| Great Neck by Jay Cantor |
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon |
No, I don't think Cantor read Chabon's book and borrowed from it. Tell you why:
- Each book has an undersized American Jewish comic-book artist at or near the center.
- Each takes place in part during a culturally important war.
- Each features a politically driven investigation.
- Each inflates the role of superheroes in political life.
- Each uses the Holocaust as a key story element.
- Each has extended passages set on Long Island.
- Each sends a key character underground, leaving a child behind.
- Each refers to Judaica-based comic books.
- Each includes many direct references to real people and events.
- The two books are nothing alike.
Cantor tells the braided stories of a dozen or so kids born in the 40s. Experiences of their teenage years will shape their lives: hearing the account of one Holocaust survivor and trying to piece together another's story, becoming entranced by a charismatic African-American, rebelling against a Freudian father, finding a talent for writing and drawing. The book covers two decades starting in the 1950s and shows these children and their parents living through the end of a world and the start of a new one.
Cantor, in my view, loses control through trying to get everything in. The threads of the narrative come together from time to time, but they don't cohere to one another. It takes great skill to form so many stories into one, and the author's skill, I suggest, lies in invention rather than management. Great Neck has things I'll remember—the Tales from the Kabbalah comic, Mr. Hartman's account of his capture and deportation from France—but I did not find the novel as a whole to hang together.
I bought Cantor's novel because some reviewer used the word "Trollopean" in describing it. That was inaccurate and unfair: to the point, in my opinion, of being unethical. Inaccurate first because the style, a careful and well-paced but loose-jointed one, bears no relation to Trollope's near-fussiness and good humor. Second: A friend whose husband drives race cars asked him why she shouldn't worry about collisions. He answered, "Because we're all going in the same direction." Trollope can put a generous half-dozen plots into a large novel and keep them all moving to a common end; Cantor, at least in this instance, doesn't. And the review was unfair because it raised a false expectation in at least one Trollope reader. I couldn't help looking for the author's genteel elbow in the ribs or his one-sentence summation of an episode, and of course it didn't come at all. Not being Trollopean is not a fault; the reviewer was wicked, though, to use the word.
It puts me off when someone recommends a book by saying, "Such beautiful writing!" They usually seem to mean that the writer has spent a lot of effort finding just the right adjective, and it happens too often that just the right adjective is trying to conceal a hitch in the story. We don't have this problem with Michael Chabon, whose Kavalier & Clay moves briskly through its 600-odd pages. Verbs good.
Chabon takes a narrower universe for his story, holding the focus on Sammy Clay and his cousin Joe Kavalier as they engender the Golden Age of comic books. The action runs from 1939, when Sammy is clerking for a whoopee-cushion wholesaler and Joe is studying to be an escape artist in Prague, to 1954, when their partnership has produced a boy almost ready for his bar mitzvah. The book contains a lot of boxes, boxes to hold a comic-book collection, boxes that Houdini escapes from, a box in which the Golem of Prague travels halfway around the world. They make a nice conceit for Joe and Sammy's world of repression and legerdemain.
Why should you read Kavalier & Clay if you never learned to love the comic books? Well: the guys do have adventures and a good few of them are amazing; you don't think the artists just make this stuff up, do you? Sammy and Joe are well-made characters, and Chabon tells their story well. And admit it, you do enjoy a fast-moving tale about magic and discovery, else you wouldn't have lined up for the new Harry Potter.
Supplemental rant, brought to you at no extra charge:
What is it with book designers and page numbers? You need a magnifying glass to tell what page you're on in the best case, and many designers have now discovered type faces in which the numbers are entirely illegible. Wake up, America! You shouldn't have to wrestle with the book. The designer has a responsibility to you to make the page numbers big enough and clear enough to use. Thank you.
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
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Great Neck and Kavalier & Clay