Michael Chabon

I'm more than twenty years late to the party for Michael Chabon's hefty novel about the origins and heyday of comic books. THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY won him the Pulitzer, and well-deserved for such a dense, ambitious project about two dissimilar friends (and cousins) who created a memorial superhero for the comics in "The Escapist." They are Jewish, of course, as Chabon's characters usually are, and this is especially important as the story begins before the U.S. enters WWII, and continues through the war years and into the post-war Eisenhower years. So the tragedy of the Holocaust looms large in the background. It is also very much about male friendships and homophobia, another frequent theme in Chabon's fiction. (This is my fourth Chanon.) The book has already been read and reviewed thousands of times, so I will pretty much stop here, although I should probably confess that I almost gave up on it a few times in the first three hundred pages, as it seemed to drag here and there. But once I passed that halfway point (in its six hundred-plus pages), it suddenly picked up speed and began rolling downhill like a runway train. Enuf said. Good book, Mr Chabon. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mais)