THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY
by Michael Chabon
(Random House) $26

Following the release of his novel Wonder Boys and the collection Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories, Michael Chabon was adopted as a critical darling by the American press. The Washington Post described Chabon as "Updike without the condescension, Cheever without the self-pity, a young American Nabokov who writes with a rueful joie de vivre."

A writer of such upright character tends, rather unfortunately, to plumb the predictable course of literature, and Chabon's newest novel will please those who weren't looking for him to stick his neck out. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay certainly proves Chabon's affinity for ingenious juxtapositions--the novel opens in 1939 New York, when the rise of Nazism and superhero-based comic books collide. Joe Kavalier, a young Czech Jew with a remarkable ability to draw and an interest in Houdini, meets his cousin Sam. Sam and Joe team up to create a comic-book series called The Escapist; for Joe, the work is a creative expression of his anxiety over his family's safety in the Old World; for Sam, it is a place to exert the boundless energy of repressed homosexuality. The story follows, in comic-book sensation--illustrated by Chabon's elegant prose--Joe's adventures in foiling a bomb plot and surviving the Arctic. Meanwhile, Sam is left to pick up the dreary pieces at home.

While Chabon's prose style carries all this action neatly, it also reflects the continued distance of his fiction. With narration like a tightly fitted mask, Chabon will never be able to access the passion necessary to create the Great Novel. Kavalier & Clay is scripted ephemera. TRACI VOGEL

Michael Chabon reads Wed Oct 11 at Elliott Bay Books, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 7:30 pm, free advance tickets.

 

PULP SURREALISM: INSOLENT POPULAR CULTURE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY PARIS
by Robin Walz
(University of California Press) $35

Surrealism, the early-20th-century movement in the arts, has sometimes been thought of as the only slightly better-behaved artsy offspring of the completely delinquent single parent Dada. Robin Walz's terrific book, however, shows that surrealism was as much a result of the superbly weird social context of contemporary France as it was from any previous movement in the arts. In fact, Walz says, "The surrealists did not so much create as discover the surreality of their epoch." Surrealist writing was influenced by popular fiction and sensational journalism at least as much as it was by any artistic manifesto. Walz demonstrates that lots of the much- touted surrealism of Louis Aragon's novel Le Paysan de Paris, a dirty little love song to Paris' scuzzy undergrounds, was in fact "real." Lots of the bizarre stuff Aragon wrote was not the product of his surreal fancy, but directly observed from urban nature.

My favorite part of Pulp Surrealism, though, is the section dealing with the insanely popular series of crime novels about the character Fantomas. Between 1911 and 1913, Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain wrote 32--count 'em--novels about this wild, slippery, completely amoral bad guy Fantomas, whose identity can change at the drop of a hat, who always talks in cliché, and who is regarded with complete and often erotically charged fascination by women, men, and others. The Fantomas novels, of whom not only the contemporary French surrealists were fans but also modern smarties like John Ashbery and Edward Gorey, are part pulp, part carnival, part cheap thrill, part bodice-ripper, part hoot--and everybody in Paris read them, not just other writers. They are about artifice, identity as construct, lack of consequence. Another cool thing about the writing pair Souvestre and Allain is that when one of them died, the other one married his widow.

The latter part of Walz's book looks at the way popular journalism treated sensational crimes, particularly the sexy mass-murderer Henri Desire Landru and the cult of suicide. Aragon, Breton, Desnos, and other "name" surrealists were, like some of our era's more interesting artists, big fans of popular culture. This book is not only a terrific study of some of the down and dirtier stuff the surrealists got into, but also a lively investigation in general of relationships between pop culture and Art with a capital A. REBECCA BROWN

 

BUNNYHOP ISSUE #10 (The Fake Issue)
edited by Noel Tolentino
(bunnyhop.com) $4.95

The first issue of Bunnyhop in nearly two years is a major event. Oodles of zine fans have proclaimed Noel Tolentino's hodgepodge of gonzo pop art, interviews, music, and investigative journalism the pinnacle of cool zinedom. To dive into these 128 pages is to immerse yourself in the so-hip-you-feel-like-a-geek scene.

One of the many highlights in this issue is the interview with computer-based illustrator J. Otto Seibold, who creates probably the most enticing children's-book art anywhere. Tolentino gabs freely with the easygoing artist about the digital medium, the bunnies/mushrooms connection, and how he really felt about Fox TV's version of Olive, The Other Reindeer. Seibold's art accompanies the article like a warped construction-paper version of Japanimation. The whole issue is splattered with visual delights, such as the cartoonage of Portland artist Bwana Spoons, the fanatical photos of Wendy Stenzel, and an awesome centerfold by Martin Ontiveros. KEVIN SAMPSELL