Your Humble Blogger mentioned our bedtime books some time ago. My Best Reader and myself read aloud a book at bedtime, chapter or so a night, most nights. We have been doing this, on and off, for more than ten years, and I heartily recommend it to any family group for whom it is at all appropriate. Anyway, due to the nature of that kind of reading, I often forget to add the finished book to the stack of Books to Report on, and so I forget to Report on them for a while.
We finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a few weeks ago, after (as you can imagine) quite some time reading. We enjoyed it a lot, although it was too long, and when you live with a book for six months, a failure to live up to a brilliant first third can be quite disappointing. In particular, I felt that the wonderful stretch of Kavalier in Prague was the highlight of the book, and nothing came close to reaching it. That feels like a criticism, when I say it, but really that bit is very good, and the best bit has to come somewhere. It’s just that when you read a book aloud over so much time, it’s best if the best bit is near the end.
Well, and the other thing that Michael Chabon did really well was to create a trio of lovable-but-flawed characters. I wasn’t sick of them by the end. No, I probably wouldn’t actually get along well with any of them in real life, but it was nice living with them in the book. Sammy, Joe and Rosa were great, and as they changed (as they did, over the course of the book) they didn’t diminish or seem stale. If I liked them all when they were younger, well, who wouldn’t? As they age, they build up layers of ambivalence, of compromise and exhaustion, they make bad decisions and live with them, they become more than they were, and less, and they have a lot less fun. They’re like people, that way. They are still capable of bad decisions, they are still people, invested in their lives, and if I like them better when they are young, I was still fond of them in middle age.
I would have liked, though, to read a chapter of Sammy’s later work (and Rosa’s, too) the way we read his early stuff. That was marvelous, and maybe I would have liked the older characters more if their creativity was as vivid as the earlier characters’. Of course, that’s presumably why that chapter wasn’t included, but still.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.