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I'm finally getting around to reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The reason why it's taken so long for me to read this book is because, when it won the Pulitzer Prize and got famous about 15 years ago, this immediately compelled everybody in my extended family who vaguely knew I was into comics to go "This book has comics in it! ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sholio likes comics! sholio should read this!" Which of course made me obstinately not want to read it, combined with a suspicion that it was going to ping my wrong-dar in all kinds of ways. A few years ago my mother-in-law gave me a copy, and I finally decided I needed to either read the damn thing or get rid of it, so I'm now reading it ...
.... and it's borderline un-putdownable, damn it. XD Considering this is a topic I know quite a lot about (the comics business), it really does seem to be hitting most of the right notes, allowing for a bit of Chabon's over-the-topness. There have been a few little things that have made me twitch (I need to make a post about the Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Artists one of these days) but in general I'm really enjoying it.
Actually, it's interesting reading the book now instead of 15 years ago, because I'd gone into it with the idea that it was a fictionalized version of Seigel & Shuster creating Superman (I think that was the general impression that reviews of the book left me with, probably because Superman is the superhero the public is most familiar with, or was back in the early 2000s before the Marvel Universe got so popular in films) but no, it is FAR MORE NERDY than that: it's a fictionalized version of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon creating Captain America.
In fact, the main characters themselves are a fascinating mash-up of actual Kirby/Simon (working-class Jewish cartoonist) and fictional Steve Rogers (Brooklyn-based disabled son of a single mom who works as a nurse). After reading a ton of MCU fanfic in which 1930s Brooklyn is basically a post-apocalyptic dystopia, it is definitely a change of pace to switch over to a historical novel which has literally the exact same setup as most 1930s-era CA fanfic -- poor Brooklyn artist and son of single mom tries to get by -- in which Brooklyn is a place where people actually have rather happy and fulfilling lives rather than a wasteland of rat-infested tenements, and being working-class immigrant poor equates to not always paying the rent on time and having to be careful not to use up all of one's drawing paper before the next paycheck, as opposed to eating out of garbage cans and blowing sailors on the docks for rent money.
In the part of the book I'm reading right now, the character who is an obvious mash-up of Joe Simon (real-life cartoonist who is one-half of the team that created Captain America) and pre-serum Steve Rogers is dating the tall blond football-star-esque guy who plays their fictional comic hero creation on the radio, The Escapist, who is the book's equivalent of Captain America. I can't figure out if this is meta or surrealist or ... I DON'T EVEN KNOW. This book isn't fanfic -- it doesn't feel that way -- but it is informed by not just the real-life events it's riffing on, but also the comics themselves, and I WOULD say by the fanfic except it was written a decade and a half before the movie came out and the fandom blew up into something huge.
I think it threw me a little because I was not expecting the book to be this ... nerdy? Or quite this affectionately, blatantly pulpy? Or something. However, I think I can honestly say that the book approaches comics and 1930s pulp fiction in almost exactly the same way that The Yiddish Policeman's Union approached noir mystery: it actually is the thing it's commenting on (more or less), but it's also a meta-commentary on the genre itself. It's also very funny, in an often bleak kind of way.
(I am still quite a ways from the ending, so PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL ME, thanks!)
sholio likes comics! sholio should read this!" Which of course made me obstinately not want to read it, combined with a suspicion that it was going to ping my wrong-dar in all kinds of ways. A few years ago my mother-in-law gave me a copy, and I finally decided I needed to either read the damn thing or get rid of it, so I'm now reading it ....... and it's borderline un-putdownable, damn it. XD Considering this is a topic I know quite a lot about (the comics business), it really does seem to be hitting most of the right notes, allowing for a bit of Chabon's over-the-topness. There have been a few little things that have made me twitch (I need to make a post about the Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Artists one of these days) but in general I'm really enjoying it.
Actually, it's interesting reading the book now instead of 15 years ago, because I'd gone into it with the idea that it was a fictionalized version of Seigel & Shuster creating Superman (I think that was the general impression that reviews of the book left me with, probably because Superman is the superhero the public is most familiar with, or was back in the early 2000s before the Marvel Universe got so popular in films) but no, it is FAR MORE NERDY than that: it's a fictionalized version of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon creating Captain America.
In fact, the main characters themselves are a fascinating mash-up of actual Kirby/Simon (working-class Jewish cartoonist) and fictional Steve Rogers (Brooklyn-based disabled son of a single mom who works as a nurse). After reading a ton of MCU fanfic in which 1930s Brooklyn is basically a post-apocalyptic dystopia, it is definitely a change of pace to switch over to a historical novel which has literally the exact same setup as most 1930s-era CA fanfic -- poor Brooklyn artist and son of single mom tries to get by -- in which Brooklyn is a place where people actually have rather happy and fulfilling lives rather than a wasteland of rat-infested tenements, and being working-class immigrant poor equates to not always paying the rent on time and having to be careful not to use up all of one's drawing paper before the next paycheck, as opposed to eating out of garbage cans and blowing sailors on the docks for rent money.
In the part of the book I'm reading right now, the character who is an obvious mash-up of Joe Simon (real-life cartoonist who is one-half of the team that created Captain America) and pre-serum Steve Rogers is dating the tall blond football-star-esque guy who plays their fictional comic hero creation on the radio, The Escapist, who is the book's equivalent of Captain America. I can't figure out if this is meta or surrealist or ... I DON'T EVEN KNOW. This book isn't fanfic -- it doesn't feel that way -- but it is informed by not just the real-life events it's riffing on, but also the comics themselves, and I WOULD say by the fanfic except it was written a decade and a half before the movie came out and the fandom blew up into something huge.
I think it threw me a little because I was not expecting the book to be this ... nerdy? Or quite this affectionately, blatantly pulpy? Or something. However, I think I can honestly say that the book approaches comics and 1930s pulp fiction in almost exactly the same way that The Yiddish Policeman's Union approached noir mystery: it actually is the thing it's commenting on (more or less), but it's also a meta-commentary on the genre itself. It's also very funny, in an often bleak kind of way.
(I am still quite a ways from the ending, so PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL ME, thanks!)
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But yes, the resonance with the comics characters and the creators is pretty great (especially the more I learn about Jack Kirby).
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(Er, side note: have you ever read Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin? I realize Helprin is mostly famous these days for being a reactionary conservative, but I really loved that book at a younger age, and a lot of the way Chabon characterizes the city reminds me of Helprin's version of it -- only with more metaphor than magical realism, but a similar kind of over-the-topness, and a sense of the city as a mythic kind of place.)
Also, I'm glad I read Kavalier & Clay after my time in CA fandom, because while I knew a fair amount about the industry beforehand, I didn't know nearly as much as I do now about Kirby and the history of Captain America as a character, and I think it's adding a lot to my understanding of the book.
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But yes, I loved Winter's Tale exactly for those descriptions of New York - the plot, such as it was, spun out of control, but those luminous descriptions of the city and the lake upstate were startlingly memorable.
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