Today’s review, unfortunately delayed by eminently foreseeable yet unavoidable conflicts (work), is of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Michael Chabon is a champion of genre writing; he has made uncomplimentary remarks about the state of modern ‘literature.’ His first novels were detective thrillers; other ones are alternate histories or fantasies, and The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a historical novel about comic books. Yes, comic books. If there’s any one genre looked down on more than science fiction, it’s comic books. Obviously not all comic books are of the same quality, but for those who deny that there is any literary value to the art form, go find Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. No, really.

In any case, Kavalier & Clay is about two Jewish cousins, Josef (Joe) Kavalier and Sammy Klayman (Clay), who, through a mutual love of art, become some of the most respected and famous comic-book artists of the early boom in comics. The book starts in about 1939, when Joe has just escaped Prague to come live in America with his cousin and his aunt; it ends in 1954, just after the heyday of the superhero comics. When they start in the biz, Joe is nineteen and Sam seventeen; they become celebrities over a very short period of time, and in many ways, revolutionize the comic-book world. However, each has his own personal issues: Joe desperately wants to get his family out of Nazi Europe, and Sam is struggling with his sexual identity. Can they find happiness?

I loved this book. Strangely, though, it wasn’t as nasty to its main characters as it could have been. Mr. Chabon has obviously shown that it is possible to write a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel that doesn’t necessarily involve a couple of unlikeable people going through a useless and pointless story to show their useless and pointless lives, or as he said, “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” While obviously Joe and Sam have issues to sort through, and they probably aren’t very happy, they still come across as hopeful and the kind of person I wouldn’t mind being around. It’s the hope, I think, that is the most important — even at the end of the book, I still have hope that everything will come out all right in the end. So much of contemporary literature seems to deny that hope is necessary.

The characters are, essentially, likeable. They are of sorts that most people would recognize: Joe, the intense, talented, slightly foreign guy; Sam, short, personable, and talkative; Rosa, a little less clear but gorgeous, wealthy, and also talented; Sheldon, a moderately unscrupulous businessman; Johnny, from later in the book, a little crazy from too many years in the military. Even Joe’s teacher, from the first part of the book, is what readers would be expecting. I think perhaps Joe was my favorite character, despite his moderately improbable combination of talents (stage magic, including escapism, and drawing); he and Sam are set up that way, and although each makes decisions with which the reader would possibly not agree, everything seems logical within the context of their lives.

It isn’t really necessary to like comic books, or even to know anything about them, in order to enjoy this story, but I bet it would make the experience that much richer. I barely know anything about comics from the ’40s, other than the names of a handful of characters and one author (Stan Lee), but I thought it wasn’t much different than a novel about modern art, something else I know very little about, or competitive swimming. The comics were primarily a means to an end. That having been said, though, there’s a running debate between the lines of the novel about the literary merit of comics and other forms of pulp fiction. Sam essentially believes that they have no merit, for the majority of the book, while Joe sees the inherent possibilities in the genre. It would be easy, I suppose, for readers to agree with Sam without considering Joe’s point of view, but I would hope the debate makes some impression.

It would be disingenuous for me to categorize this as entirely genre fiction. It isn’t a comic book, despite some of the covers it’s been given, and despite the fact that whole sections of the book are told in a comic-book style. It does, however, include elements of the genre in different ways, and that seems to have been Mr. Chabon’s point. One could, I suppose, read it as an entirely historical novel about a couple of Jewish guys in New York just before America gets into World War II, and that would be a correct and legitimate reading. However, including the comics and the element of illusionism (stage magic, something at which Joe is talented and performs for a while) lends the book an air of whimsy that keeps the depths of darkness at bay, while at the same time enrichening every other aspect of the story. 5/5 stars, and highly recommended to readers 16+.