August 29, 2008
Recent Reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. Here's another book that has languished on my bookshelf for years awaiting the day that I would actually read it. The first Chabon book I read was Wonder Boys, which eventually became a Michael Douglas movie. It was Chabon's second and possibly last chance to gain me as a loyal reader.
There is a lot to love about Kavalier & Clay, and there is also a lot not to love about it. A quick trip through some things I don't like:
- Chabon beats his reader over the head with his well-endowed vocabulary.
- Chabon is so enamored of his own ability to craft a good story that he often gets in the way of the reader enjoying that story.
- I am not a fan of books with lots of gratuitous and unloving and violent sexual encounters.
I did enjoy a good bit of this book, and I think that it's the kind of book that will keep on giving as my brain continues to work through some of its themes. One of the reasons I finished it was to decipher one of the themes I identified at the very beginning of the book. I'm not entirely sure that Chabon satisfied my readerly curiosity, but I do think that the book ended as happily as it could.
While I know that a lot of people love this book--it received a Pulitzer Prize in 2001--I am not sure that I would recommend it for a casual reader. In fact, at a book club meeting last night, only about a third of the people there had finished it.
Rita Diane Devlin
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