The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (& Cumberbatch)

Book Rec: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

For months I’ve been reading this book in fifteen-minute bursts during my breaks at work, and now I’m finished, yay! So a few months ago I was obsessively watching PBS’ Sherlock Q&A (with Benedict Cumberbatch, writer Steven Moffat, producer Sue Vertue, and Masterpiece executive producer Rebecca Eaton) when the question arose: what are your dream projects? Steven Moffat was cute and said Sherlock and Doctor Who, and Benedict Cumberbatch answered, “There’s a very good book called Kavalier & Clay.”

I had no idea what this was, so like a good fangirl I trooped off to my library and squirreled it away for months and read it. And let me just tell you, guys, in matters of literary taste, Benedict is impeccable; this book is phenomenal. I would love nothing more for his dream project to pan out for him (even though it’s currently in “development hell” and has been for years), because if he can do a decent Czech accent, Benedict was born to play the character of Joe Kavalier.


A bit of a summary first. Josef Kavalier is a young Jewish artist and apprentice magician/escape artist living in Nazi-occupied Prague with his father, mother, younger brother, and grandfather on the brink of World War II. Of the entire family, he is the only one who manages to secure a visa to leave for New York, where he will live with his aunt and his cousin, Sammy Klayman. Except it turns out that even with a visa, it requires a near-superhuman effort to actually escape.

Sam Clay, as his cousin will later be called, has a wonderful talent for writing and especially for thinking up character backstories. Oh, and he’s also a gay Jewish man living in the 1940s, with all the challenges that that entails. Upon Joe’s eventual arrival, he and Sam form a perfect team of artist/writer for comic books, the profits of which venture Joe hopes will allow him to purchase freedom for his family. But things go terribly wrong.

The novel covers a ton of ground. Chabon describes the horrifying restrictions placed on Jews in Prague, the woes of immigration (“There was no pursuit more disheartening than the immigration goose chase” (177)), the world of comic books, the tricks escape artists employ, magicians, being Jewish and gay in New York in the 1940s, life in Antarctica, and life during World War II. The book is eminently readable, and I swear to God that Chabon is using the same writing/storytelling style as Dorothy Dunnett in her Lymond Chronicles (one of my favorite series ever), right down to the damn sentence structure.

Allow me to demonstrate why I think Benedict would make such a good Joe Kavalier. There’s the physical similarities between the two of them, of course (Joe is tall and thin and smokes artistically), but there’s also the fact that this novel puts Joe through the wringer, and I think if there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that Benedict is in his element when playing characters who suffer beautifully.

Here’s the first time Sammy sees his cousin (page 4):

In the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question mark against the door frame, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his face.

The question mark posture, the slenderness. Oh, and it gets better because Joe starts acting Sherlockian (page 6):

Josef Kavalier settled back against the mattress, cleared his throat once, tucked his arms under his head, and then, as if he had been unplugged, stopped moving. He neither tossed nor fidgeted nor even so much as flexed a toe. The Big Ben on the nightstand ticked loudly. Josef’s breathing thickened and slowed.

And contrast the languid abandonment of that post-case crash with this (page 11):

Without warning, in a kind of kinetic discharge of activity that seemed to be both the counterpart and the product of the state of perfect indolence that had immediately preceded it, Josef rolled over and out of the bed.

And that’s just the first 11 pages! Later we find (page 215):

Joe Kavalier’s mouth bunched up at one corner in a small, eloquent smirk…

And then the glory of this final quote, wherein the author describes the painting of Joe that his girlfriend, Rosa Sparks, completes. Rosa is a fascinating character, but I felt that she was more interesting, almost Sherlockian herself with the organized chaos in her room, before she and Joe became a couple. However, their chemistry is off the charts, as I hope you will see:

In the piece, his doffed jacket, with a curled newspaper in its hip pocket, hangs from the back of the chair, and he leans against the arm, his head with its long wolfhound face cocked a little to one side, the fingers of his right hand lightly pressed to his right temple. His legs are crossed at the knee, and he ignores a cigarette in the fingers of his left hand. Rosa’s brush caught the rime of ash on his lapel, the missed button of his waistcoat, the tender, impatient, defiant expression in his eyes by means of which he is clearly trying to convey to the artist, telepathically, that he intends, in an hour or so, to fuck her.

It’s just too perfect. Tell me you’ve never seen Benedict give such a smoldering look. And I haven’t even played my trump card yet—because Joe Kavalier pulls a Reichenbach.

The novel, in my opinion, would make a wonderful mini-series instead of just one movie. The only possible issues I see arising are the Czech accent and the fact that Benedict’s 36 now, and the character in a large chunk of the book is much younger. But I feel confident that he can pull it off anyway. (As Third Star producer/writer Vaughn Sivell said, “If the character description says handsome: he is. If it says Nasty: he is. Older: he is…Younger: he is.” I agree.)

I’m dying to see an adaptation of this, and I’d love nothing more if Benedict were the main character.