The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Plot summary

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 vaudeville circuit.

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 produce Amazing 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, and Fredric 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.

Characters

Reception

Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "This 2000 novel blended comic books, Jewish mysticism, and American history into something truly amazing."

Editions

Film

Producer Scott Rudin, who had worked with Chabon in the early nineties on The Gentlemen Host, a screenplay that as of 2013 remains unfilmed, bought the screen rights to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for Paramount Pictures based on a one-and-a-half page pitch before the novel had been published. (Rudin was involved with the novel so early on that his name appears in the acknowledgements to its first edition.) After the book was published, Rudin hired Chabon to write the screen adaptation. In July 2002, it was reported that the process had taken 16 months and six drafts, none of which pleased the demanding Rudin. "It's like those arcade games where a gopher head pops out", Chabon said at the time. "I fix this and then another head pops out." Rudin explained that his problems with the drafts often derived from scenes in the book he wanted kept in the film and which Chabon, "incredibly unprecious about his work", had cut.

In their 2002 "It List", Entertainment Weekly declared Kavalier & Clay the year's "It Script", publishing a short excerpt from the screenplay. Chabon told the publication, "A lot of things about the book are really a pain in the neck [to adapt]....The story takes place over this huge span of time. There's an 11-year gap in the middle when we don't see the characters at all. I wrote the first draft of the screenplay from memory, as if there were no novel at all and I were just remembering a story that I had heard.... Much less time passes in the movie than in the book. It's really just the period of the war." While at that point, the film was in active pre-production (with Sydney Pollack attached to direct and Jude Law in talks to play Kavalier), by late 2004 Chabon had declared the film project "very much dead".

In November of that same year, though, director Stephen Daldry announced in The New York Times that he planned to direct the film "next year." In January 2005, Chabon posted on his web site that, "about a month ago, there was a very brief buzzing, as of a fruit fly, around the film version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It was a casting-buzz. It went like this: Tobey Maguire as Sam Clay. Jamie Bell as Joe Kavalier. Natalie Portman as Rosa Saks. It buzzed very seriously for about eleven minutes. Then it went away." Actors Andrew Garfield, Ryan Gosling, Ben Whishaw and Jason Schwartzman were also possibly considered for parts in the project.

In June 2006, Chabon maintained that Portman was still "a strong likelihood for the part of Rosa", and listed a number of important plot points present in the book that would be left out of the movie. The list included the scene between Clay and Tracy Bacon in the ruins of the 1939 World's Fair (though the film will still feature a gay love story), the Long Island scene, and the appearances of Orson Welles and Stan Lee. Chabon added that "whether [this project] will move at last ... into really-truly pre-production, with a budget and cast and everything, will be decided on or around 12 July 2006." Jamie Caliri, director of music videos and other short films, posted 2 and a half minutes of concept footage on his Vimeo channel, stating, "This piece was made as part of the development process... They asked me to explore animation concepts. I thought it would be much more fun to actually shoot a section of the script to intertwine live action and animation." In August 2006, however, it was reported that the film had "not been greenlit". In April 2007, Chabon added that the project "just completely went south for studio-politics kinds of reasons that I'm not privy to.... Right now, as far as I know, there's not a lot going on."

In 2016, an animated opening sequence to the film was uploaded onto Vimeo.

Television

In a December 2011 interview, Daldry stated that he was considering making a Kavalier & Clay adaptation as a television miniseries rather than a feature film, preferring to do it "on HBO as an eight-parter...If you could put that in the article and ring up HBO and tell them that’s what I wanna do, I’d really appreciate it."