Book Review: 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' (2012)

Elsewhere, the novel advances not through plot or language but the march of time. In these instances of contrivance, the author succumbs to an affliction I'll call Unfortunately Gratuitous Historicism (UGH). Its local symptoms include conspicuous cameos by the likes of Salvador Dalí (at a party in whose honor Joe meets Rosa Saks, a lovely surrealist who melts his clock) and Orson Welles (at the premiere of whose Citizen Kane K. and C. swoon in artistic epiphany). Also, Chabon, who has researched this novel assiduously, is sometimes too eager to show his work. He distracts us from his own performance with a few superfluous flourishes.

These are complaints about a writer whose unevenness seems inextricable from his undeniable brilliance. Kavalier and Clay is over 600 pages long, but it's not an epic novel. Rather, it's a long, lyrical one that's exquisitely patterned rather than grandly plotted, composed with detailed scenes, and spotted with some rapturous passages of analysis and others that give lavish accounts of superheroic derring-do. The book is, in a sophisticated way, comic-bookish. It's all zings and zigzags, bold strokes and curlicues and peculiar coinckidincks. It's like a graphic novel inked in words and starring the author himself in the lead role: Wonder Boy. A-