The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

The question of something being one’s business or not held a central position in the ethics of Ethel Klayman, whose major tenet was the supreme importance of minding one’s own.

prognathous,

exegesis,

concours à deux.

reify

recherché

roentgen

withal

parturition.

Much as Sammy did love his mother, and craved her approval, five minutes of conversation with her was all it took to induce a matricidal rage in his breast.

hassock.”

beau geste—

bravura

Fifth Columnist,

offing.

aetataureate

kliegs,

Muezzin,

The word flew into Sammy’s mind and careened blindly around it like a moth while Sammy chased after it with a broom in one hand and a handbook of lepidoptery in the other.

dernier cri

tergiversations,

donnybrooks

cuspidor.

alarums

philippic;

excoriating,

elf-knot

tractable,

voluble

amour propre

abstruse

penury

He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man.

abject.

lucubrations

purblind

Now we have hordes of Baptist lunatics down in Alabama, or some goddamned place, making big piles of comic books and setting them on fire because they are an offense to Jesus or the U.S. flag. Setting them on fire! Can you believe it? What did we fight the war for, if when it’s over they’re going to be burning books in the streets of Alabama?

prolix

oppugned

hogan

Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together.