Book Club Guide

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

by Michael Chabon · 2000 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Comics as a response to the Holocaust — the artist who fights back through art
Escape as both literal and metaphorical — what we escape from and toward
Sammy's hidden desire and what it costs him to keep hiding it

About this book

In 1930s New York, Josef Kavalier — a Czech Jewish refugee with an escape artist's training — and his cousin Sammy Clay create a superhero comic called The Escapist. Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about escape in every sense: from Prague, from poverty, from the closet, from death, and finally from the stories we tell about ourselves.

Published in 2000, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Chabon spent five years on it, doing extensive research into the history of the American comic book industry and the Golem legend.

Discussion questions

The Golden Age of comics is the novel's historical backdrop. How does Chabon use this setting — as period colour, as allegorical framework, or as something integral to what the novel says about art?
Josef's desire to escape and rescue his family runs through the novel. How does Chabon develop the relationship between literal and artistic escape?
Sammy's homosexuality is the novel's most carefully handled theme. How does Chabon show what the 1940s required of Sammy — and what he loses by complying?
The novel is enormously long and generous. Does the length feel earned — and are there sections that feel like digressions from the novel's central concerns?
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize. What does it do that earns this — and what does its use of popular genre (comics) say about the relationship between literary fiction and mass culture?