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shadowkatI can't remember how long ago it was that I first watched Orson Well's film "Citizen Kane", which is a film that while brilliant, drug for me. I did not understand the hype or why film buffs acted as if they had seen Shangra-Lai or the promised land whenever it was mentioned. Often in whispered undertones of awe. Male film buffs in particular.
Now, in retrospect I do. Michael Chabon in his pulitizer prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay explains why Citizen Kane was a masterpiece and then demonstrates it. His novel is written in a similar manner to Well's film. A technique that is by no means new or orginal in our era, not like it was when Citizen Kane aired on the silver screen.
What did Wells do? Simple, he split the point of view of the narrative and made the narrative itself a jig-saw puzzel that would eventually create a portrait of the central character, Kane, through multiple points of view -demonstrating that we cannot know someone without knowing everyone he comes in contact with or affects, no matter how indirectly. Wells also treated Kane as a bio-pic. It was amongst the first fictional bio-pic's created and in a sense satire on the form itself. The character is loosely based on William Randolph Hearst and Wells. But is in reality fictional.
Chabon takes on a similar challenge with Kavalier and Clay - he creates a fictional bio-pic of two comic book writers during the dawn of comic book age, just after Shuster and Siegel created Superman. The novel contains, much like a biography would, footnotes at the bottom of pages. It also contains long tangents that have very little to do with the story, but everything to do with the time period and the environment in which the characters worked. And like a biography, the author jumps ahead in time and tells us the outcome before we reach it in the narrative. Telling us that this experience explains why the character did this later. Or this is what happened to that piece of artwork - even though it won't be brought up again later in the story nor will the character who has it. Like a biography, the author assumes you know the ending before you've seen it. Just as Wells assumed that people knew the ending of Kane before they saw it.
The book itself is chock full of history, some of it real, some of it made-up. And it is difficult at times to figure out which is which - although anything dealing directly with the two heroes is clearly made up. It's also told in an interesting manner - we jump, and the transistion is smoother than one would expect, from an omniscient biographer pov to an individual character's pov. It feels at times as I was reading two books at the same time - one a history of comic books and writing comic books in the 1930's-1960's. The other - a fictional story about two cousins and their struggle to love, write comics, and deal with the war. If there's a weakness in the novel, it might be the times the two stories don't quite mesh. The author will often sacrifice one to aid the other.
The other problem I had with the novel, comes in the second half or third section, in which we are limited to one point of view and have left the other characters almost completely. When we come back in the fourth section, the transition is almost jarring and the writer summarizes or tells us what happened in his characters lives during the intervening time gap - which causes a distance to be created between the reader and the characters that had not existed prior to this point. As a result, I felt emotionally detached in the final section. Instead of showing us how the relationship between Rosa and Sammy, for example, develops, the writer spends his time describing what happened in the comic book world during this time period, we also get two detailed descriptions of Houdini. In retrospect, I actually liked the descriptions of Houdini - which are utlized to prove a point and provide an emotional impact, but felt the impact would have been greater if we had watched the characters struggle to get there, as opposed to being told how they struggled.
That said - Chabon had his reasons for telling his story the way he did. He chose to tell it in the format of a biography, complete with foot-notes, distracting historical tangents, and leaps in time. Stating that he can imagine what happened in these character's lives based on historical accounts, but can only go so far. I'm not a fan of biographies, I find them dull, overlong, self-congralutory, and disjointed. I want more story, less historical rambling about how such and such was all the rave in the 1950s. Chabon's novel has those faults. As a critic, I cannot fault him for writing the type of novel that I'm not crazy about. (For example: If you hate fantasy novels, despise stories about elves and vampires and magic, then you are not going to like Jim Butcher's Dresden series. So criticizing it on those terms is a bit silly.) I knew this going into Chabon's novel and realize that many of my difficulties with it demonstrate that Chabon accomplished his task. He did not after all write his book with me in mind.
I'm not sure if the failings of the biography format may have hurt Chabon's narrative or not.
Or if what hurt it is Chabon's attempt to do both - an ambitious undertaking, and one worthy of pulitizer. He manages to juggle both thread successfully up until the third section, when we leave the comic book story and enter the war - a territory the author is less comfortable in and feels at times cliche ridden and dull in comparison to the earlier sections. I almost stopped reading the book at this point and struggled to get to section four. Section four takes us back to the comic book world we'd left and the writer is once again in charge.
I've heard that people had troubles with the ending of the novel. Not sure why. It worked for me. Neatly wrapped up the themes, metaphors, and relationships - almost but not quite swinging them backwards to the point in time in which things went wrong - at the end of section two. It would have resonated more emotionally, I think, if the writer had shown us what was going on with Rosa and Sammy and spent less time with Joe in Antartica. I understand why Chabon feels the need to go into detail about Antartica - it is the culmination of Joe Kavalier's thwarted desires for vengeance and depicts how vengeance can never really be accomplished, the need for it, the feelings raised by it, destroy the avenger more then the ones who plagued him. He can't kill the people who took his family from him and doing so does not return that family, all it does is cost him the family he has left. A constant theme in the novel starting with the mythical "golem" figure who cannot survive far from his homeland, who loses his soul, his sense of being, and becomes ash. Joe feels the same. As if taken from his family, his home, he is nothing - just an escape artist, doomed to escape from things his entire life. The fourth section demonstrates how this is not true - through the love of the son, he ignored, his cousin, and his abandoned girl-friend - who forgive him and allow him to return, he stops escaping. Sammy, meant as the counter-point to Joe, a man who stays stuck as opposed to escaping to a better life - switches places with Joe in the end. Sammy becomes the escape artist and Joe takes his place. I think that metaphor works and Chabon's use of the golem to emphasize it and link it to comic books, which are in of themselves a method of escaping reality of having power in your own mind when you don't in reality - works as well.
What did not work for me in the final section was not the plot, metaphors, or story, but rather how it was told. I felt the writer took too long to get there, summarized too many emotional moments, and spent far too much time on exposition - setting the scene. So much so that I lost the characters at different points. This may be a fault of the type of narrative style he chose or the events he felt needed to be depicted. I'm not certain. But the last third of the novel, or hundred pages, drug. But I am not at all certain if this is what troubled others about the ending. For me it was a style over substance debate, did the novel's adherence to certain type of style, a style I'm admittedly not overly fond of, hurt it? Or is that what makes it brilliant, the reason it got the Pulitizer Prize?
Don't know.
Like Citzen Kane, a movie I appreciate but do not love, Chabon's work appears to accomplish it's objective. It shows the lives of two men through a scattershot narrative approach. We get glimspes of them through their own point of view, histories reflections on them long after they are dead or no longer writing, and those who they affected directly and indirectly. It also comments on the biography as a narrative format, depicting it's limitations and strengths. Much like Orson Wells did with Citzen Kane.
Interesting book. Not for everyone. But do recommend, if only for the ambitious narrative style it attempts and manages somehow to pull off. Also, if you are at all interested in the background of comic books? A must read.
Now, in retrospect I do. Michael Chabon in his pulitizer prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay explains why Citizen Kane was a masterpiece and then demonstrates it. His novel is written in a similar manner to Well's film. A technique that is by no means new or orginal in our era, not like it was when Citizen Kane aired on the silver screen.
What did Wells do? Simple, he split the point of view of the narrative and made the narrative itself a jig-saw puzzel that would eventually create a portrait of the central character, Kane, through multiple points of view -demonstrating that we cannot know someone without knowing everyone he comes in contact with or affects, no matter how indirectly. Wells also treated Kane as a bio-pic. It was amongst the first fictional bio-pic's created and in a sense satire on the form itself. The character is loosely based on William Randolph Hearst and Wells. But is in reality fictional.
Chabon takes on a similar challenge with Kavalier and Clay - he creates a fictional bio-pic of two comic book writers during the dawn of comic book age, just after Shuster and Siegel created Superman. The novel contains, much like a biography would, footnotes at the bottom of pages. It also contains long tangents that have very little to do with the story, but everything to do with the time period and the environment in which the characters worked. And like a biography, the author jumps ahead in time and tells us the outcome before we reach it in the narrative. Telling us that this experience explains why the character did this later. Or this is what happened to that piece of artwork - even though it won't be brought up again later in the story nor will the character who has it. Like a biography, the author assumes you know the ending before you've seen it. Just as Wells assumed that people knew the ending of Kane before they saw it.
The book itself is chock full of history, some of it real, some of it made-up. And it is difficult at times to figure out which is which - although anything dealing directly with the two heroes is clearly made up. It's also told in an interesting manner - we jump, and the transistion is smoother than one would expect, from an omniscient biographer pov to an individual character's pov. It feels at times as I was reading two books at the same time - one a history of comic books and writing comic books in the 1930's-1960's. The other - a fictional story about two cousins and their struggle to love, write comics, and deal with the war. If there's a weakness in the novel, it might be the times the two stories don't quite mesh. The author will often sacrifice one to aid the other.
The other problem I had with the novel, comes in the second half or third section, in which we are limited to one point of view and have left the other characters almost completely. When we come back in the fourth section, the transition is almost jarring and the writer summarizes or tells us what happened in his characters lives during the intervening time gap - which causes a distance to be created between the reader and the characters that had not existed prior to this point. As a result, I felt emotionally detached in the final section. Instead of showing us how the relationship between Rosa and Sammy, for example, develops, the writer spends his time describing what happened in the comic book world during this time period, we also get two detailed descriptions of Houdini. In retrospect, I actually liked the descriptions of Houdini - which are utlized to prove a point and provide an emotional impact, but felt the impact would have been greater if we had watched the characters struggle to get there, as opposed to being told how they struggled.
That said - Chabon had his reasons for telling his story the way he did. He chose to tell it in the format of a biography, complete with foot-notes, distracting historical tangents, and leaps in time. Stating that he can imagine what happened in these character's lives based on historical accounts, but can only go so far. I'm not a fan of biographies, I find them dull, overlong, self-congralutory, and disjointed. I want more story, less historical rambling about how such and such was all the rave in the 1950s. Chabon's novel has those faults. As a critic, I cannot fault him for writing the type of novel that I'm not crazy about. (For example: If you hate fantasy novels, despise stories about elves and vampires and magic, then you are not going to like Jim Butcher's Dresden series. So criticizing it on those terms is a bit silly.) I knew this going into Chabon's novel and realize that many of my difficulties with it demonstrate that Chabon accomplished his task. He did not after all write his book with me in mind.
I'm not sure if the failings of the biography format may have hurt Chabon's narrative or not.
Or if what hurt it is Chabon's attempt to do both - an ambitious undertaking, and one worthy of pulitizer. He manages to juggle both thread successfully up until the third section, when we leave the comic book story and enter the war - a territory the author is less comfortable in and feels at times cliche ridden and dull in comparison to the earlier sections. I almost stopped reading the book at this point and struggled to get to section four. Section four takes us back to the comic book world we'd left and the writer is once again in charge.
I've heard that people had troubles with the ending of the novel. Not sure why. It worked for me. Neatly wrapped up the themes, metaphors, and relationships - almost but not quite swinging them backwards to the point in time in which things went wrong - at the end of section two. It would have resonated more emotionally, I think, if the writer had shown us what was going on with Rosa and Sammy and spent less time with Joe in Antartica. I understand why Chabon feels the need to go into detail about Antartica - it is the culmination of Joe Kavalier's thwarted desires for vengeance and depicts how vengeance can never really be accomplished, the need for it, the feelings raised by it, destroy the avenger more then the ones who plagued him. He can't kill the people who took his family from him and doing so does not return that family, all it does is cost him the family he has left. A constant theme in the novel starting with the mythical "golem" figure who cannot survive far from his homeland, who loses his soul, his sense of being, and becomes ash. Joe feels the same. As if taken from his family, his home, he is nothing - just an escape artist, doomed to escape from things his entire life. The fourth section demonstrates how this is not true - through the love of the son, he ignored, his cousin, and his abandoned girl-friend - who forgive him and allow him to return, he stops escaping. Sammy, meant as the counter-point to Joe, a man who stays stuck as opposed to escaping to a better life - switches places with Joe in the end. Sammy becomes the escape artist and Joe takes his place. I think that metaphor works and Chabon's use of the golem to emphasize it and link it to comic books, which are in of themselves a method of escaping reality of having power in your own mind when you don't in reality - works as well.
What did not work for me in the final section was not the plot, metaphors, or story, but rather how it was told. I felt the writer took too long to get there, summarized too many emotional moments, and spent far too much time on exposition - setting the scene. So much so that I lost the characters at different points. This may be a fault of the type of narrative style he chose or the events he felt needed to be depicted. I'm not certain. But the last third of the novel, or hundred pages, drug. But I am not at all certain if this is what troubled others about the ending. For me it was a style over substance debate, did the novel's adherence to certain type of style, a style I'm admittedly not overly fond of, hurt it? Or is that what makes it brilliant, the reason it got the Pulitizer Prize?
Don't know.
Like Citzen Kane, a movie I appreciate but do not love, Chabon's work appears to accomplish it's objective. It shows the lives of two men through a scattershot narrative approach. We get glimspes of them through their own point of view, histories reflections on them long after they are dead or no longer writing, and those who they affected directly and indirectly. It also comments on the biography as a narrative format, depicting it's limitations and strengths. Much like Orson Wells did with Citzen Kane.
Interesting book. Not for everyone. But do recommend, if only for the ambitious narrative style it attempts and manages somehow to pull off. Also, if you are at all interested in the background of comic books? A must read.
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Date: 2006-08-07 10:03 pm (UTC)