ISBN 0-679-45004-1
This novel is partly about comic books. It is more about identity, with corollary themes of family, race, nationality, sexuality, talent, profession, and self-expression.
The title characters, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, are cousins and creators of comic books during that medium’s golden age. They are fictional counterparts to the writers and artists who took elements from the popular arts of their day, explored the boundaries of a new medium, and created a form of storytelling. For comics fans, Chabon includes plenty of name-dropping and asides into the industry in that era. These elements don’t bog down the story, but fill in the background.
Joe escapes from Prague as a young man just at the Nazis are beginning to implement the isolation of the Jews there. By happenstance, he was born in the Ukraine and eligible for a Soviet passport. His family’s arrangements fail, and he is sent back to Prague. He enlists the help of Bernard Kornblum, an escape artist who taught Joe his art. Together, they smuggle the golem of Prague out of the country. Joe takes a long journey to New York, where he moves in with his aunt, Sam’s mother, and begins his creative partnership with his cousin.
Joe spends the rest of the book involved in escapes, with varying degrees of success. He tries to escape his survivor’s guilt, his grief, his hatred of those who killed his family, love, his own self-isolation.
Sam is a product of New York, an absent father and a caustic mother. He is a hustler, looking to escape poverty and loneliness, and later looking to escape the difficulties of his sexuality. He sees an opportunity in Joe’s artistic talent. Within a day, he persuades his boss, a seller of novelties, to publish a comic book; within a weekend, he manages to get his friends to produce one.
Joe and Sam are naturals to create a comic book superhero. They struggle to be and do things that seem out of their reach. They are like Tom Mayflower and the Escapist, the hero they created. Mayflower is a crippled kid who can only dream of being the great magician he longs to be. As the Escapist, he has the power do above and beyond what he imagined. Nothing can hold him. Through their creations, Joe and Sam engage in fictions that fulfill their own needs. Joe seeks revenge at first, and later seeks and reconciliation with his past. Sam seeks to end his loneliness, both his need for a father and a desire for a kind of love he could not safely pursue.
In the end, escapism becomes not just away to get a break from troubles, but a way of finding oneself. While Sam never becomes fully reconciled with his art, he finally gives himself the freedom to stop fearing and be himself. Joe embraces the comic book, and the escape it permits, as a way of both relieving the pressures of the world and to imaginatively deal with them.
- If your interested in this book, you may also be interested in The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont.
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