in the book he wanted kept in the film and which Chabon, "incredibly unprecious about his work", had cut.[21]
In their 2002 "It List", Entertainment Weekly declared Kavalier & Clay the year's "It Script", publishing a short excerpt from the screenplay. Chabon told the publication, "a lot of things about the book are really a pain in the neck [to adapt]... The story takes place over this huge span of time. There's an 11-year gap in the middle when we don't see the characters at all. I wrote the first draft of the screenplay from memory, as if there were no novel at all and I were just remembering a story that I had heard... Much less time passes in the movie than in the book. It's really just the period of the war."[22] While at that point, the film was in active pre-production (with Sydney Pollack attached to direct and Jude Law in talks to play Kavalier);[22] by late 2004, Chabon had declared the film project "very much dead".[23]
In November of that same year, though, director Stephen Daldry announced in The New York Times that he planned to direct the film "next year".[24] In January 2005, Chabon posted on his website that "about a month ago, there was a very brief buzzing, as of a fruit fly, around the film version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It was a casting-buzz. It went like this: Tobey Maguire as Sam Clay. Jamie Bell as Joe Kavalier. Natalie Portman as Rosa Saks. It buzzed very seriously for about eleven minutes. Then it went away".[25] Actors Andrew Garfield, Ben Whishaw, Jason Schwartzman and Ryan Gosling were also considered for parts in the project, with Wishaw and Garfield doing scenes for a screen test titled The Window, Shabbos Dinner, The Return, The Story of the Golem, War Is Over.[26]
In June 2006, Chabon maintained that Portman was still "a strong likelihood for the part of Rosa", and listed a number of important plot points present in the book that would be left out of the movie. The list included the scene between Clay and Tracy Bacon in the ruins of the 1939 New York World's Fair (though the film would still feature their gay love story), the Long Island scene, and the appearances of Orson Welles and Stan Lee.[27] Chabon added that "whether [this project] will move at last... into really-truly pre-production, with a budget and cast and everything, will be decided on or around 12 July 2006".[27]
Jamie Caliri, director of music videos and short films, posted two and a half minutes of concept footage on his Vimeo channel, stating, "this piece was made as part of the development process... They asked me to explore animation concepts. I thought it would be much more fun to actually shoot a section of the script to intertwine live action and animation".[28] In August 2006, however, it was reported that the film had "not been greenlit".[29] In April 2007, Chabon added that the project "just completely went south for studio-politics kinds of reasons that I'm not privy to... Right now, as far as I know, there's not a lot going on".[30] In a 2012 interview, Benedict Cumberbatch expressed interest in starring in a possible film adaptation of the book.[31]
Television
In a December 2011 interview, Stephen Daldry stated that he was considering making a Kavalier & Clay adaptation as a television miniseries rather than a feature film, preferring to do it "on HBO as an eight-parter... If you could put that in the article and ring up HBO and tell them that's what I wanna do, I'd really appreciate it".[32] In 2019, CBS TV Studios signed a multi-year production pact with Chabon and his wife and writing partner Ayelet Waldman including plans to adapt the novel as a Showtime series.[33] Chabon confirmed in 2020 that he and Waldman were working on the script together, anticipating an initial run of "two eight-episode seasons".[34][needs update]
Stage
In 2014, Seattle-based Book-It Repertory Theatre produced a stage adaptation written by Jeff Schwager.[35] The production ran from June 8 to July 13, 2014, and featured a five-hour running time, including a 40-minute meal break.[36]
Opera
In 2018, The Metropolitan Opera announced that they were in talks to co-commission an opera based on the novel, with Opera Philadelphia.[37]
In January 12th 2024, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music announced co-production of opera with The Metropolitan Opera through its social media page. Mason Bates will be composing the opera with Gene Scheer on libretto.
In November 15th 2024, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music world-premiered opera conducted by Michael Christie (conductor).[38]
References
External links
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