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Ricardo Ichisato ichisato — Pretty good book. Just not my favorite.

Omar Mirza omard6e7 — The Superhero Formerly Known as Prince Michael Chabon's post about Prince on Instagram Inspirational "Dearly beloved/We are gathered here today /To get through this thing called life." I was really speeding through this highly enjoyable novel, until I got distracted when Prince died unexpectedly and I became addicted to CNN's coverage of his death. In Prince's 1996 interview with Larry King, he questions the value of artistic categories, and then asked how he defines his own music, he says, it's "inspirational". Prince's great appeal was how he transcended boundaries, not just musical, but also gender and race. Michael Chabon has concocted something equally inspirational as Prince's music in this novel. "Kavalier & Clay" doesn't purport to be a work of post-modernism or metafiction, but it is concerned with the form of various artworks, especially comic books, the interaction of the script and the panels, and the influence of film on graphic and comic design: "The daring use of perspective and shading, the radical placement of word balloons and captions and, above all, the integration of narrative and picture by means of artfully disarranged, dislocated panels that stretched, shrank, opened into circles, spread across two pages, marched diagonaly toward one corner of a page, unreeled themselves like the frames of a film..." Like Sparks from a Roman Candle Often, the novel reads with the ease of a comic book. There are six parts, most divided into three- to five-page chapters. The prose drives the narrative efficiently and economically, while often pausing to luxuriate in some beautifully-crafted compound sentences: "Chess-boards dissolve, parabolas bend themselves into asterisks, whorls and pinwheels. Mysterious hieroglyphs stream past like sparks from a roman candle." "So much has been written and sung about the bright lights and ballrooms of Empire City - that dazzling town! - about her nightclubs and jazz joints, her avenues of neon and chrome, and her swank hotels, their rooftop tea gardens strung in the summertime with paper lanterns." "An enormous moth rested, papillating its wings with a certain languor like a lady fanning herself, irridescent green with a yellowish undershimmer, as big as that lady's silk clutch." "There is only one sure means in life of ensuring you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money." This is a novel that should appeal to readers who appreciate richness of language, narrative and imagination. Drawn to the Borderlands At the same time, its subject matter includes both artistic and social unconventionality and transgression. As Michael Chabon tweeted in tribute to Prince: "I came of age feeling drawn to the borderlands. I felt like I did not belong anywhere except wherever nobody belonged, and that I could not, would never want to be defined except as someone who instinctively rejected definition. "It was exhilarating but it was lonely and confusing. You looked for people who seemed to be walking the tightrope between This and That (or This and Not-This) with grace, confidence, an appearance of fearlessness, a wanton disregard of gravity and physics. "Between "high art" and "pop." Between "black" music and "white" music. Between white and black, straight and gay, male and female, cool and nerdy, genre and mainstream, rooted and uprooted, old school and avant-garde, commercial and arty. Between synth-bass minimalism and a shredding Telecaster solo. Between anyplace they stuck you and everywhere you knew you had the right, and the desire, to be." "Just as Long as We're Together" As with a band, it helps if you find compatible musicians or artists with whom to collaborate on your artistic vision. "In his imaginings, Sammy found that, for the first time in years, he was able to avail himself of the help of a confederate." This is a joint adventure, an exercise in companionship and partnership, like Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon", separated only by an ampersand. "I Wanna Be Your Lover" Two aspects of the plot follow: Kavalier and Clay, both twenty-something Jews, have lost their fathers, and embrace the fantasy world of super-heroism by way of remedy. Sammy also dabbles in homosexuality, although he turns out to be more bisexual in nature (he fears being called a "fairy"): "Sammy had been in love with men nearly all his life, from his father to Nikola Tesla to John Garfield, whose snarl of derision echoed so clearly in his imagination, taunting Sammy: 'Hey, pretty boy, who's your boyfriend?' " "Sammy still refused to admit to himself - at that irrelevant, senatorial level of consciousness where the questions that desire has already answered are proposed and debated and tabled till later - that he was in love, or falling in love, with Tracy Bacon." "It really did seem to be reciprocated. And these blossomings of desire, these entanglings of their fingers, these four nourishing kisses stolen from the overflowing standpipe of New York's indifference, were the inevitable product of that reciprocity. But did that mean that he, or Bacon, was a homosexual? Did that make Tracy Bacon Sammy's boyfriend?" "Regardless of what he felt for Bacon, it was not worth the danger, the shame, the risk of arrest and opprobrium." Joe is sceptical about the sincerity of Sammy's homosexuality. He thinks of it as a "brief experiment in bohemian rebellion": "To the small extent that he had ever given the matter any thought at all, Joe had assumed that Sammy's youthful flirtation with homosexuality had been just that, a freak dalliance born of some combination of exuberance and loneliness that had died abruptly." "Rave un2 the Jew Fantastic" Michael Chabon dances elegantly around the issue of whether comics are a form of escapism, particularly for young boys. The name of Kavalier and Clay's superhero is "The Escapist", a tribute to Joe's background as a magician and escape artist in the manner of Houdini. He also escaped the Holocaust by hiding in a coffin containing the Golem of Prague when it was sent out of the country for safety reasons. He originally thought of himself as an "Ausbrecher" or "Outbreaker". Thus, he's able to break out and cross over borders or boundaries. This anticipates Chabon's comment about being "drawn to the Borderlands". He's interested in transgression, including the perceived transgression of homosexuality. Transgression of any type involves risk-taking: "Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to." "Take care - there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination." "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" For all the sympathy for the transgressor, Chabon respects the heroic ability of his characters to build a nurturing family life for their child, Tommy, different from what they themselves had experienced (even if it means living in the 'burbs): "Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father was, after all, not the peculiar trait of one man but a universal characteristic of fathers. Maybe the 'youthful wards' that he routinely assigned to his heroes...represented the expression not of a flaw in his nature but of a deeper and more universal wish..." "Sammy had resolved never to let Tommy feel abandoned, never to walk out on him, and until now, until tonight, he had managed to keep the promise..." Sammy and Rosie Get Laid Tommy's mother is Rosa Saks, also an artist, whom Sammy encourages to draw "a comic book for dollies" and becomes commercially successful in her own right. She was originally Joe's lover before he left to join the armed forces and seek revenge against the Germans for wiping out his family in the Holocaust. "Let's Pretend We're Married" Sammy marries Rosa, who unbeknown to Joe is pregnant with his son, Tommy. Sammy proceeds to be a good father to him, thus breaking the line or circle of missing fathers. Chabon's style morphs as his subject matter changes. At times, it reminded me of Saul Bellow, other times of adventure writers like John Buchan and Alastair McLean. He also writes the best party scene (which features Salvador Dali in a deep-sea diving suit) since William Gaddis' "The Recognitions". "The Greatest Romance Ever Sold" Even if some of the scenes are of less substantive interest than others, Chabon writes with a kaleidoscopic vitality, as if the only valid response to Hitler and the Holocaust is the creation of a vivid language experience. Joe and Sammy together invent a Jewish superhero who redresses the real world powerlessness of the European Jews: "Joe's work also articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums and playground goats." "The Escapist" is not just a vehicle for passive escapism, it's an assertion of freedom, independence and dynamism. It's a vehicle for personal, artistic and commercial liberation. While they start as virtual slaves for Empire Comics, Joe eventually makes enough money to buy the company, in the same way that Prince fought to buy back his master tapes. Art (particularly popular art), like life, has a tendency to be ephemeral. The Golden Age of American comic books barely survived the war, challenged by television, westerns, true and fictitious crime, and romance. Buying the rights is a way to gain control, even if it doesn't guarantee continued popularity or financial security. Chabon's novel reminds us of the fragility of creativity and the imagination, the ability to construct not just a culture, but a family, a people and a society. Chabon writes and fights bravely against the disappearance of the past, the present and the future: "The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place."

Jamie Colfer jcolferaa39 — Far too biased.