The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Sweeping is a weird word to describe a novel. It sounds like it should be a negative thing. “This book is really sweeping…if you know what I mean. As in, it’s sweeping up the garbage! Ha!” 

Maybe it’s just me. 

Anyway, this book is sweeping. In a good way! It’s a sweeping American epic about the birth of comic books and the struggles of two young artists in the mid-1900s New York. Joe Kavalier, a Jewish immigrant who escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (using magic tricks!), and his cousin Sammy Clay dream up a comic book character called The Escapist and see their creation take off. 

Though this is fiction, everything feels real. Michael Chabon clearly did his homework to add a lot of cool, fascinating details about this early era of comic book publishing. But there’s a lot more to the story than just these two kids making comics. Their lives take turns, they fall in love, they deal with the harsh realities of mid-century life. But all those traditional Great American Novel ingredients are mixed in with details about publishing, storytelling and myth creation. The result is a great book that works on a meta-level…if you stop to think about it.

I don’t often re-read books, but lately I’ve been feeling like taking this off the shelf and giving it another read. It might hit different now that we’re living in the post-Avengers: Endgame world. (I know there have been more comic book movies since Endgame, but most of those have been sweeping…in the bad way.) 

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