Talia Morison-Allen
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Penguin Random House, 2000, 678 pages, $19
The new anti-superhero genre we’re seeing in 2023 is not that of the classic anti-hero. It questions whether there can be a hero at all. TV series such as Invincible and The Boys explore the fascistic idea of a near-invincible individual who exercises their power only through violence. The shows propose a potentially more ‘realistic’ portrayal of what would happen if those individuals were to appear in capitalist America. Superhero-ing in the world of The Boys has been turned into an amalgamation of Hollywood and private defense contracting run by a behemoth for-profit private company, Vaught Industries. Superheroes range from egotistical divas to psychopathic murderers. Invincible, meanwhile, centers around a spiderman-esque teenage hero who has just discovered that his father—a Superman-type character—is actually a psychopath incapable of love. The norms of the comic book genre—unshakably moral individuals burdened by the responsibility of the power they have been gifted—have become only façades, behind which lurk invincible villains and corrupt capitalist systems.
These shows tell us to dismantle the system, reveal the corruption, kill the invincible psychopaths—or just embrace the chaos. To root out all evil, must we destroy the system by which the world is structured? What will be left? Our heroes must become anarchists. In contrast, Michael Chabon’s 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is a completely uncynical ode to the history of the comic book industry. The book follows the lives of Joe Kavalier and Sam Klay, two teenaged Jewish boys living in New York City, as they invent a comic book character to deal with the helplessness they feel watching World War II happen from across the Atlantic. They name their superhero The Escapist, and he has the god-like ability to right a chaotic world, to end wars, and to wipe villains from the face of the Earth.
After a summer of bitter, darkly humorous superhero TV, I perhaps chose to reread The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for its inherent optimism. It had been twelve years since I had fallen in love with the book in middle school, and I was chasing the nostalgia and emotional impact I remembered the first time I read it. The book’s lack of cynicism doesn’t mean a lack of nuance, however (it won a Pulitzer). The novel is layered with comic book plotlines, Jewish lore, and flashbacks, allowing Chabon to approach magical realism without actually stepping outside of the real world. He subverts the moral simplicity which often accompanies these comic book storytelling by contrasting it with the complexities of the lives of his two central characters. The novel was published in 2000, but Chabon’s ability to write about grief, love, and self-discovery remains timeless.
Reading it as an adult, I am still swayed by the beauty of Chabon’s metaphors and writing, but his inability to circumvent his heteronormative male gaze surprised me. Themes of Jewish identity, manhood, and fatherhood are heavily explored in the novel, while womanhood and motherhood are actively shut down, through over-sexualization of the female love interest, or simply through sidelining the mother characters. The developments of Rosa Sax and Sam Clay, female and homosexual characters, are stunted so as to centralize the hero figure, the heterosexual Joe Kavalier.
Is a book meant to be judged by the moments you find yourself in tears, highlighting a sentence with your sharpie which seems to entirely capture the inevitability of loss? Or by the ones where you realize you can no longer recommend the book without the qualifier, “read it for the writing, not the depressing portrayals of its female and gay characters”?
Superheroes, Chabon reminds us, have always existed in one form or another. The Escapist, the Jewish golem of Prague, Harry Houdini, and Joe Kavalier are all introduced as the hero in different layers of the novel. Chabon’s playful inter-stitching of historical flashbacks, comic book plotlines, and tales of Jewish lore within the main narrative of the story lends the novel a sense of magical realism even as it remains firmly in the real world. Chabon will suddenly begin a chapter with a story directly from the fictitious The Escapist comic book series, letting the reader slowly catch on. In another moment, he is relating an eye-witness account of one of Harry Houdini’s escapes. And the Jewish golem actually has a physical presence in the novel. Through these layers, Chabon is introducing the oral histories and cultural traditions that define his characters. However, the moral simplicity of the lessons within each story contrast with the complexity of right and wrong in the central narrative.
Every superhero needs a motive; Joe’s is being forced to leave his family behind in his escape from Prague. As a child, one of my favorite chapters from the book was a flashback to Joe Kavalier’s near-death experience as a young teenager in Prague. He convinces his younger brother Thomas to tie him up in a sack and roll him into the Moldau river in mid-winter, in an effort to impress the illustrious Prague magician’s club. The two nearly drown in attempts to save each other from the frigid water. It was the kind of story I loved: funny brotherly squabbling, youthful overconfidence, and an esoteric experience. The brothers are rescued by Joe’s wise old magic teacher, who privately shares with the reader that Joe was “one of those unfortunate boys who […] feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.” Chabon introduces the significant metaphor of escapism as the emotional torment driving Joe Kavalier, and leads the audience to fall in love with the little brother Joe must soon leave behind. If the point hasn’t been driven home enough, Joe’s brother Thomas gifts him with a drawing of Houdini, which will reappear throughout the novel.
Though the flashback offers a familiar hero backstory, Chabon complicates the narrative by painting Joe as a character capable of both heroism and destruction. Kavalier is running from the emotional trauma of abandoning his family in his escape from Prague, and his response at times is to further inflict torment through the emotional and physical abandonment of the family he builds in New York City. As a child, I sometimes loved Joe. I sometimes wanted to scream at him. Superheroes live in a world of constant action and violence because what is just has already been decided, but, as Chabon points out, for most people most of the time, the fight is within ourselves. Despite its setting within World War II and the Holocaust, violence happens almost entirely in the negative space between chapters of the novel, and is only ever actively portrayed in the comic books that the characters create. What Chabon finds more interesting is how his characters learn to handle the emotional impact of violence.
Motherhood and womanhood are themes largely omitted in Kavalier & Clay, though women and mother figures play large supporting roles to the two boys. They are opaque characters, even when Chabon shifts the perspective to them, and are curiously subservient to the men in their lives. This dynamic is most visible in the relationship between Joe Kavalier and his love interest, Rosa Saks. As heroes do, Rosa Saks has two identities. She is a tipsy, wild haired, red-lipped party girl at night, and suited, hair-plaited, bespectacled volunteer for a Jewish refugee organization during the day. In a meta twist, Kavalier is inspired by her to invent a comic book character called Luna Moth, who becomes famous for her huge boobs and constant near nudity, a literal embodiment of the straight male gaze. The sexualized descriptions of both Rosa and Luna Moth are most surprising in how one-sided they are. Rosa Saks’ thoughts and opinions later in the book are entirely concerned with how to best please Joe emotionally so that he will stay with her, while Joe’s reciprocal love is represented through his sexual attraction.
Is Michael Chabon constrained by the limits of comic book tropes, a largely male perspective-oriented genre, or was he incapable of imagining female sexualization of women? When Sam Clay falls for a man named Tracy Bacon, Bacon’s good looks are emphasized, but there are no detailed descriptions of his rippling muscles, pubic hair, or even references to his penis. This clear heteronormative perspective denies Chabon’s female and gay characters sexual agency and stunts their character development.
The ultimate issue of the novel is Chabon’s choice to center the plot lines around Joe Kavalier, rather than allow the three main characters to act independently of each other. The carefully crafted characters of Sam Clay and Rosa Sax are left undeveloped as Chabon makes Joe’s issues their central focus. Rosa goes from being a surrealist fruit painter, who’s described as being more skilled as an artist than Joe, to a creatively unfulfilled housewife, whose happiness is dependent upon Joe’s. Sam Clay enjoys a beautiful love story before hopping back into the closet for almost fifteen years, a choice seemingly more driven by the need to keep him in New York City than keeping in line with his character. The even more sidelined characters of Sam Clay’s mother and Joe Kavalier’s aunt and mother figure simply die of old age. The Holocaust and the generational family trauma it caused are enormously weighty topics to take on in any form, and it could be argued that sidelining Sam Clay and Rosa Saks gave Chabon the narrative space to tackle the complexities of his central character’s journey towards healing. I would counter that Chabon’s comfort within the identity that most aligned with his own, the heterosexual male, might have also been a driving factor. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a testament to Michael Chabon’s ability to craft beautiful, realistic characters, but it is ultimately disappointing to imagine how timeless the novel could be today, had he pushed that talent towards representing the growth of characters outside of his own identity.
At the end of the summer, having finished my second read of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I returned once again to the third season of The Boys. I was surprised by how lacking it was in poignancy and subtlety. Though the series continues to make fun of the superhero trope, it falls prey to the genre’s need for constant action. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, violence is often bloodless, leaving the impression that maybe everyone was just knocked unconscious. Rather than avoiding the constant fight scenes, The Boys chooses to emphasize how violent superheroing is. People are torn to pieces or exploded in showers of blood until, in season 3, the writers are forced to deal with the inevitability that the hero characters they’ve created are just as bloodthirsty and obsessive as the villains they’re fighting. Perhaps they’re missing the point that violence has the potential to be the least interesting part of a comic book.
However, The Boys remains part of the conversation by inviting criticism. It shows us behind the façade of the “superhero”: into the boardrooms, private meetings, and backstage encounters, where the greed, vanity, and selfishness of the people in charge are only emphasized by their superpowers. It’s easy to see how that critical attitude can extend to the writers themselves. Behind the façade of the TV show is a writers’ room filled with flawed humans, and as an audience we can have our own opinions.
I decided to call up the only other person I know who loves the book as much as me. Funnily enough, she is also a woman. Vicky told me that for her, it was the writing. She read the book for a class in high school, and it continues to define the type writing she prefers today. For both of us, the novel was an introduction to the world of comic books, at an age when our identity as children trumped that of women. In describing how Chabon brought the comic book scenes to life, she tells me, “I remember him writing about the spaces between panels being as informative as the panels themselves; that’s how he wrote.” The world may finally be tired of the unrealistic premise of a perfect superhero, or even of a genius author who can write the perfect book, but the creative potential of comic books is far from finished.