Discusses golems and the analogy he has come to see between them and
novels, as well as how contemporary audiences tend to view all writing as
autobiographical.
Criticism
Lee Behlman, “The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic
Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction,” Shofar, 22 (Spring
2004): 56–72.
Investigates how The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay both dramatizes
the use of fantasy and escapism in art as a response to the Holocaust and presents
a running debate on the value and relevance of such popular culture escapism.
Behlman also discusses Nathan Englander’s For the Release of Unbearable Urges
(1999) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002).
Hillary Chute, “Ragtime, Kavalier and Clay, and the Framing of Comics,” Modern
Fiction Studies, 54 (Summer 2008): 268–301.
Argues that graphic narratives and contemporary fiction share a valuing of the
popular, an obsession with history, and even some stylistic and narrative practices,
and that E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime and Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures
of Kavalier and Clay participate in this through dramatizations of how the popu-
lar—that is, comic books in Kavalier and Clay—articulates traumatic histories.
The article is stronger on theory than on close reading.
Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book
(New York: Basic Books, 2004).
History of the early comic-book industry focusing particularly on the many Jew-
ish figures involved as writers, artists, and financiers, with emphasis on the story
of Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of Superman who sold the rights
to the character for $130 and spent decades writing the stories but not profiting
from the millions the character generated.
D. G. Myers, “Michael Chabon’s Imaginary Jews,” Sewanee Review, 116 (Fall
2008): 572–588.
Largely biographical article that is quite critical of Chabon’s use of Jewish ele-
ments and themes in his works, despite seeing him as “immensely talented”;
argues that there is a “fundamental incoherence” at the heart of Kavalier and
Clay’s message about Jews and the golem.
Daniel Punday, “Kavalier & Clay, the Comic-Book Novel, and Authorship in a
Corporate World,” Critique, 49 (Spring 2008): 291–302.
Looks at a number of contemporary novels that feature the comic-book industry
or comic-book characters and argues that Kavalier and Clay offers a new way of
imagining the individual against the economic landscape, one that harkens back
to something more possible before the twentieth century than during it.
Marc Singer, “Embodiment of the Real: The Counterlinguistic Turn in the
Comic-Book Novel,” Critique, 49 (Spring 2008): 273–289.