I wonder whether Chabon was tempted to entitle this 'The Escapist' - to a certain cast of mind, its punchiness and the double-meaning it embodies would surely have appealed. In any event, if the thought did cross his mind, he chose well in going with the novel's actual title, which more effectively gets across the duality (or even trebling, depending on how you read the text) which is at work within it, concerning the relationship between life and art, by means of the comic book.
So far as my reasons for reading Kavalier & Clay go, it wasn't the most auspicious beginning. I met a guy at some party - Ben T, a friend of Nenad's - who was at the centre of a book club (these things are springing up like mushrooms after the rain) and invited me along. The club's first text for discussion had been The Catcher in the Rye and the one immediately coming up at the time was a Bukowski, which, taken together, seemed to me to establish a rather worrying trend (all a bit determinedly counter-cultural for me, and besides I was only lukewarm on Catcher - despite having read it in high school, which ought to've been the perfect time for the book - and detested the Bukowski that I read a while back); but, a few weeks on, they got the word through to me that the next book would be Kavalier & Clay, and since I'd been vaguely intending to read it anyway and besides book clubs are fun with a capital 'f', I picked up a copy...then, as these things go, I got distracted and didn't start it until a couple of days before the meeting, which I promptly missed.
Turns out that the delay was my loss, though. Kavalier & Clay is one of those immensely easy-to-read, page-turning novels that makes you feel the whole way through - it's littered with these little peaks of sadness, and the cumulative effect is, well, effective...despite the frequent breeziness of its tone, I always felt that the book earned its emotional payoffs. Somehow, it happens without any particular signposting on Chabon's part but nor does it ever feel peremptory or abrupt - it's almost as if the moment of affect or sadness is experienced only as it is passing, and never as a particular static moment of presence (a rather metaphysical way of trying to express it, but that's the best I can do after a day at work followed by stand-up cocktail party). The more you think about it afterwards, the more it hits you. Anyway, however it's done, it works really well.
Cracking yarn as well. Picks up two major characters - the titular Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay - and puts them through their paces, drawing in a colourful and sympathetically-observed gallery of others, unfolding satisfyingly and often in unexpected directions. Doesn't shy away from a large canvas, and happy to play with history and narrative in a generally unobtrusive but effective fashion. And did I mention that it's funny, too?
PS: Literature (well, art in general) can make you a better person. Lately, I've been feeling - for the first time - that I've really felt and taken some small steps towards grasping the horror and the sadness and, probably even more so, the sheer scale of the waste, of war (with the usual caveat re: the extent to which this is possible for someone who's never had any actual experience of war itself)...I mean, of course I've always known this, but it's only quite recently that that 'knowledge' has really been moored in something - even this kind of imaginative, as opposed to first-hand or 'real life', terrain - and I think that this rather belated flowering, if you can call it that, is mostly due to some of the stuff I've been exposed to lately, this novel and perhaps Everything Is Illuminated, and others that I can't call to mind right now, and maybe even The White Hotel operating in the background...
