THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY -- Michael Chabon

Picador USA -- tpb
New York -- ©2000 -- 639pp
ISBN: 0-312-28299-0
Pulitzer Prize Winner

A "biography" of Thomas Kavalier and Sammy Clay, two men who changed the world of comics.

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Finally. Finally I have read a major prize winning novel that is unique, and exciting, and adventurous, and easily worth the time I spent reading it.

I admit that I was somewhat hesitant to even start this novel as so many of the big prize-winning novels that I've read recently have been dull, boring works of self-loathing and pity and moroseness. To read a 600+ page novel of the type was not something I looked forward too. Fortunately, Kavalier & Clay was anything but.

Perhaps it's my own interest in the comic-book medium that helped make this novel so enjoyable, but I'd like to think that I would have been engrossed in this even if I'd never read a comic in my life. The research seemed impeccable, and the biographical style was brilliant. There was just the proper amount of 'biographer-removed' and 'biographer-respect' in the telling of the story.

Part of what marked this as incredibly well done is that I wanted, so badly, to see and read the comics that Kavalier and Clay created, and at the same time, it seemed that I had seen them. Absolutely remarkable.

Ther relationship between Joe and Sam and Rosa was extremely well plotted. It's hard to imagine any other possible way for the relationships to co-exist.

The war years for Joe seemed odd, at times, but it helped to explain much of what he had done.

Really a brilliant novel, and well worth the read.