The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is considered to be one of the best living writers of fiction, as evidenced by the fact that his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  This epic family saga traces a couple of decades of the lives of Sammy Clay, the son of Jewish immigrants living in New York, and his cousin Joe Kavalier, who escapes from Nazi-infested Prague to start life over in the U.S.

Before Joe arrived, Sammy had a lowly job working for a novelty distributor who sold things like whoopie cushions and miniature radios through ads in the back of comic books.  Sammy is a budding writer and artist, and Joe, who formally studied art in Prague, decide to team up and create a comic.  Sammy's boss agrees, and a new comic book superhero superstar is born.

Their Amazing Adventures take them from their late teens, to love, to notoriety and more money than they ever imagined they could make writing and drawing comic books.  Their successful partnership final takes a detour when Joe enlists in the navy, hoping to exact revenge against the Germans for killing his brother and destroying his family.

Although the story did tend to drag, ranging from the years before World War 2 well into the 1950s, Chabon does tell a good story, keep the threads together.  But Chabon's style is what makes him a truly great writer.  Every page tingles with well-wrought phrases and imagery.  He captures mid-century New York beautifully, and convincingly creates the history of the Clay and Kavalier families from Prague to New York to Antarctica.

In Kavalier and Clay, Chabon also tells the story of the rise of comics in America.  Neither they nor their creations are historical (although a tribute comic based on Chabon's novel has been written), but many of the other comics and writers in the story are historical.  At one point Sammy is subpoenaed to testify before a senate committee who, based on evidence presented by Fredric Wertham in his book The Seduction of the Innocent, was investigating the danger comic books pose to children.  This had the ring of truth to me, so through the awesome power of Google, I discovered that Dr. Wertham, his book, and the senate hearings were real.  In fact, just last week the New York Times ran an article about a scholar who discovered that Dr. Wertham exaggerated his findings and falsified many of his results.  Kavalier and Clay would have felt some vindication from this.  However, the damage done to the comics industry at the time was catastrophic, and most of those artists and writers are long dead.

I love the fact that Chabon values a great plot as well as excellent style.  Literary fiction is often great writing about nothing, but he has been embraced by the literary world regardless of his love of plot.  He says that the "real writer" should not shy away from genre fiction and enteratining fiction.  Reacting against "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story," he said, "I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain.  Period."  Bring it on!