The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by: Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon ( Born May 24, 1963 ) is an American novelist and short story writer.

Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 (see: 2001 in literature).

His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo,Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of that same year. Chabon's most recent novel, Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as "a twenty-first centuryMiddlemarch," concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004.

His work is characterized by complex language, the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes, including nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by: Michael                                                Chabon

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman. With the help of his mentor, Kornblum, Joe escapes Prague by hiding in a coffin, an effort initially conceived in order to smuggle the inanimate Golem of Prague to safety, out of the collections of Munich or Berlin. Having escaped Prague, Josef leaves behind the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas. As the novel develops, both Sammy and Josef find their creative niches, one entrepreneurial, the latter’s artistic. Beyond having a shared interest in drawing, Sammy and Joe share several connections to Jewish stage magician Harry Houdini: Josef (like comics legend Jim Steranko) studied magic and escapology in Prague, which aided him in his departure from Europe; Sammy is the son of the Mighty Molecule, a strongman on the vaudevillecircuit.

When Sammy discovers Joe's artistic talent, Sammy gets Joe a job as an illustrator for a novelty products company, Empire Novelty. Sheldon Anapol, owner of Empire, motivated to share in the recent cultural and financial success of Superman, attempts to break into the comic-book business on the creative backs of Sammy and Josef. Under the name "Sam Clay", Sammy starts writing adventure stories with Joe illustrating them, and the two recruit several other Brooklyn teenagers to produceAmazing Midget Radio Comics (named to promote one of the company's novelty items). The pair is at once passionate about their creation, earnestly optimistic about making money, and always nervous about the opinion of their employers. The magazine features Sammy and Joe's character, the Escapist, an anti-fascist superhero who combines traits of (among others) Captain America, Harry Houdini, Batman, the Phantom, and the Scarlet Pimpernel. The Escapist becomes tremendously popular, but like talent behind Superman, the writers and artists of the comic get a minimal share of their publisher's revenue. Sammy and Joe are slow to realize that they are being exploited, as they have private concerns: Joe is trying to help his family escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, and has fallen in love with the bohemian Rosa Saks, who has her own artistic aspirations, while Clay works to find his sexual identity and seeks progress in his professional and literary career.

For many months after coming to New York, Joe is driven by an intense desire to improve the condition of his family, still living under a regime increasingly hostile to their kind. This drive shows through in his work, which remains for a long time violently anti-Nazi despite his employer's concerns. In the meantime, he is spending more and more time with Rosa, appearing as a magician in the bar mitzvahs of the children of Rosa's father's acquaintances, even though he sometimes feels guilty at indulging in these distractions from the primary task of fighting for his family. After multiple attempts and considerable monetary sacrifice, Joe ultimately fails to get his family to the States, his last attempt having resulted in putting his younger brother aboard a ship that was destroyed by a German U-boat. Distraught and unaware that Rosa is pregnant with his child, Joe enlists in the navy, hoping to fight the Germans. Instead, he is sent to a secluded naval base in Antarctica. After a faulty chimney fills the base with carbon monoxide, Josef emerges from this interlude the lone survivor from his station. When he makes it back to New York, ashamed to show his face again to Rosa and Sammy, he lives and sleeps in a hideout in the Empire State Building, known only to a small circle of magician-friends.

Meanwhile, Sam develops a romantic relationship with the radio voice of The Escapist, Tracy Bacon. Bacon's movie-star good looks initially intimidate Clay, but later they fall in love. When Tracy is cast as The Escapist in the film adaptation of the now-popular franchise, he invites Clay to move to Hollywood with him, an offer that Clay accepts. But later, when Bacon and Clay go to a friend's beach house with several other gay couples, the private dinner is raided by the local police as well as two off-duty FBI agents. All of the men at the party are arrested, except for two who hid under the dinner table, one of whom is Sam Clay. The FBI agents use their authority to sexually abuse Sam and the other man. After this episode, Clay decides that he can't live with the constant threat of being persecuted because of his relationship with Tracy; he does not travel with Bacon. Some time after Joe leaves, Sammy marries Rosa and moves with her to the suburbs, where they raise her son Tommy in what outwardly appears to be a typical traditional nuclear family.

Sammy and Rosa cannot hide all their secrets from Tommy, however, who manages to take private magic lessons in the Empire State Building from Joe for the better part of year without anyone else's knowledge. Tommy is instrumental in finally reuniting the Kavalier and Clay duo, which works with renewed enthusiasm to find a new creative direction for comics. Joe moves into Sammy and Rosa's house. Shortly afterwards, Sammy's homosexuality is revealed on public television. This further complicates the attempts of Rosa, Sammy, and Joe to reconstitute a family. In the end, despite Joe and Rosa's efforts to convince Sammy to stay, he leaves the house in the middle of the night without saying goodbye.

Many events in the novel are based on the lives of actual comic-book creators including Jack Kirby (to whom the book is dedicated in the afterword), Bob Kane, Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Joe Simon, Will Eisner, and Jim Steranko. Other historical figures play minor roles, including Salvador Dalí, Al Smith, Orson Welles, andFredric Wertham. The novel's time span roughly mirrors that of the Golden Age of Comics itself, starting from shortly after the debut of Superman and concluding with the Kefauver Senate hearings, two events often used to demarcate the era.