I’ve just finished this remarkable book and it immediately assumes a spot among my all-time favorites.
The depth (and breadth) of the story, the sharply-defined characters and the beautiful arc of the story are first-rate. It also helps that Michael Chabon can construct a sentence with the best of them.
I did a search and found just two very brief threads, the most recent being seven years old. I was just wondering if anyone else here has taken this journey (and, of course, your impressions on the novel).
Its been a while since I read it but I think its split into about 5 sections. For the first 4 sections I loved it. I thought it was going to go into my short list of ‘favourite ever reads.’ But the last section completely ruined any goodwill I held towards the book.
I read it & loved it. Was impressed by how Chabon covered mid-century history & culture while drawing interesting characters. And how he really loves comic books–check out The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, available per issue or in digest form.
For a writer who has had such “mainstream” success, Chabon is not shy about loving genre fiction. His later The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won “the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best SF Novel, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for Best Novel.”
I liked it a lot. It’s on my pile of books to be reread. I also heard that there was interest in a film version of the book, but it’s been stalled several times over the past decade.
I also really liked it, read it on a vacation and was utterly absorbed by it. I kind of agree that it dragged down in the final part, though.
Chabon comes out of the mimetic literary tradition, according to his afterword to the (equally excellent) Gentlemen of the Road. IIRC, at some point he decided to try his hand at writing the kinds of books he grew up loving instead of the kinds of books he learned to write in professional writing programs, and when he found that he could be successful at that, he never looked back.
The only one of his books that I’ve detested was Summerland, his attempt at writing young adult fiction. There seems to be a sense among authors of adult fiction that writing young adult fiction is really easy, you just dumb everything down and insert a sense of strained whimsy; too often writers of adult fiction fail miserably when they try, and I think Chabon crashed and burned at this attempt.
One of my favorites, I’ve read most of Chabon since then. I don’t dispute some of the criticisms about plot and character, I have my own. However, I find his writing to be superb (even within dodgy plot choices).
It was mostly about the kid if I remember rightly. He was a real pain of a character. I also felt in the final section that Chabon really shafted Clay so that Kavalier could get a happy ending.
I tried to read it but I just couldn’t bring myself to care about the characters. And they had a strained, unreal quality to them that kinda threw the story off. I didn’t think it was a particularly interesting book, so gave up about a hundred pages in. And no, no subsequent hundreds of pages could repay me for the boredom of reading the first hundred. I’m surprised I made it as far as I did.
I enjoyed it when I read it about the time it came out, but I find I don’t remember it very well now. I also read the Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which stuck with me much more.
I read it earlier this year and loved it, including the final section. The characters felt true to me and it was a great portrait of a specific time, place and industry.
I finished this today and liked it. I think the characters were more rich and intense in the first half, and tying up the plot took a lot of the focus in the second half. It wasn’t so grim that it triggered nightmares for me (my father was in a prison camp and I have to carefully pick what WWII movies and books I can handle) but it still felt authentic. I was never much of a comic book fan so I loved getting in on the inside of the founding of that world. As a refugees’ kid, I also really enjoyed the atmosphere of starting over in a ruthless but wide open New York, and the desperate optimism America offered to those who would take big chances.
I just finished it two weeks ago. I really liked it. The last bit dragged, but not too much. It was a little jarring to be thrust into a domestic novel after all the magical realism of the earlier parts.
I think he did a good job of conveying Kavaliers intense frustration and despair at his family’s fate, without it becoming unreadably depressing. I wish there’d been more of the actual comic book adventures but I enjoyed the origin stories of the Escapist and Luna Moth.