Book of a Lifetime: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

From The Independent archive: Shelley Harris shares an audaciously-constructed novel filled with astounding tales of danger and romance, tragedy and triumph – all delivered with sly humour in forensically beautiful prose

Michael Chabon in 2020 and (inset) the first edition cover of his 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (Getty/Random House)

Ideally, I would underplay this. I would temper my language, or slip in Kavalier & Clay among other recommendations as if it were just an ordinary book. That way, its genius will come as a revelation, and be all the sweeter for it. But I’m going to state right now that this is an astounding novel, everything a great story should be, and that it knocks into a cocked hat all the specious arguments which seek to separate “readability” from “good writing”.

It won the Pulitzer Prize, but you don’t have to give two hoots about the Great American Novel to love it. It is set in New York during the golden age of comic books, and you don’t have to care very much about that either to be tugged into its story of two cousins, the comic-book superhero they create, and the real-life dangers which threaten them.

Josef Kavalier smuggles himself out of occupied Prague in a coffin and ends up “slumped like a question mark against the door frame” in the Brooklyn bedroom of his cousin Sam Clay. Together they invent The Escapist, a superhero “whose power would be that of impossible and perpetual escape”. And escape is this novel’s preoccupation. While their superhero trounces Hitler in their pages, Kavalier fervently tries to free his family from the Nazis and Clay, covertly gay in an era of bigotry, has his own bonds to slip.