Just put down: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I finished reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay last night, and like another review I read said, it's hard to thing of reading anything else for a bit. I need some time to decompress. The book is about so many different things, with so many themes running through it.

One of the ones I found most affecting was how it dealt with war, and showing the aftereffects it has on every single person, however tangentially involved. The story starts around the beginning of World War II in Europe, and ends sometime after the Korean War. Each character in turn wades into this minefield of years, and each is the worse for wear. It is truly heart wrenching, no matter how clearly it's prefigured, each blow that befalls Joe Kavalier in the twenty years we know him. In a time before PTSD had entered our lexicon, the evident transformation in Joe from a shy though eager 18-year-old to an almost agoroaphobic man plagued by events he could never have controlled. It's hard to discuss the extent of this because it gives away far too much of the plot, but it's safe to say that the place he finds himself post-war is, though a product of his own control, so far removed from his actual desires that only someone so far outside of themselves could have maneuvered into it.

Sam Clay's own journey mirrors that of Joe's, but his war is cultural. Though the comic book world that Sam and Joe were wrapped up in was already on the fringe of society, there were some ways of life in the 1940's that were just too far out there. And because of that, Sam chose to live fully in the shadows for every bit of his adult life. When he's finally forced out, though you feel relief for him, you can't help also feeling the immense burden of what's been lost, of the time utterly wasted and the heart possibly so walled off that it won't ever really be useful again. What minimal hope the book ends with is tainted completely by what's already transpired, for for Sam and for Joe, and Rosa as well, the reader knows that maybe the scars are too deep.