The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Like the comic books that animate and inspire it,The  Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clayis both larger than life  and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes  and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the  most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages  brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man,  city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves  him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a  refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however  unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for  pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a  comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark  blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing  feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!"  Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be  known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your  average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal  Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist  delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically  bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies  take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their  battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's  efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush  and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the  beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde  muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of  his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some  increasingly wrong-headed ways.More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice  to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks.  Previous books such asThe Mysteries of  PittsburghandWonder Boyshave prose  of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a  canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by  love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere  characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking  wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the  inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as  hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's  presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not  capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of  defiance and hope--a way out, in other words, of a world gone  completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the  pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape.  As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life."  Indeed.--Mary Park--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.