The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
If you’re a mood reader like me, then you know it’s rare to find a book that not only fits your exact mood – to multiple criteria – but is also one of the best books written in the 21st century (and it came out in 2000). That’s what The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay did for me.
All my friends know that I’ve been on a queer historical fiction kick since mid-December of last year. And some of those friends know that I’ve been on a superhero kick since the Superman (2025) trailer dropped around the same time. If you’ve already read this book, or even heard of it, then you can see why it was a winner amongst all of that.
Kavalier and Clay has been on my radar since around 2014 as a book I knew that I should read, and knew that I would like. But the length – 639 pages – made it seem too intimidating. I thought about taking it out from the library or buying it but I knew I just wasn’t ‘in the mood’ yet, so eventually I forgot about the book outside of it sitting on my Goodreads’ to-read shelf quietly for nearly a decade. Whenever I cleaned out that shelf, I would think to myself, “You know, I really should read that”… and then I wouldn’t.
Until this summer when, on a walk with one of my friends, I found a copy in someone’s Little Free Library. This copy then sat on my shelf for a few months until mid-December when, after reading a few historical fiction novellas and getting unironically excited about Superman (2025), I realized that it was the perfect time.
Despite the intimidating length of the book, Kavalier and Clay is deceptively quick to read. With dynamic and engaging prose, I felt like I couldn’t put it down. The book follows the lives of cousins Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay as they embark on a career making comics, creating and launching superheroes that become beloved to the public. For Joe, who came to Brooklyn from Prague in 1938 funded by the last of his family’s money and aided by the magician he’d once apprenticed under, this is a means to the end of getting his family out of Europe before it’s too late.
We follow the cousins as they work together to create something at the dawn of the medium, build relationships, and try to navigate early 1940s New York City. If one of my problems with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is that it felt ahistorical, that was in contrast to how grounded in reality this book felt. It didn’t feel like someone in 2000 writing about the 1940s – it just felt like the 1940s, even with the brief moments where we get to know about something one of the characters had to say much later on. Similarly, Kavalier and Clay is much more firm in its themes of family, the creative process, and religion.
I’ve already recommended this book to people, and know that I likely will be for the rest of my life. This is definitely one of those books
“Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.”