Rating: 
Summary: Ambitious, funny, heartbreaking- this one's a winner
Review: It's 1939. America begins to stir after the long Depression while Europe stands on the brink of devastating war. Sinister forces descend on Europe's Jews while comic book superheroes capture a generation of American boys. Funny, heartbreaking and delightfully intense, Michael Chabon's inventive eloquence gives voice to a big, broad, tumultuous world."The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" opens with a lookback, from the bully pulpit of comic book conventions, of Sam Clay boasting that his boyhood, "sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York...had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini." This is not quite accurate, Chabon lets us know, and turns to that night in 1939 when the story begins. But these few paragraphs stick in the reader's mind, providing the comfort that Clay, at least, emerges from the turbulence of the novel's events to bask in nostalgic glory at some later date. That 1939 night, Samuel Klayman's mother wakes him and orders him to make room for his newly arrived Czech cousin Josef Kavalier, a thin young man with a somber air. Josef, an academy trained artist and a magician, schooled in Houdini-style escapes, has escaped his crumbling Czech world in a coffin with the Golem of Prague. The Nazis derailed a more conventional exit, financed by his family's entire savings, and Josef is consumed with worry for those left behind, especially his younger brother, Thomas. Sammy already thinks of himself as Sam Clay, a non-ethnic, American success. A generous, ambitious soul, hoping to break into the budding mania for comic books, Sam recognizes his cousin's greater artistic talent and presents him to his boss, together with a proposition for a new superhero. Fueled by coffee and cigarettes, and by Sammy's drive to achieve the American dream of riches and fame and Joe's determination to rescue his family, the pair creates a fabulously successful new hero, the Escapist, a Houdiniesque character crusading against Hitler's tyranny. Sammy has an unexpected genius for comic book plots and characters while Joe's talent and fever to win the war, even if only on paper, lead him to new heights of invention and design, culminating in the daring Luna Moth, a female superhero inspired by Rosa Saks, Joe's love, herself a beautiful and eccentric artist. Fabulous characters and stories arise from their heroic fantasies, striking a chord with the youth of America, making them rich, though not as rich as their employers, who own the characters outright. There's a lot going on here as the American romance with money and consumerism turns a blind eye to sinister developments in Europe. Chabon explores the ambivalence of American Jews at the war's outset - caught by their own worldly ambitions between American isolationism and the early rumors of Holocaust. The mechanics of Joe's daring escape from the Nazis reveal the sad, helpless docility of the Jews left behind. His life in New York is an exhilarating fantasy and a desperate wasteland. Hope lifts him again and again as new schemes for rescuing his family are set in motion and love expands his outlook and every week he wins the war on the comic pages. Flashbacks and shifting points of view illuminate Joe's and Sammy's early life and evolution as well as private dreams and fears. Joe discovers that all his money can't pry his family out of Czechoslovakia. Sammy discovers that wealth won't cure loneliness. As the joys of success give way to personal failures, the cousins deal with seminal crises in their very different ways. Joe chooses escape, Sammy rejects escape. And the story's barely half way through. Before Chabon ("Wonder Boys," "Werewolves in Their Youth") is done, he explores most of the issues that preoccupied America through the fifties, takes his characters to their emotional limits and beyond, carries his readers from laughter to tears and back again. His writing is strong, lighthearted, brutal and breathtaking and there is much to engage the heart and the imagination in every corner of his broad, vibrant canvas.
Rating:
Summary: Great Characters, Great Story
Review: The main characters, Joe and Sammy and Rosa, are so magnetic, and the story so engrossing, it makes for a fabulous read. The time frame, just during and after World War II, and the setting, the immigrants' up and coming New York hustle, is gripping. Whether or nor you ever read a comic book, these characters are people you want to stay with for all 500 plus pages.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing book...
Review: This is really one extraordinary book. Tragic, hilarious, insightful, didactic, heartfelt, unsparing, sentimental, sharply-observed. Chabon is clearly approaching what may be the first Great American Novel in a very long time. It is extraordinary to see him break free from the bondage of contempary literary fiction. "Mysteries of Pittsburgh" by and large was a first-rate but typical exercise in parlor fiction: a sharply observed tale of individual angst. "The Wonder Boys" really exploded the internal constraints while still staying, externally, a story of the discontents of an academic and his friends, students and lovers. And now, with the "Kavalier and Clay" he really has broken out in all directions. However, "Kavalier" falls short of the 6th Star, the true and undeniable masterpiece, because of flaws in overall structure. The way the book, perhaps necessarily, telescopes in and out on key moments of its narrative (sampling bits of the mid-1930s, 1939, 1940, 1941 and 1953) makes it a little bit unjointed and lacking in the cumulative force which could make it a truly legendary work. When Chabon finds the story which he can tell with the force, insight, humor, compassion and erudition of "Kavalier & Clay" over a slightly narrower canvas (or finds the story of such compelling character it can support a 1200 or 1300 page length, although one can doubt whether that is possible), he'll clearly announce himself as the leader of American letters, bar none.
Rating: 
Summary: Better than Before
Review: To be honest, I wasn't a real fan of Chabon's previous book, Wonder Boys. This book, on the other hand, I thought was considerably better. The characters were much more engaging and the plot, for the most part, was more interesting. The book does go a little off track at the end of part IV. The death of Joe's brother was too predictable to be streched out as long as it was as was Sammy's dealings (to a lesser degree) with Tracy Bacon. Still, there were enough nice things happening in parts V & VI to read past the poor transition.
Rating:
Summary: Comic Book Dreamworld as Reality
Review: Michael Chabon is an almost super-literate writer; his prose seems at times to be intended more to baffle than expose. This style is at its most appropriate in describing the exploits of Joe Kavalier: artist, exile and magician. One wonders if Chabon, like Kavalier, is employing a vast misdirection in this book; telling us one story, while hiding another, like the Kabbalah which animated the legendary Golem of Prague. The Golem is one of any number of characters in this book that the reader can only wish were real, indeed, very early in reading this book, I found myself wishing I could meet Joe, and Sammy Clay, Chabon's artist and writer team. Yet somehow, Chabon's clever mixture of fact and fiction makes it possible to dream those characters into life. Chabon himself draws a telling comparison between the Golem, raised to life from inanimate clay, and the artistic endeavors of his two heros. Their metier, the comic book, that rawest recepticle of juvenile dreams, is ennobled by their aspirations, and given a quality of life only rarely achieved by the geatest of its creators. The Escapist and Luna Moth are characters who could very easily have been stars in the Golden Age, and Chabon deserves credit for the imagination which spawned them. Indeed,I could wish that he would take a stab at doing the Escapist in a comic book format for real, but the dream of this character (like any good comic book hero) might just be more powerful than the reality.
Rating:
Summary: Jack Kirby Lives :)
Review: I read in a sidebar accompanying the NY Times review of this book that Chabon was heavily influenced by the art and work of the late Marvel (later DC) comics artist/writer Jack Kirby. Given that fact alone, I'll buy this book. Kirby was something of a genius in his field, working with Stan Lee of Marvel Comics on some of the biggest titles of the 1960s. I discovered him as a kid when he wrote a series of comics called "The Forever People" for DC. I will buy and read this book based on that alone. I enjoyed Chabon's first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, while in grad school. I missed his next couple, but happened into a Village bookstore in the early 90s here in NYC when he was reading from A Model World, a collection of short stories. He is one of those handful of young American writers whose new books deserve investigation based on his name alone.
Rating:
Summary: Baroque, yes. But brilliant, too
Review: I haven't been so taken by a book for a long, long time. Chabon's use of language, while sometimes over the top, is also frequently so evocative and original that I'm amazed. Beyond this, the book is also very funny, quite moving, and full of enough plot to keep the reader turning the pages. I don't even like comic books, but Chabon makes this world so engaging, and so intrinsically woven into the world of pre-war New York, that it becomes fascinating. Really a tour de force. Give it a try.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for everyone
Review: Chabon is not for everyone. And he's not for me. I once read F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter giving advice to a young writer, "It probably isn't a good idea to expand your vocabulary past a certain point. Because then you'll be tempted to use all those long words, and they will weigh your writing down." I was astounded to read a legendary writer like Fitzgerald giving another writer advice to NOT acquire as big a vocabulary as possible. But this book--to me--shows how absolutely correct Fitzgerald was. Chabon himself once said, "I have a big vocabulary, and I like to use it." This book could have used a judicious editor. (The Oct. 5 review below gives examples of what I mean.)
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic, epic novel
Review: This is a fantastic read from one of the most talented young writers around. Chabon's first two books are excellent, but this is an epic, grand wonderful book. The writing is beautiful, and the story is enthralling.
Rating:
Summary: Everyone is right.
Review: There's no question this novel is rendered in baroque prose, and in places just plain overdone: "a flaw in the omniveillant maternal loupe"; "governmental tergiversations"; "degrees of cousinage and testamentary disputes" -- even the luminous NYT review pokes fun at the eleventymillion descriptions of sky. But despite the wandering back and forth over the purple line, the brilliance of this work seems almost beyond dispute. If anyone out there has come across another contemporary novel that delivers its period and setting in such miraculously vivid detail, I'd like to know about it. And we shouldn't discount the possibility that the author has overwritten on purpose, because the ornate, over-the-top style does create a certain effect that somehow fits the the subject and the era, like the flourishes and exclamations of an escapist's show. Gasps and applause for the author.
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