From that pile on the night-table...

I finished Michael Chabon's "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" last night and I honestly can't recommend this book highly enough. It's great. Just great. While not quite the "spanning-the-decades-epic" the book jacket blurb makes it out to be (but what book ever does match its jacket copy?), the novel neatly captures the build-up to and consequences of America's involvement in WWII and the characters are terrific. Plus, it glories in the history of the comic book without ever wallowing in arcane references and in-jokes. If you know and love the work of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and other giants, you'll be tickled by their appearances but, if you don't know who they are, it won't affect your enjoyment of the novel one bit. That's a hard trick to pull off, I think, and the book was a pure joy to read, especially its earliest sections with its "two Jewish boys taking on New York City" earnestness. In short, this over-600-page novel reads like a comic book with a built-in argument for why that's such a good thing:

"It was the expression of yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something -- one poor, dumb, powerful thing -- exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation ... The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigations into comic books had always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life."

What really struck me about Chabon's book is its unabashed idealism -- obviously a planned or accidental side-effect of its comic book roots. In his twentieth-century, good triumphs over evil and innocence is triumphant. I found it all especially ironic since I'd also begun Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (the paperback being more portable than Chabon's tome for that dreary bus trip to Hamilton for dinner with the family).

While I'm enjoying Eggers' book immensely, it does go a bit overboard with what feels like a very popular literary device these days: the Writer as Superman. It's the bastard offspring of Mark Leyner. Eggers' book is an autobiography of some sorrow but he loads it with self-aggrandizement in an aggressively ironic "look-at-me" stance that occasionally creates pathos but also, more often than not, more self-aggrandizement. It's that whole McSweeney's thing right now, I guess: Eggers and Neil Pollock (author of "The Neil Pollock Anthology of American Literature: The Collected Writings of Neil Pollock") have managed to spin gold out of one joke but there's always the uneasy feeling that all that gold is still one joke.

Hopefully, they can learn from Toronto-born but New York-bred David Rakoff who -- while guilty of the same "isn't it ironic that I claim to be so much more spectacular than I actually, tragically, am?" device (like in this Salon piece) -- has published a book of essays turning the whole thing around with a plain cover and the proper title of "Fraud." It's very very funny stuff (he's pals with David Sedaris and the influence is felt) but, unlike Pollock, his writing -- however arch -- still reads like it came from an authentic and sympathetic human being. I'm getting that with Eggers' too, thank heaven, but the Cleverness with a capital C is a bit wearying.

If irony-steeped writers like Eggers, Pollock, Rakoff and Sedaris are the new wave they tend to be hyped as, writers like Chabon may come to seem schmaltzy and sentimental. I hope that's not the case but I'll happily take the schmaltz if I have to. I like a little hope with my irony, thanks.