Until now, it has been difficult to notice a pattern to Michael Chabon's work, mainly because he has published comparatively little. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was published in 1987, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is only his third, after Wonder Boys (1995) and two collections of short stories (A Model World and Other Stories, 1991, and Werewolves in Their Youth, published last year). But some landmarks are beginning to be discernible. First, the critics’ early, convenient comparisons with his contemporaries Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis have been shown, with each book, to be ever wider of the mark. Chabon seems much more interested in innocence than experience—his characters tend to be ingénus trying to pass themselves off as old hands (“Like all of his friends, [Sam Clay] considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass”). Though he shares with McInerney a smooth, stylish eloquence, Chabon seems less concerned with experimenting with form or structure. In Kavalier & Clay, the extent of his technical innovation consists of infrequent intrusions of an authorial voice into a tale simply narrated, for the most part, from the point of view of its two main characters. When this commentary appears, it has the professorial tone of a chronicler or antiquarian expounding a true history, complete with the occasional, only mildly ludic, footnote.

The subject matter which Chabon addresses in such a scholarly manner can be taken as another identifying feature of his work. Josef Kavalier and Sam Clay are comic-book-writing cousins in what Chabon calls the “Golden Age,” before the domination of television in the 1940s and 50s, a time when the costumed super-hero was part of every American boy's pantheon. Chabon's devotion to the classic comic book is evidence of a general interest in the trashier, pulpy end of American letters. In Wonder Boys, this manifested itself in the protagonist, Grady Tripp's interest in a pulp horror writer, August Van Zorn; there was also a Gothic-horror pastiche, ostensibly by Van Zorn, in his most recent collection of stories. The preoccupation is taken even further on Chabon's website, where he claims to have “piggybacked” an academic's site devoted to Van Zorn—who one had hitherto assumed (and surely still should) to be a creature of Chabon's imagination—on to his own. Of course, Chabon's own prose, with its carefully chosen similes and extended, elegant disquisitions, couldn't be further from the pulp and fantasy fiction he so admires. But a tension emerges in this novel between the seriousness of literary fiction—Sam Clay, like Grady Tripp, has an unfinished great American novel on the go—and the satisfaction of pure, abundant creation. Clay writes pulp novels on the side, and there is a hint of professional jealousy of the speed with which his character can produce to order in Chabon's description of it:

“First of all,” Deasey said, “Mr Clay, where is Strange Frigate?”

“Halfway done,” Sammy said. This was a fourth Goblin novel that Racy Publications … had commissioned from Sam Clay. Like all seventy-two of its predecessors in the series, it would be published, of course, under the house name of Harvey Slayton. Actually, as far as Joe knew, Sammy had not even started it yet. The title was one of two hundred and forty-five that George Deasey had dreamed up during a two-day bender in Key West in 1936 and had been working his way through ever since. Strange Frigate was number seventy-three on the list.

“I'll have it for you by Monday.”

“You must.”

“I shall.”

And he does. To a writer with a more sedate rate of production, such facility might seem enviable.

But Chabon's own creations are worth waiting for, and the ambitious, confident sweep of Kavalier & Clay is no exception. Chabon's novel moves, like a comic book—but one inked in by an accomplished miniaturist—in a series of tableaux: Jewish Prague after the Nazi invasion, a cross-section of the layers of Brooklyn and Manhattan society, a war-time interlude in the Antarctic, post-war American suburbia and the period of witch-hunting senatorial investigations into the nation's morals and political rectitude. Chabon thinks nothing of taking on the most emblematic aspects of his subjects. In Prague, Josef Kavalier, an amateur magician, helps his illusionist teacher to execute a plan to find and smuggle out the Prague golem (created, according to legend, by the sixteenth-century Rabbi Loew to protect the Jews of the city), which has been holed up in an apartment block out of harm's way. There is a bitter irony in Josef and his master's initial search for the golem. Their careful itemization of the Jewish population, dutifully agreed to, horribly foreshadows the fate of Josef's family and their fellow Jews in the years ahead.

When Josef escapes to New York, Chabon plunges him once more into the middle of history. Sam's and Joe's comic-book publishers move to the Empire State Building, placing the immigrant Josef at the heart of the American dream. When the young men go to an arty shindig up-town, all the guests have had to move to another room in order to hear themselves speak; Salvador Dali is in the ballroom wearing a deep-sea diver's suit connected to noisily wheezing breathing apparatus.

Chabon is even willing to mock the tendency of his characters to be in the right place at the right time. When Josef, angered by the grim news from Prague, starts picking fights at random with New York Germans, he is given a beating by someone who bears an uncanny similarity to the former heavyweight boxing world champion Max Schmeling: “With pugilistic quickness, he crowded Joe against a pillar, crooked an arm around Joe's neck, and gave him a swift punch in the stomach.” In an authorial aside at the end of the chapter, however, we learn that “there is good reason to believe that Schmeling was not in New York at all, but in Poland, having been drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front as punishment for his defeat by Joe Louis in 1938.”

At the centre of the novel is Joe's and Sam's own comic-book hero, the Escapist, a super-hero Houdini, who wriggles out of every tight spot his enemies put him in, and is employed by his creators to take on the Nazis single-handed. For Josef, the Escapist's Nazi-bashing is, of course, a displacement activity, and when America enters the war, he joins up. His posting to Antarctica (“this waste for which the adjective ‘godforsaken’ appeared to have been coined”) means that his direct influence on the course of the war is, if anything, even smaller after he has taken an active part in it. But the war is only part of the cousins’ world, an altered reality where the comic strip had been a fantasy. When the war is over, the central concern of the novel, indicated by the very name of the Escapist, is returned to. The Escapist is more accurately, of course, an escapologist, and the shorter term is not just convenient abbreviation. Sam and Joe's character is a means to escape their own realities. As Joe discovers, “The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they … might never have existed in the first place.”

When reality is so painful, Chabon seems to suggest, escapism is not self-deluding; it is self-preserving. At various moments, his characters defend the beneficial effects of entertainment. Chabon is prepared to make a case for the comic book as more than trash, describing the influence of Citizen Kane on the strips as resulting in a “sudden small efflorescence of art, minor but genuine, in the tawdry product line.” But Sam, for all his frustrated literary ambition, sees that there can be no more “noble or necessary service in life” than “satisfying the desire to escape.” An exclusive diet of escapism can infantilize its consumers, but it seems uncivil to blame Chabon for that. At any rate, his own novel is so accomplished, handling with humour and a light touch a multiplicity of emotion and experience, that it becomes in itself a perfect illustration of his theme. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is proof of the abiding power of complex, serious, engaged, but above all entertaining story-telling.