Literary

I’ve read a couple of Michael Chabon’s other books and have found him to be a writer I like a lot, but have never been totally enamored with. His prose reminds me of a certain type I sometimes meet at parties in the city: stylish, insightful, full of savoir faire, but trying just a little too hard to impress, and maybe not as original as he wants to be.

Still, if there was ever a novel that plays to an author’s descriptive flair and love for homage, it would be the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Through mannered but flip character study, Chabon hones in on the energies passing through pre-war New York City, as experienced by two young artists intent on making their mark in the dawning Golden Era of Comic Books, and later, the doldrums of 1950s suburbia and a stagnating industry. One of his protagonists, Joe Kavalier, is a young Jew from Czechoslovakia, trained in the arts of escape (think Harry Houdini), the other, Sammy Klayman, is a young Jew from Brooklyn, with aspirations of being a novelist. One worries about his family back in Europe, the other struggles with his sexuality, alternating between cautious acceptance and the socially-prescribed denial of the era. As with other Chabon novels, there are broad “Jewish” themes of exile, suffering, and redemption, which make an interesting subtext.

To me, the joy of this novel is the inventiveness with which Chabon has his heroes playing out their psyches and backstories on the nine-paneled page, as they struggle with guilt, a sense of identity, love, friendship, and failure. His ability to evoke the imagery of classic comics in prose is impressive, and reminds us of the ineffable power that visuals hold over both creator and devotee, even hampered by the stilted “sock! bam! pow!” conventions of the early days. A less graceful writer might have stamped out an empty nostalgia trip, but Chabon, in celebrating the earnest constructive spirit of young men in a new field of expression, crafts an ecstatic secret history of one rapidly evolving. It’s not often that words are worth a thousand pictures.

Well, for the first third of the book, anyway. Once the young duo achieves its meteoric rise and begins settling into comfortable lives of regular paychecks and predictable comforts, the novel begins to sag and its character studies to feel a little superficial and plodding (but impeccably written). Luckily, an engaging interlude involving a little known-theater of World War Two shakes things up for a while at the two-thirds mark (though it’s largely superfluous to the main story, and felt like Chabon just needed the writerly equivalent of an excuse to get out of the building and run around for a bit). After that, the story returns to 1950s suburbia, a dull marriage, a McCarthy-esque harassment of comic book writers, and a resolution that I found surprisingly banal. Does Chabon just not know how to end books well? I had a similar problem with the Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Yet, as with that book, I liked the imagination and joyous construction of a place in time on display in the first half of The Amazing Adventures so much, I still think it’s worth your consideration. The audiobook might even be an improvement over the print version, with Joe and Sammy’s distinct accents brought to life, along with those of several other characters. Probably my favorite of Michael Chabon’s novels thus far.

I really enjoyed this book, though, as you can tell from other reviews online, it's not a novel for every taste. Let me put it this way: if you like the films of Hiyao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke), and relish a few dashes of metaphysics, literary/movie/music references, and existentialism, then Murakami's mix of fantasy, surreality, and realism might speak to you. If not, you'll probably be frustrated with the listening/reading experience. (If you don't know Hiyao Miyazaki, then get ye to Netflix first, then come back here.)

On the surface, the book has two intertwining stories. One is about a 30-something loner guy with slacker tendencies and cyberpunkish skills who lives in Tokyo and takes a job with an eccentric scientist, a choice which soon sets off a cascade of strange consequences. This is interleaved with a second story, in which a man with no memory finds himself trapped in a fantastical, dreamlike town, trying to make sense of its fable-like inhabitants and his reasons for being there. As the novel progresses, the two stories begin to intersect. While "magic realism" is a genre that can really fly off the rails sometimes (see Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale), Murakami keeps his story readable and grounded in a coherent flow of events.

This is one of those books where (in my opinion), you'll enjoy it more if you don't expect the author’s stew of ideas and imagery to make perfect sense or try to analyze his science and philosophy too much. Yes, there are a few logic holes and not everything in the surface-level plot gets resolved in an obvious way. Rather, this is a novel to read for its oddball characters, the vision of the writing, the strange-but-fitting twists and turns of the story, the humorous juxtaposition of the surreal and the everyday, and the existential questions under its fanciful trappings. If you had only 36 hours to live, what would you do with the time? I found the way Murakami chose to answer this question unexpectedly moving. Even with the end of the world coming, you might still have to do laundry...

I enjoyed the narration and voice-acting in the audiobook. The main character's voice reminded me of Spike from Cowboy Bebop, which (in my world) was a bonus.

For me, this novel was about as close to perfect as contemporary fiction gets. It's beautifully written, well-voiced, full of memorable characters, and a rich snapshot of life on a North Dakota Indian reservation in the late 1980s. The narrator, Joe, is a grown man remembering a few life-shaping months of his early teens. The book begins with Joe and his father, a reservation judge, coming upon Joe's mother, who has just been assaulted and raped. The situation soon grows in complexity -- Geraldine takes to her bed and can't (or won't) recall who attacked her, and because the attack occurred somewhere close to the reservation boundary, it's unclear whose legal jurisdiction it falls into.

With his mother in legal and emotional limbo, and the police seemingly disinterested, the young Joe takes it on himself to solve the crime, though he proceeds in a typically fumbling, distractible adolescent manner. What follows is a story that's a lot of things at once. It's a mystery, a coming-of-age story, a drama of family and best friends, and a reflection on the history of a people struggling to maintain control of their own laws and culture within the larger framework of American society and its systems. Through Joe's young eyes, we come to grasp the weight of a complex past on the present day. I was in awe of the subtle purity with which Erdrich makes these separate pieces connect, ultimately bringing her protagonist towards terms with his reality and his identity.

As I said, the characters are wonderful. There's Joe's soft-spoken, intelligent father, Bazil. There's Joe's best friend, Cappy, the boy we all remember from adolescence who seemed to be a step ahead of us in confidence and experience, if not always wisdom. There's an ex-Marine priest, who has a singularly painful reason for choosing his vocation. There's an old man whose nocturnal tales confuse (or perhaps not) real events and tribal mythology. There's one of the dirtiest-minded old grandmas I've ever encountered in fiction. Erdrich's craft as a writer is such that I felt that I knew these people well and could picture their backstories and relationships within a couple pages of meeting them. (If I have a complaint at all, it's that the villain's pretty one-dimensional, but that wasn’t a big issue for me.)

The central, recurring theme in The Round House is that of overlapping worlds. I knew I was in love with the writing a few chapters in, when Joe explains Star Trek: the Next Generation from the perspective of reservation boys. In this personal way, Erdrich explores several other blurred boundaries, such as that between the Indian world and the white world, the way both Christian and native beliefs have personal meaning, the difficult crossing between childhood and the adult world, and the conflict between personal justice and the importance of rational, impartial law. I loved the way she brought these separate threads together in the raw, but beautifully symbolic final chapters. This is the novel that many aspiring writers attend MFA programs in search of, but few pull off.

To me, Gary Farmer did a good job with the audiobook narration, though some listeners might find the halting intonation of his Native American accent a little reminiscent of William Shatner. The only other book of Erdrich's I've read before was A Plague of Doves; while it was good, this is the one to start with.