The Books: “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” (Michael Chabon)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – by Michael Chabon.

This is one of my favorite books ever written – and I consider it to be in the pantheon of great American novels. I don’t really want to say more about it because words fail me, sometimes, when it comes to these books I love so dearly. It’s a great great book – it’s got it all – memorable characters, a sweeping panoramic view of American life and culture, details, humor, and fantastic writing … It’s not too dark, as a matter of fact – it’s just the opposite. Although there are evil forces at work – WWII, for one – fascism, the Nazi threat – (we start right in the middle of all of that with the escape from Prague) – there is a deep sense of hope in the book. Even amidst horror. I want to speak about that more – because the whole “everything happens for a reason” morons have hijacked the way we talk about hardship in this country … Not that I don’t believe in REASONS for things happening – I do! – but when the first response to some tragedy is a kneejerk, “Everything happens for a reason” – then my response to that is one of suspicion and contempt. That is a person who wants to cut off feeling things, who leaps over the tough stuff to some easy slogan. The reasons will come – if we are open to the universe, and to ourselves, and the beauty of life. But you can’t skip steps. Hope, to me, means something very different, something much more hard-won, and perhaps more fragile. Yet tremendously valuable. It should be protected, hovered over, nurtured. It’s not a bumper sticker. It can’t be summed up in a slogan. It’s not EASY. Like Anne Frank in her attic – staring out the window where she can see just a part of the huge tree in the street. She loves that tree, she writes about it, she muses on it, she misses the outdoors, that tree becomes a symbol – something to hold onto, to stare at in the midst of yet another year in hiding … (that tree was just cut down, by the way – it had rotted …) Anyway – to me, THAT is “hope” – Actually, Ted and I had a discussion on his blog about that a week ago – and I found one of my favorite quotes of Vaclav Havel’s:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Yes. Yes.

Anne Frank’s knowledge that she should be free is right – regardless. Regardless of how it turned out. It’s like Thomas Jefferson putting that pesky little phrase “the pursuit of happiness” into the Declaration. How on EARTH can a government ensure that? What on EARTH does “happiness” have to do with the fortunes of men and warfare and politics? But what a difference it has made – to the world – to have that phrase in the public record. It is not a GOAL. It is a journey, a reminder … a necessary reminder in the darkest of times … of what is the best in us. The pursuit of happiness is the best that is in us.

And it is right – “regardless of how it turns out”.

My life has not been one long successful journey of happiness. That is not the point of life – and anyone who is consistently thrown off course because life isn’t easy or smooth – is (as far as I’m concerned) not a developed person. Life is difficult. Start from there. Accept it, goddammit … and then maybe you’ll get somewhere! There are those who seem to feel that life SHOULD be easy. I am very sorry for those people – they have a rough time of it. And they only have themselves to blame, as far as I’m concerned. So no. “HAPPINESS” has not been my main course in life. Maybe it is for some other people – and I am envious. But the PURSUIT of what makes me happy … whatever that may be … continues to help me get up in the morning, even when my feet are dragging, my heart is heavy, and I have lost yet another possibility … it is the PURSUIT that matters. It is the PURSUIT that is guaranteed. And it is the PURSUIT that is right … ‘regardless of how it turns out’. (this all dovetails with the Stockwell obsession and why I think it has come to me right now).

I have wandered far from my topic … but I suppose that is one of the marks of a great book. And The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a great book. I did not want this book to end. I couldn’t bear the thought that I wouldn’t get to “see” all of those people again.

Read it, if you haven’t.

It was hard to choose an excerpt – because the book is so great … the opening is just … Fuggedaboutit – I DARE you to read those first 3 pages and not read further! But I decided to go with Joe and Rosa meeting at the crazy Bohemian party … Joe had actually SEEN Rosa Luxemberg Saks before – had caught her naked in a friend’s bed – a couple years before, when he was still new and green to America – still struggling wtih English, etc. Years later, he is at a party in Greenwich Village with a bunch of artists – Dali is there, Joseph Cornell, etc. etc. And he runs into Rosa again. He remembers her immediately – and she thinks he looks familiar – but he tries to shoo her off that old story. Rosa is one of those characters my heart ached to leave behind. Chabon writes women very well. Even when he was a young man, I thought that Jane and Phlox from Mysteries of Pittsburgh were very well-drawn characters. And, I saw a lot of myself in Rosa. I almost never see myself in fictional characters – there’s always some huge character trait that is either missing, or present … that throws the whole thing off. I kind of relate to Franny in Franny and Zooey – she “feels” very close to me, in terms of how I relate, what panics me, what love feels like, what religious faith feels like … art … all that. That’s complex stuff and Franny is right there with me. Rosa is one of those characters – from the second we first meet her (or hear her, actually – we first hear her voice shouting, “FUUUUUUUUUCK” – and she’s standing in the middle of a group of men at a party – and everyone is laughing uproariously at some bitter thing she’s just said) … and then she takes Joe up to her room – and because of the image we have first had of her, a ballsy loud woman surrounded by men, we think we know what’s going to happen up in the private room. But no – we don’t know. And I really saw myself in that. In who Rosa was – the public AND the private. In a person who is “unclassifiable”.

Also her blush – which gives it all away. And how she immediately goes with Joe – into his emotional life. Watch how immediately she does that. Who wouldn’t fall in love with such a person?

So here’s an excerpt.

The writing is exquisite. The talcum being a ‘guardrail’ – the ‘optimistic descent’ into a first kiss – how she starts to smoke the cigarette without it being lit – the ‘determined blankness’ in her eyes – that whole section – and the words he uses to describe the color of her eyes. It’s all just so damn GOOD.

Excerpt from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – by Michael Chabon.

It was fascinating to see her face again after so long. Although Joe had never forgotten the girl whom he had surprised that morning in Jerry Glovsky’s bedroom, he saw that, in his nocturnal reimaginings of the moment, had had badly misremembered her. He never would have recalled her forehead as so capacious and high, her chin as so delicately pointed. In fact, her face would have seemed overlong were it not counterbalanced by an extravagant flying buttress of a nose. Her rather small lips were set in a bright red hyphen that curved downward just enough at one corner to allow itself to be read as a smirk of amusement, from which she herself was not exempted, at the surrounding tableau of human vanity. And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.

The men around her had parted reluctantly as Harkoo, providing blocking for Joe and Sammy like a back for the latter’s beloved Dodgers, shoehorned them into the circle.

“We’ve met,” Rosa said. It was almost a question. She had a strong, deep, droll, masculine voice, turned up to a point that verged on speaker-rattling, as if she were daring everyone around her to listen and to judge. But then maybe, Joe thought, she was just very drunk. There was a glass of something amber in her hand. In her case, her voice went well, somehow, with her dramatic features and the wild mass of brown woolen loops, constrained here and there by a desperate bobby pin, that constituted her hairstyle. She gave his hand a squeeze that partook of the same bold intentions as her voice, a businessman’s shake, dry and curt and forceful. And yet he noticed that she was, if anything, blushing more obviously than ever. The delicate skin over her clavicles was mottled.

“I don’t believe so,” said Joe. He coughed, partlly to cover his discomfiture, partly to camouflage the suave rejoinder he had just been fed by the prompter crouching by the footlights of his desire, and partly because his throat had gone bone-dry. He felt a weird urge to lean down – she was a small woman, the top of whose head barely reached his collarbone – and kiss her on the mouth, in front of everyone, as he might have done in a dream, with that long optimisticc descent across the distance between their lips enduring for minutes, hours, centuries. How surreal would that be? Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. “Someone like you I would absolutely remember,” he said.

“Oh, good God,” said one of the men beside her in disgust.

The young woman to whom he was lying produced a smile which – he couldn’t tell – might have been either flattered or appalled. Her smile was a surprisingly broad and toothy achievement for a mouth that in contemplation had been compacted into such a tiny pout.

“Huh,” said Sammy. He, at least, sounded impressed by Joe’s suavity.

Longman Harkoo said, “That’s our cue.” He put his arm once more around Sammy’s shoulder. “Let’s get you a drink, shall we?”

“Oh, I don’t — I’m not –” Sammy reached out to Joe as Harkoo led him away, as though worried that their host was about to drag him off to the promised volcano. Joe watched him go with a cold heart. Then he held the pack of Pall Malls out to Rosa. She tugged a cigarette free and put it to her lips. She took a long drag. Joe felt constrained to point out that the cigarette was not lit.

“Oh,” she said. She snorted, “I’m such an idiot.”

“Rosa,” chided one of the men standing beside her, “you don’t smoke!”

“I just took it up,” Rosa said.

There was a muffled groan, then the cloud of men around her seemed to dissolve. She took no notice. She inclined toward Joe and peered up, curving her hand around his and the flame of the match. Her eyes shone, an indeterminate color between champagne and the green of a dollar. Joe felt feverish and a little dizzy, and the cool talcum smell of Shalimar she gave off was like a guardrail he could lean against. They had drawn very close together, and now, as he tried and failed to prevent himself from thinking of her lying naked and facedown on Jerry Glovsky’s bed, her broad downy backside with its dark furrow, the alluvial hollow of her spine, she took a step backward and studied him.

“You’re sure we haven’t met?”

“Fairly.”

“Where are you from?”

“Prague.”

“You’re Czech.”

He nodded.

“A Jew?”

He nodded again.

“How long have you been here?”

“One year,” he said, and then, the realization filling him with wonder and chagrin, “one year today.”

“Did you come with your family?”

“Alone,” he said. “I left them there.” Unbidden, there flashed in his mind’s eye the image of his father, or the ghost of his father, striding down the gangplank of the Rotterdam, arms outstretched. Tears stung his eyes, and a ghostly hand seemed to clutch at his throat. Joe coughed once, and batted at the smoke from his cigarette, as if it were irritating him. “My father has recently died.”

She shook her head, looking sorrowful and outraged and, he thought, entirely lovely. As his glibness had departed him so a more earnest nature seemed to feel greater liberty to confess itself in her.

“I’m really sorry for you,” she said. “My heart goes out to them.”

“It’s not so bad,” Joe said. “It will be all right.”

“You know we’re getting into this war,” she declared. She wasn’t blushing now. The brass-voiced party girl of a moment before, telling a story on herself that ended in an oath, seemed to have vanished. “We have to, and we will. Roosevelt wil arrange it. He’s working toward it now. We won’t let them win.”

“No,” Joe said, although Rosa’s views were hardly typical of her countrymen, most of whom felt that the events in Europe were an embroilment to be avoided at any price. “I believe …” He found himself, to his mild surprise, unable to finish the sentence. She reached out and took his arm.

“What I’m saying is just, I don’t know. I guess ‘don’t despair,’ ” she said. “I really, really do mean that, Joe.”

At her words, the touch of her hand, her pronouncing of his short blank American name devoid of all freight and family associations, Joe was overcome with a flood of gratitude so powerful that it frightened him, because it seemed to reflect in its grandeur and force just how little hope he really had left. He pulled away.

“Thank you,” he said stiffly.

She let her hand fall, dismayed at having offended him. “I’m sorry,” she said again. She lifted an eyebrow, quizzical, bold, and on the verge, he thought, of recognizing him. Joe averted his eyes, his heart in his throat, thinking that if she were able to recollect him and the circumstances of their first meeting, his chances with her would be ruined. Her eyes got very big, and her throat, her cheeks, her ears were flooded with the bright heart’s blood of humiliation. Joe could see her making an effort not to look away.