The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000

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Part 4, Chapters 7-10 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “The Golden Age”

Part 4, Chapter 7 Summary

Chabon writes that “[o]ne of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom” (340). The United States is isolated with regards to the wars happening in Europe and Asia, and for the average New Yorker, the feeling is not “one of siege, panic, or grim resignation to fate but rather the toe-wiggling, tea-sipping contentment of a woman curled on a sofa, reading in front of a fire with cold rain rattling against the windows” (340).

It is one o’clock in the morning and Sam is on duty as a spotter on the top of the Empire State Building. Sam carries a typed list of the seven aircraft that have been granted clearance to fly over the New York metropolitan airspace by Army Interceptor Command. By 11:30 that night, Sam has already spotted six of the planes, and the last isn’t expected until about 5:30 in the morning. Sam is considering whether he should sleep for a few hours in the spotters’ quarters before going to work at Empire Comics.

Sam hears a rumble coming from the elevator. He begins to imagine that it might be an enemy agent and that he is going to wind up like one of the hapless guards in a comic book, whacked with a blackjack by the bad guys. Sam knows there is a firearm in the bottom drawer of the desk at the guard station, but he doesn’t know how to remove the safety, so it’s useless. Fortunately for Sam, it is not an enemy agent coming up in the elevator; rather, it’s Tracy Bacon.

Tracy acts very casual, asking, “Is this Men’s Sportswear?” (343), as he steps out of the elevator carrying shopping bags. Sam is happy to see him, but he is also anxious about breaking the rules. No one is allowed on the observation deck without written permission from Command. Sam doesn’t want him to go and ignores the rules. Tracy has a look around the deck. Tracy is haphazard in his actions, picking up the red telephone at the guard desk and pretending to make a phone call. Sam rushes over to hang up the phone before someone on the other end can answer. Sam then asks Tracy what he’s brought along in the bags—Tracy has brought dinner.

At one point, Tracy stands up from the table because of thunder in the distance. Sam leads Tracy by the arm to the windows and the two of them stand shoulder-to-shoulder, staring out at the city and storm. Tracy kisses Sam. Before Sam’s “considerable store of Judeo-Christian prohibitions and attitudes could begin sending its harsh and condemnatory messages to the various relevant parts of his body, it was too late. He was already kissing Tracy Bacon back” (352).

Part 4, Chapter 8 Summary

A group of magicians with literary careers meet twice a month at Louis Tannen’s magic shop. Joe likes to attend these meetings, and through a fellow magician, Walter B. Gibson, he meets Orson Welles. Welles is a semi-regular attendee and is also a friend of Tracy Bacon’s. Joe and Bacon get four tickets to the premiere of Welles’s first film.

Joe, Rosa, Sam, and Tracy are all on their way to the movie theater. Joe is a little down after learning from Hoffman that the ship Thomas is supposed to be on is delayed. There is some discussion about how there might be a movie version of the Escapist with Tracy playing Tom Mayflower and the Escapist. Sam and Joe are skeptical and express their frustration that even if a film is made, they won’t receive a penny for it.

Part 4, Chapter 9 Summary

Orson Welles tells Sam that he enjoys reading the Escapist. At the party after the film, Joe dances with Dolores Del Rio, and Rosa dances with Joseph Cotton and Edward Everett Horton. Joe and Welles would see each other from time to time afterward, in the bar of the Edison Hotel. Though the party after the film is splendid, what really makes an impression on Joe and Sam, and will have future repercussions, is Welles’s film.

George Deasey himself will wind up having a role in turning the Escapist into a parody of the superhero genre. After the war years, the Escapist character becomes flamboyant. However, during the war, the Escapist is a very serious character: “The early stories, for all their anti-fascist fisticuffs and screaming Stukas, are stories of orphans threatened, peasants abused, poor factory workers turned into slavering zombies by their arms-producer bosses” (360). In spite of this varied history of the Escapist, however, the true success of the comic is due to the creativity of Joe and Sam. This creativity is directly influenced by Citizen Kane.

After the film is over, Joe and Sam are both awestruck by the film’s brilliance. Joe is especially impressed with the camera angles and what he feels is the perfect blend of narration and image: “It was more, much more, than any movie really needed to be. In this one crucial regard—its inextricable braiding of image and narrative—Citizen Kane was like a comic book” (362).

Joe wants to begin implementing techniques from the film into their comics. Sam is reluctant, arguing that they are only producing comic books, implying their inferiority to other art forms. Rosa tells him, “[N]o medium is inherently better than any other […] It’s all in what you do with it” (363). Tracy points out that Sam doesn’t believe comics are inferior; rather, Sam feels that he himself isn’t good enough to produce anything artistic. This seems to convince Sam to at least try.

Joe and Sam meet with Anapol to discuss their new ideas. Anapol eventually gives in. Sam and Joe renegotiate details of their payment; Anapol agrees, but as a condition for his accepting the new terms, he asks them again to lay off of the Nazis because the film producer has “very healthy business” in Germany (366). Sam says no, but surprisingly Joe agrees to Anapol’s demand. Joe tells Sam that all the fighting is wearing him out:

I’m tired of fighting, maybe, for a little while. I fight, and I am fighting some more, and it just makes me have less hope, not more. I need to do something…something that will be great, you know, instead of trying always to be Good (367).

Joe, Sam, and Anapol agree to the new conditions. Before leaving, though, Sam wants to know about whether they can use the Japanese as enemies.

Part 4, Chapter 10 Summary

Following the ban on Nazis and Japanese, the storyline emphasis is laid:

[…] [N]ot only on the superpowered characters […] but also, almost radically for the comic book of the time, on the ordinary people around them, whose own exploits, by the time hostilities with Germany were formally engaged in the early months of 1942, had advanced so far into the foreground of each story that such emphasis itself, on the everyday heroics of the “powerless,” may be seen to constitute, at least in hindsight, a kind of secret, and hence probably ineffectual, propaganda (368).

Joe’s and Sam’s comics become more artistic and the stories more in-depth because of the potent spell Citizen Kane has had on Joe. This blend of artistry and narration requires the full collaboration of Sam and Joe.

The new type of comic book meets with success; although it is difficult to ascertain whether this success is simply a reflection of the general explosion in comic book sales at the time, the success is nevertheless undeniable:

It required shovels and snowplows and crews of men working around the clock to keep ahead of the staggering avalanche of money. Some of this snowfall ended up, in due course, in the bank account of Josef Kavalier, where it towered in fantastic drifts and was left that way, aloof and glinting, to cool the fever of exile from the day his family should arrive (370).

Part 4, Chapters 7-10 Analysis

Toward the end of Chapter 7, the question regarding Sam and Tracy’s relationship is finally answered in the form of a romantic kiss. However, the kiss does not open all doors and result in them leaving all inhibitions aside. Shortly after the kiss, Tracy apologizes. Sam tells him it’s alright, and they are left touching hands and feeling the “electricity” of the storm outside along the railings—a metaphor for the sexual tension and attraction that exist between the two men. Their tentative romance illustrates the conflict between Society and the Individual Conscience—in a society without anti-gay bias, the mutual attraction between these two characters would not be complicated. In the world they live in, however, they must navigate the feelings of guilt and fear that arise alongside their attraction.

In watching and appreciating Orson Welles’s famous film, Citizen Kane, Joe develops his own understanding of the comic book form. The narrator points out how closely related film and comic books are; a good film and a good comic book have apt imagery and narration in common. Both are seen primarily as commercial art forms—especially in this era—and like Orson Welles, Joe struggles to forge a path that will allow him to make truly expressive art without sacrificing commercial appeal.

Joe’s change in opinion regarding the Nazis is also notable—he is growing tired of the emotional effort it takes to battle his anger and his sense of uselessness with regards to saving his brother and mother, though he now has hope that he has procured his brother’s freedom. Because of the earlier developments regarding Carl Ebling and his imagined Saboteur persona, Joe is learning that the fight against the Nazis is more complicated in reality than it is in his comic books. The Healing Power of Art, in offering catharsis, may also do harm by offering a moral clarity unavailable in life. Joe is beginning to both question and realize his own reality, separating himself more from the world of his art and life with Sam and Rosa.