The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Two Jewish cousins in 1940s New York create a comic book superhero, the Escapist, and the novel traces the relationship between escapism, art, and survival. Chabon published it in 2000 and won the Pulitzer. It treats comic books with the same seriousness that literary fiction usually reserves for itself. The Houdini-inspired escape sequences are some of the best set pieces in recent American fiction.
Chabon never met a sentence he couldn't extend or a research file he could leave out: six hundred pages, with an Antarctic interlude that strands the plot on an ice shelf for fifty of them. Rosa gets written as a prize the cousins pass between them. The boyish energy of the first half slowly leaks into a long, dutiful postwar denouement.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
