The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

A friend of mine recommended this book to me a few months back. It's on my list of things to read, but I can't remember what he told me about the book.

The style of writing took awhile for me to get used to. The author tends to be a bit unnecessarily wordy. Once I got used to it I really got hooked on it. It is kind of hard to summarize... I guess you could say it is about the relationship between to young Jewish men in New York during WWII but before the US got involved. One of the boys escaped from Prague but had to leave his family behind.

That summary really doesn't do the book justice, though. There are some deeper underlying currents throughout the book that really give the book meaning.

Yep, I've read it, and liked it quite a bit. Some really great stuff about comics and the art of magic (and other things). Have you finished it? I don't want to put in a spoiler or anything.

I really liked it too!

Yeah I finished it yesterday. I actually want to talk about the ending... I'm not quite sure what to think of it yet

I'll cover my ears...Carry on.

I found the ending kinda odd, as if it was kind of a fun male fantasy to have everything taken care of for you (including raising your child past the icky diaper stage) so that you can just step in later as if nothing at all had happened or was weird about that.

Alright... sorry for the late response.

While I didn't think of it in the "male fantasy" aspect, stepping in and becoming dad was part of the ending I am still questioning.

On the face of things everybody got what they want. Joe and Rosa ended up together, Joe got his kid Tommy got his Dad, Sam finally made it to LA where I presume he could be himself (ie openly gay) and out of the comic book business.

Looking at it this way you would think it was a happy ending. However, at the same time, Sammy lost everyone he has ever loved (Joe, Tommy and Rosa), Joe lost his best friend and partner (Sam), Tommy lost the only man he has ever know as dad for 12 years, Rosa lost the man that helped her raise a kid that wasn't his, gave her a job, and for 12 years lived a life that he hated in order to provide for a them.

I think Sammy and Tommy really got the shaft in this whole deal and am not convinced it was a happy ending. I'm still not quite sure what to think.

Yeah, it's ... strange.

And Sammy definitely takes it on the chin there, and in other parts of the story. The author really rips him. Is Sammy a standin for the author? Or is Joe? Or no one?

I think Joe is. The title of the book includes both of their names but it could easily be called the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier.

I hadn't really thought of it before but maybe he intentionally made it that way. Remember toward the end when they made a big deal out of Sam giving sidekicks to all of his comic characters? They eluded that they were really thinly disguised homosexuals (the superhero and the sidekick). Sam explained the relationship more as a father/mentor son/mentee relationship.

If you recall Sam had issues stemming from the lack of his own father so perhaps the author made this relationship off-balance on purpose to highlight some of Sams issues.

I don't know... the more I think about this the less answers I actually have. I really enjoyed reading the book but am starting to feel a bit let down by the lack of info in the ending.

It's like a lot of books I've read recently, instead of having a proper ending, it just runs out of steam, like the author got tired or needed to send it in, in order to get paid, or the editor had to cut out some pages and seemingly lopped it off at a random spot.

Clay doesn't have many adventures (well, a few as a young man, and with Tracy), but yeah, it's Kavalier who gets the big stuff. And gets to keep his love, albeit after a long separation.

Yeah, Sam is manhandled by the story, when you get right down to it, but Joe gets off more or less scot-free in the end. Rosa is also pretty well manhandled although at least she has a semblance of a happy ending for herself.

Do you have any thoughts about the whole escape theme that seemed to be prevalent throughout the book?

I have some ideas but haven't quite formulated it into coherent thoughts yet.

Well, that's kind of Joe's raison d'etre; he's an escape artist and that's all he does, he just kind of keeps escaping from one situation into another and another. Kinda makes you wonder if he won't escape in a few years, after the end of the book, and just go somewhere else.

I thought the Golem theme was kind of neat, but very little was done with that.

I thought it went a little deeper than that. It seemed that escaping was really just running away from problems. He first tried to escape to his work drawing the books. When that wasn't enough he escapedto getting his butt whooped by picking fights with germans. He started to turn things around after he met Rosa and got involved in the ship to bring kids over but when that went downhil he ran off that night to escape to the navy (after possibly trying to kill himself during an escape escape).

It went on and on and on until the very end where escape got a little bit blurred and instead of running away it turned into freedom. Joe escaped from his Box of Secrets (or what ever it was called) and started his life... almost like being reborn (not in the religious sense). Sammy escaped from living a lie and a job that he hated and found freedom (presumably) in LA.

I thought it was kind of an interesting transformation. This thing that kept the all so unhappy for so long was what set them all free in the end.