The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Part IV - The Golden Age (January 2012)

[Logophile]

I just finished this part, and it's as if I hit a brick wall. All that youthful optimism, all that hope for the future, all that tender innocence - WHAM! It's making me sad to even think about opening the book again.

It occurred to me that my father would have been about the age of Sammy and Joe, so I'm getting a glimpse of the world he grew up in. Just another added poignancy...

[William]

I agree that the end of this section comes as quite a shock, even though we can sort of see it coming. The unraveling of their lives is so rapid (often like reality) that even the reader expecting it is taken aback.

[Adam]

I started to drift a bit in this section and cannot quite put my finger on what it was that didn't keep me as engaged as other sections. I think, perhaps, I found Chabon's descriptions of the developing personal relationships of Kavalier (w/ Rosa) and Clay (w/ Tracy Bacon) less interesting than the storylines in the preceding sections. When the relationship between Clay and Bacon first started developing, I sort of groaned because I am getting the impression that it has become fashionable for writers as of late to introduce a same-sex relationship into the story whether it adds anything or not. Some of what I have read recently have inserted same-sex relationship into the story, even it was tangential to the story and felt forced and distracting to the core of the story (i.e. Ten Thousand Saints). Chabon did a fine job in depicting the relationship between Clay and Bacon. It was written much better than I expected and added much needed depth to Clay's character whose story was being overshadowed by Joe's life. Still, it remained my least favorite of the sections read so far.

[William]

I more or less agree with you on all of that, Adam. I had the same fears, and those fears were proven more or less wrong as were yours. And I too had the same feeling of structural weakness in this section, but it's the pivot point of their lives, the central eye of the storm, in a way. I wonder if he contemplated breaking this section into two parts or experimented with alternate narrative styles and came back to what he ended up with in the final version. Thinking of it structurally, I'm not sure there's a better solution he could have used, he almost has to paint himself into the corner a little bit to get the beginning and ending parts of the book just right.