The Immersion Library

That was magic – not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world – the reality – that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain universally despised.

Years ago, I subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and set out to read every issue in which Wolverine appears. Then I decided to tackle Black Panther, and Deadpool, and finally – the Everest of Marvel – Spider-Man. This endeavor serves my completionist compulsion but also my sense of nostalgia. So when The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay appeared on my list of next to read, I felt both excited for the subject matter but also nervous about the quality.

The book does not disappoint. I find it a perfectly balanced mix of character study, the timelessness of the American experience, a historical thesis, and a treatise on the nature of art.

The story seamlessly interweaves the seemingly insurmountable challenge of the immigrant journey with the magical prowess of comic book superheroes. It challenges the reader to question their elitist understanding of high art as well as the value of escape and true nature of freedom. While I imagine Chabon wrote this book with a thesaurus close at hand, I appreciate his ability to blend real and fantasy narratives as well as his ability to convey his fiction as historical research.

As Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay create The Escapist, the reader immediately notes the thematic perpetuity of escapism. Joe studies the performance art of escapism as perfected by his idol Houdini. Then escapes Prague. Then ultimately learns how to escape the urge to carry the catastrohic destruction of his family and home within his new life. Even when finding success in America, he continues his journey of escape; much like the alter ego he draws in his comic books. Joe must reach the ends of the earth and his near demise before he can truly find some sense of clarity and freedom from the chains of his past. While his journey seems like a complex and never-ending origin story, one can only imagine the super-human efforts he makes to finally escape.

The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something – one poor, dumb, powerful thing – exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape.

Where they model their original hero, The Escapist, after Joe’s literal abilities and apply the hero to the struggle and wishes of an immigrant class looking to destory Hitler and inspire a country to fight, Joe’s last character, The Golem, perhaps, accurately reflects Joe’s final understanding of himself.

Sam also needs to escape his self-depricating point of view on his life’s work in comic books. Like his early editor Deasey, he wants to write the great American novel and views comic books as a cheap art. “‘There is only one sure means in life,’ Deasey said, ‘of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.’” But Sam, though motivated by the allure of financial success as a young man, after finding it, feels frustrated by the lack of meaning in his work as well as his mundane existence of an American who “make it”.

He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man.

Yet Joe views his art as a means of escaping the horror of his reality. Can something so valuable to him be invalidated so easily by Clay and Deasey? Can Joe free Sam from the bars through which he views his work and contribution to society?

What higher art exists than the ability to mirror a society finding itself in a modern age; a mosaic of millions of contrasting experiences fueled by the same fantastically ridiculous idea of living their dream. If that dream is to leap buildings in a single bound, or fly, or become super from the pits of a dark origin story, how is this more remarkable than making it in America? than finding freedom from the chains of our anguish? than focusing not on what we escape from but what we escape to.

I never would have thought that a story of the Golden Age of Comics would so accurately embody the essense of the American Dream, the soul of immigrants escaping to new lives, and freedom of Self. Perhaps Chabon originally wanted to write a historical thesis about this period then thought that a fictional story would better convey his insights. He was right.