Word: chabon
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...Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House; 639 pages; $26.95) is a serious but never solemn novel about the American comic book's Golden Age, from the late 1930s to (and this could cause a generational squabble) the early 1950s...
...Chabon, whose previous novels include Werewolves in Their Youth and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, knows and loves his pulps. He also seems to understand intuitively that in the U.S., popular culture is the culture, and there is no point in pretending it is not. But the real heroes of his latest effort are the ink-stained drudges who filled the brightly colored panels with muscle-bound avengers and infectious onomatopoeia: Biff! Bam! Boom! and the occasional Kerplunk...
...Chabon, writing the kind of charged prose that leaps 600 pages of fantasy and social history in a single bound, re-creates a New York City subculture bursting with commercial vitality and inspired schlock. The headquarters of Empire Comics is in the 14-story Kramler Building, "faced with stone the color of a stained shirt collar." Sheldon P. Anapol, the "likable and cruel" publisher and novelty peddler, succeeds with a combination of "hard-won cynicism, low overhead, an unstintingly shoddy product line and the American boy's unassuageable hunger for midget radios, X-ray spectacles and joy buzzers...
...Michael Chabon's source novel was a wry comedy that focused on the college's elders. The screenplay, by Steve Kloves, genuflects to the camera's love of young faces and promotes Grady's best student (Katie Holmes) and his weirdest (Tobey Maguire) to lead roles. But the pulse of Curtis Hanson's direction is lethargic; the comic bits are so slack and deadpan you could mistake the film for an earnest drama--an Afterschool Special for troubled kids and their pooped parents...
...Chabon's chapters aren't unreadable, but they are unstrung: a series of funny scenes about not writing a novel that somehow don't hang together as a novel. Chabon seems to be winking at friends: Look, here's a ridiculous bit in which Tripp gets the dean of students pregnant. And here's Miss Sloviak, the transvestite, and here's Tripp's car with a dead dog and a tuba in the trunk. Some of this is worth a smile, some a raised eyebrow, but let's agree with Chabon's publisher that he has actually written his third...