Michael Chabon's the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: The Return of the Golem (Critical Essay‪)‬

Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, is marked by intricacy of plot structure and sophisticated use of language. Critics unanimously praised the work: The New York Times found the novel to be a "towering achievement," while the Denver Post described the author as a "literary Houdini." The novel utilizes different genres of creative writing including that of referencing comics in telling the story of both Prague-born Joseph Kavalier, who escapes from Europe on the eve of the Shoah, and his New York cousin Sammy Clay, nee Klayman. In the process, Chabon's plot plays out against the background of America's pre-war isolationist policy that advocated an escape from moral responsibility. The novel in fact employs the metaphor of escape as a governing principle. Kavalier studies with an escape artist before escaping his natal city and the Shoah; Sammy overcomes or escapes the limitations of his physical handicap; the Holocaust is dealt with only obliquely. Kavalier & Clay is comprised of two narratives, a longer and a shorter one. The former story deals with America and the history of the comic book industry and its oppression of creative artists between 1939 and 1955. The latter story treats response to the Holocaust in a distinctive yet problematic manner. Very few critics have, however, analyzed the novel in terms of Holocaust representation in the third, non-witnessing, generation of American-born novelists. Consequently, important issues such as the moral role of fiction, the relationship of imagination to history, and the contemporary use of Jewish myth in representing the Shoah have been largely elided.