SR June: Michael Chabon, Literary Gadfly

Sorry, you're gonna have to hear from me more than once this week. But the fact is, I just finished re-reading this book, and if I don't write about it now, I think I'll burst;

The future of American literature has a name, and it's Michael Chabon. Today, I wanna talk mostly about the jaw-dropping, Pulitzer-winning crown jewel of his writerly achievements-

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It may very well be the best American fiction novel published in a decade that gave us masterpieces such as The Road and The Corrections, and its my Summer Reading recommendation for this month-I'll give ya four weeks to read this fucker before I strongly suggest another one in July. This is a book you will love. I'm making that statement without qualification, without denoting that you will enjoy it if you're a fan of this genre or that style. You will love this book no matter what. And don't be givin' me no lip about the 640-page-length. Read about 60 pages (roughly an hours worth) per day, and you'll be done in 11-12 days. And besides, I didn't hear you bitching when you plowed through the Harry Potter series, young man/and/or lady!

Chabon's main characters are two teens growing up in the 1930's Joe Kavalier, a stoic, fiercely impulsive refugee from Nazi-invaded prague, and his cousin, Sammy Clay, a polio-stricken, nebbishy Brooklyn boy. When Joe comes to live with Sammy, together they decide to write comic books (quickly becoming a profitable novelty in the states) for loose change, ultimately authoring a hit five-n'-dime series called The Escapist. They're content to bang out simplistic, anti-German propaganda pieces until Chabon introduces throws two more people into the mix; Joe's lover Rosa Saks, a wealthy, impassioned liberal who might be able to bring his still-trapped relatives over to America; and Tracy Bacon, a flirtatious radio star who causes Sammy to question his sexual orientation and his lot in life. It's here, as the emotional complications start to pile up between the boys and their romances, that the membrane between fiction and fact is permanently permeated, and Kavalier and Clay's art begins to resemble a barely modified rendition of their own lives.

At base level, this is simply a gripping read. It's filled with fights (verbal and physical), snappy dialogue, and stunning incidents of the larger-than-life, only-in-books variety, often leaving you with a pulse-pounding sense of pulpy wonder so overpowering that you forget you're really reading a character study. And those characters are the secret to Chabon's success, lemme tell you; in this novel and others, the author proves that no one alive can do a better job of creating characters so fully dimensional that they greet you like old friends each time you crack open the cover. Artists in particular will be moved and reassured by the messages about the power of and need for creativity, but anyone at all who reads this story will become emotionally involved in it because of the choices these very flawed, beautiful beings make; in its final pages, some of the most moving sacrifices in the history of modern storytelling take place, in deeply moving moments up there with the plane scene in Casablanca or passages from Fantine's story arc in Hugo's Les Miserables. Roger Ebert said art affects us deepest by making us proud of the characters being portrayed. Chabon proves him right.

This is also a helluva read for potential English/Creative Writing majors (COUGH). Chabon is a writer's writer, and I actually went back and read this book again to marvel at the structure of his sentences. With his pen, he transmogrifies the ordinary into objects of incalculable beauty and magic. The Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges? "A pair of great iron tsarinas linking hands to dance." Comic books? "Two-bit argosies of blood and wonder." Cops? "A writhing knot of nightsticks and broad-brimmed hats." This man is supernaturally talented, perhaps the best composer of descriptive prose since the king himself, Steinbeck.

I've cried reading two other books; the final Harry Potter and Ray Charles's autobiography. This one made me weep the first time through, and tear up after my second reading. I can boil my opinion of this work down to two "W" words: Wrenching and Wondrous.

Okay, let's say 640 pages scares you. Or you don't like reading about comic books. Or you hate Jews (in which case you're shit outta luck. Chabon is my fellow brother of the yarmulke.) Check out The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon's Salingerian account of the sexual misadventures of a college grad and mobster's son; or The Final Solution, a gut-buster of a novella that effortlessly merges tales of Sherlock Holmes and the Holocaust. In thirty-odd years, Chabon will be known as a literary savant, a Mark Twain for the Twitter generation. Don't you wanna say that you read him way back when? Because that Jew-boy with the weird laugh that you knew in high school told you to?

You must read some Chabon this summer. Ah, but what author must *I* expose my self to during the hot months of the year?

COMMENT.