Last week I finished reading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and, while I liked it, I thought it was interesting after having recently finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a novel I found much more appealing.

Everything about Kavalier and Clay is a touchy showy, a bit over-the-top. This applies to the events of Joe Kavalier’s life (his WWII experience on Antarctica was too much for me to swallow) as well as to the sentence-level writing, where Chabon’s descriptions were ornate, elaborate, and at times (dare I say it?) self-indulgent. Maybe this is fitting due to the fact that the book has comics books at its heart, a generally hyperbolic medium but that doesn’t mean that it works in the context of a novel. Even though I greatly enjoyed it and would recommend it to others, I kept thinking it felt a tad bloated. In contrast, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union rarely sets a foot wrong and coincidentally it’s about 200 pages shorter to boot.

However, I shouldn’t be too down on Kavalier and Clay since it’s full of humor and emotion, and you can’t help feeling attached to all the not-so-perfect characters. And it also rekindled my own fond memories of collecting comics, a hobby I had for a couple years clustered around 5th and 6th grade and then again during my junior and senior years of high school. Chabon does a great job explaining how all at once you can love comics and think they’re silly fluff, appreciate what they can do for the imagination while being frustrated by their limitations.

Apropos of nothing, after finishing the book I bought a bunch of graphic novels I’ve been considering getting for years: V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: The Killing Joke. So yes, lots of Moore and Miller. This could be habit forming…

Current Mood: Wiped Out |