The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a novel written by Michael Chabon, which deals with the title character's lives as they live through the comic book's golden age. Now, the latter is how I would start a review of the novel, but seeing as how I'm barely on page 130 (out of a behemoth 600-and-change), and I have come upon a thought, I have chosen to drop the novel for a minute and talk about why I think it's so long (and other, more interesting and less obvious thoughts).
Okay, so I forgot to mention that when I'm not reading about Kavalier and Clay's amazing odyssey, I'm reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which I have already pictured a couple of decades down the line with the slick Penguin Modern Classics cover (the ones with the silver bottom). I've drawn some similarities, see? Both novels are very heavy on narrator monologue and very, very light in character dialogue, which means that the reader is mostly subjected to tons of descriptions, predominant in the case of Kavalier and Clay, and character reflections and thoughts, as with Life of Pi. Very little is revealed about the characters via their dialogue, as the authors decide to talk about the characters omnipresently, describing every bit of their lives by jumping through time as naturally as breathing.
What saves the novels, and perhaps what made them Pulitzer Price and Man Booker Price winners, is the fact that the narrator's prose is such a pleasant read, though, in the case of Kavalier and Clay, often not a simple read.
Simple doesn't always have to mean shallow, or lacking in imagination, but certainly with words less complicated as these. I'm only talking about Kavalier and Clay here. There are words that will fly right over the heads of people who do not have the better part of a thesaurus memorized. I don't want to complain too much about this, however, for this is how one learns new words (or at least me) - by highlighting them and then looking in the dictionary for definitions (and maybe using them as everyday vernacular when the sound of the word is not too awkward), but when the reader is subjected to sentence after sentence of environmental description, which makes the bulk of the prose in any section so far, then not only can the reader find him/herself losing track of what the narrator is describing, but they may also decide to skip right through the descriptions on to the parts where the narrator does something else, like, talk about a moment in time relating to present scenarios (which makes another big bulk of the prose).
Though I may complain about, I always realize that I probably wouldn't take Kavalier and Clay any differently than what it already is. Its epic prose (minus a few complex words) is what gives the novel character, and in it I find a break from Life of Pi's much more simplistic and readable prose. The narrator in Pi doesn't do with descriptions altogether, but he does condense them; he doesn't love his character's surroundings as much as the narrator in Kavalier and Clay, which is a shame, really, for I could stand to read more about the surroundings of the temples which Pi visits in the novel, and not so much the urban make-up of Kavalier and Clay's Brooklyn.
The key-word with Kavalier and Clay is immersion - it's an experience. Chabon wants you to be there with his characters, and he wants you to forget your surroundings immediately upon opening the book for the first time. I, however, am more of a quick reader, for I take most books as means to ends; I want to have a collection of books that showcase how many books I've read in my lifetime, and if I ever read a book a second time it's to highlight words I didn't know before and learn them, so that I may use them in my own writing. But if you disagree with me completely, then you must be a reader who enjoys immersing yourself in a book, in which case you will absolutely love Kavalier and Clay.
Okay, so, maybe that was a review of sorts. However, I promise that a formal review of both novels will come up as soon as I'm reading them, though Kavalier and Clay may just take me a lifetime.
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