An ode to the golden age of comic book heroics

As an eloquent homage to the popular culture of mid-century America, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" represents the finest in a whole new breed of contemporary fiction.

It's full of pizzazz and testosterone and street smarts, with a moral center that tethers its intelligence. Like the writing of Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, the novel is big and blustery and self-assured, and its reach and dynamism speak well to the future of the form.

This is boy fiction in the purest sense: like a young colty quarterback running, on an autumn night, for the love of the game.

Since the publication of his first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," in 1988, Michael Chabon has been heralded for his imagination and narrative vigor, both of which are the divining rods that guide this story. In constructing a mammoth plot that focuses on the lives of two comic book artists, Chabon has written an ode to the comic book itself: to the golden age of pen-and-ink heroics, to the pulp fiction that translated and delivered so many of America's hopes and fears. It helps that the author knows a prodigious amount about this age, from the work of specific comic artists to the streets and smells of New York and Prague in the 1930s. But what brings the novel together is Chabon's intuitive grasp and reimagining of what mass culture really meant, or could mean: the manifestation and interpretation of an entire period of history, from Hitler's monstrosities to the everyday heroism of a world trying to hold him off.

The wonder boys who have earned the title credits of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" are first cousins, introduced when Josef Kavalier arrives at his aunt's home in Brooklyn late one night in the fall of 1939. His family's last, best hope for escape, Joe has managed to get out of Prague by way of bribery, escape artistry, and serendipity; now he is standing in Sammy Klayman's bedroom, clutching a stack of New York newspapers -- including "The Women's Daily Wearing," as he tells his cousin -- with the hope he'll find some news of the Jews of Europe. Begrudgingly, Sammy makes room for his cousin in his bed; Joe sneaks him outside and shows him how to roll a cigarette. It is a meeting between two young men (Joe is 18, Sammy 17) that will shape, and in some ways save, the rest of their lives.

An exceptional student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Joe had earlier been trained in the stage arts of magic and illusion; his beloved mentor had seen in his young charge both the discipline and the self-destructive streak that were hallmarks of great escape artists. Having left that path behind, Joe finds that his skills -- to pick locks, to remain still and hidden for hours -- may get him out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. His old teacher has been recruited to smuggle out of Prague the famous Golem -- the earth-and-clay figure that, in Jewish lore, is bestowed with life once the word "truth" is written on its forehead. Through a series of sleights-of-hand, Joe survives his journey; now he's loose on the streets of New York, terrified about his family in Europe but at least anchored by the warmth of the Brooklyn Klaymans.

Endowed as it is with vast and mythic promise, the Golem will figure throughout this novel, as will Joe's tendencies toward flight, whether fantasy or escape. With his inarticulate heart and his charmingly worried English, he follows Sammy -- pen name, Sam Clay -- to his job at Empire Novelty, a whoopee-cushion house of delights where Sammy is a lowly clerk. Once Mr. Anapol, the mustache-twirling owner of the company, catches sight of Joe's artistic abilities, he knows he has a new Superman in his coffers -- and what Joe can draw, Sammy can plot. Thus begins the brilliantly imagined collaboration of Kavalier & Clay -- a round-the-clock world of cigarettes and inspiration, artistic genius and financial travesties, where villains and champions slug it out both on and off the page. There will be, of course, a damsel, though Rosa Luxemburg Saks is hardly in distress. She's the high-spirited, artistic daughter of a wealthy Greenwich Village eccentric; once Joe inevitably falls madly in love with her, they begin plotting a way to get his younger brother out of Prague.

Throughout this profoundly realized tale of adventurism and sacrifice are the creative fruits of Joe's and Sammy's labors -- moments from ordinary life turned into comic book characters (Miss Judy Dark, a.k.a. Moth Girl!), military gains and losses turned into illustrations of good and evil. Salvador Dali shows up at a cocktail party, trapped in a diving suit; their exposure to "Citizen Kane" helps Joe and Sammy reenvision the linear constraints of time and space in comic book frame. So even modernism and surrealism have walk-on parts in this cornucopia of special effects; and even Chabon's most outlandish subplots, which can be long-winded to the point of bombast, manage to be as entertaining as they are desultory.

Because really "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" wants to be a novel about everything, and almost is: history and censorship and art and love and the promises of God, whether or not he exists, and chance and the smell of perfume or a riverbed from childhood. A boy's lost hopes; a mother's lost letter to her son. A graphic artist who wins the Navy Cross for Distinguished Service (Joe) and a writer whose love for his imaginary boy heroes finally tells him who he is (Sammy). "Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity," writes Chabon -- a typically wise-but-enigmatic sentence, tucked within the epic pop and creative calisthenics of this bountiful story.

Streaming blithely as it does between its earthbound plot and its infinite flights of fancy, "The Amazing Adventures" is unstoppably garrulous; Chabon loves the English language with as much stubborn good cheer as Joe uses trying to master it, and you can't help applauding them both. It is not a book for those who like their literature laconic and neat. But throughout the rousing, sometimes beautiful expedition that Chabon has charted here, there's the sense, both exhilarating and consoling, that he's given us a novel that actually matters. And that all those collective years spent in the company of Green Lantern and Spider-Man really mattered, too. Holy Toledo!