Nothing Much

Despite being woken during the 7:00 hour to the vigorous and vociferous argument of the neighbors, I managed to have a nice enough morning, working my way through another fifth of Dune: House Atreides.  I also had a very pleasant lunch, including a St. Benedict Street cookie, warmed and decorated.  All this fueled by the glow that yesterday I wrote a thousand words, underscored by the fear that I’ll never be able to do it again.

Thus the procrastinatory post.

I promised posterity a review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and haven’t delivered it yet.  I’ll work on it, maybe now, because it was a good book and deserves a positive review.

Did a little job-hunting online today.  Am afraid that only large, boring companies post available job positions online.  Called a bookstore, a library, and a testing center.  No answer, no answer, busy.

It’s hard to write when there’s nothing to write about, but there’s always something to write about.  How my two housemates’ rooms are filling up with moving boxes, tension building and building until the sudden empty depletion, dark quiet rooms full of the droning of the ceiling fan and the cycle of the hot water heater and the busy street half a block away.  And then there was one, and then there were none.  (See also, Agatha Christie.)

Goodnight the bookcase and the chair, goodnight the desk, goodnight the pens and papers and can openers and rugs.  Goodnight the sharing of the bathroom, goodnight the closing of the doors.  Goodnight the movie-watching and the conversations with tea.  Now I lay thee down to sleep.  Here is your requiem now on this mild sunny afternoon, so I can make myself not be sad when you are really gone.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Josef (Joe) Kavalier, an artistic Czech Jew trained by a real escape artist, comes to New York in the 1930s to make a fortune and save his family from hostile Europe. His cousin, Sam Klayman (Clay), introduces Joe to the comic book, and together the two young men–Clay the ideas man and Kavalier the artist–invent a superhero named The Escapist, who is, of course, a parallel for both men’s lives, relationships, careers.

Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is at once an encyclopedic history of the comic book, a map of 1930s, 40s, and 50s New York City, and a very great novel which asks questions about what it means to be an American and what it means to belong to a family. Filled with Nazis, radio shows, art and literature, Antarctica, daring escapes, heartbreaking miscommunications, a Golem, and a femme fatale, Kavalier and Clay’s adventures are indeed amazing. Not once in six hundred pages did the plot flag.

The first sentence, to tantalize you:

“In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.”

Though I came to the novel simply because I saw it had won the Pulitzer Prize (in 2001–between Interpreter of Maladies and Empire Falls, a prestigious slot to fill), I am now interested in the rest of Chabon’s work. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I own but haven’t read; he’s written two or three short story collections, as well as his most recent novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, about what would have happened if Alaska, not the modern nation of Israel, became the homeland for Jews. None of these have I read, but someday I will read all of them. [It always pleases me to feel as though I’ve discovered a new author.]

Do I recommend this book? Yes. To everyone? Everyone who wants to read a good book.

© Kelly / May 2008