Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Picador, 2000.

It is a stupid thing to say of a novel that it is too long and this is one of the few about which I'll ever say it: this novel is too long.

At some point all I could do was watch as Chabon pushed and pushed his initial situation into the furthest reaches of his abilities to create what he hoped was an epic novel. I suppose it's an admirable feat, but at some point his story runs away from him. He takes one of his protagonists to Antarctica to fight in WWII, because this is a story very much about German prosecution of Jews in the 1930s and '40s, and yet this weird, brief section dropped into the final third of the novel does absolutely nothing to tell us about WWII, to open up the experience of that war to us, nor does it finally endow the character with abilites or attributes we've been waiting to be unveiled all along. Kavalier is a magician, an escape artist. What is he doing fighting through the hoar of the Antarctic? "He's escaping," you could say. "He's getting himself out of a dicey situation using his own wits and abilities." But no, he's not. He escaped his life in NYC simply by enlisting, which any old schmuck can do,* and his escape from that frozen landscape is done through a matter of luck or coincidence or other people being in the right place at the right time. This coincidence, also, isn't treated as a kind of tragic failure on the part of the escapist not to escape. It just happens because Chabon knows that any decent reader is going to work like a dog through this section to get—for the love of god, please—back to NYC where he's been comfortable all along.

This, though, happens once the novel gets back on track: The government comes to inquire about comic books leading to degeneracy among their readers. One of them asks about Batman and Robin, and actually a whole spate of younger sidekicks that started popping up in comic books of the time. Why do they live together? Why do they wear those tights? Aren't they gay, really? That is: aren't they homosexuals?

Sammy, who writes comic books and is Chabon's requisite gay character in his novel, has this to say about it, albeit long after the government was around to hear it:

[I]t was obvious that Batman was not intended, consciously or unconsciously, to play Robin's corrupter: he was meant to stand in for his father, and by extension for the absent, indifferent, vanishing fathers of the comic-book-reading boys of America. Sammy wished that he'd had the presence of mind to tell the subcommittee that adding a sidekick to a costumed-hero strip was guaranteed to increase its circulation by 22 percent. (631)

In a culture that's completely consumed Freud with perhaps only minor indigestion, it still seems shocking to do this, to equate homosexual love between men with the love between a boy and his father. Or to read the one as a replacement for the other. Isn't this what straight men do when they hoist up their eyebrows and whistle and say, "Whoa, Mama!" at some passing gal?

Straight men still do this, right? Television isn't lying to me, is it?
---
* Fortunately I'm not running for office, and I can call people who enlist "schmucks" with only mild fallout.