The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Two Jewish cousins in 1940s New York create a comic book superhero, the Escapist, and the novel traces the relationship between escapism, art, and survival. Chabon published it in 2000 and won the Pulitzer. It treats comic books with the same seriousness that literary fiction usually reserves for itself. The Houdini-inspired escape sequences are some of the best set pieces in recent American fiction.
The adjectives are the complaint: “superfluous description and obscure references and ostentatious puffery,” from readers who suspect Chabon was “eclipsed by awe in the minds of his editors.” It takes a hundred to two hundred pages to engage, and the research digressions through the middle stall what momentum does arrive. Rosa is the only major woman and shows up sexualised before she shows up as a person, filed by one reader under “manic pixie dream girl.” Readers who quit tend to go in the back third, around the sixty-percent mark, and several say the 650 pages contain “a manageable fun 200 pg adventure.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
