I'm reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay right now and have been for a while—lay off, it's 636 pages. I promised myself that after reading Ulysses over the winter I would tackle something light, something that I could breeze through and take the feeling of satisfaction quickly and move on to something else. But then a friend gave me AAK&C and it had a picture of New York on the cover, and I was coming to New York, so I jumped in and got hooked.
I quickly noticed that this Chabon guy liked to toss around his weight in words the way the guys in Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market toss Copper River Salmon. Early and often. It’s less his vocabulary—which is huge—and more his elongated sentences, his immense detail, that at times distract from the story. Like I said, I was hooked from the beginning, and a lesser writer wouldn’t be able to hold a reader’s attention for as long as Chabon does trying to pull the same tricks. A reader would label it instantly as too flashy coming from the pen of someone less talented. Still, as good as he seems to be, some of the sentences in this book become exercises in deliberation. Especially in the YouTube society in which we find ourselves living; you have to work to stay with these sentences. Which is probably a good thing. We should all settle down from time to time and focus a bit more. However, as I come to the end of page 212 and reach the following two sentences, I can’t help but feel as though I’ve been at this book an awfully long time to only be on page 212, and maybe, just maybe, Mr. Chabon could, at time, get to his point a bit quicker:
"There was a long hemicircular reception desk opposite the entry, faced with black marble and ribbed with Saturn’s rings of glass, behind which three black-coated firemen, their faces concealed by heavy welder’s masks, crouched, poking around carefully with broom handles. On the wall over the reception desk, there was a painting of a lithe masked giant in a dark blue union suit, his arms outspread in ecstatic embrace as he burst from a writhing nest of thick iron chains that entangled his loins, belly, and chest."
It may not seem like much reading it here, standing alone. But when it comes on the heels of other paired expository sentences, the result can be a bit draining. A few pages prior:
"At the time, he had taken note only of the charming scene: the two boys lying shirtless and barefoot, in a swinging hammock stretched between a pair of unblighted elms, in a dappled bend dexter of sunlight, their downy legs tangled together, the restless attention of each wholly absorbed in a crudely stapled smear of violent color labeled Superman. Love had followed the subsequent conquest by the strapping, tights-wearing hero of the newspapers, of cereal boxes, and lately of the Mutual Broadcasting System, and was not unknown to cast an eye toward Superman’s funny-page adventures."
Does Picador (the publisher) have editors on staff? The two boys were lying in a hammock reading Superman and now their uncle, Love, reads the comic himself. Obviously we wouldn’t want to read that. I am not calling for a death to Mr. Chabon’s creative use of language. But maybe an imprisonment here and there of some of the words he knows. Just chain ‘em up for a short time and work with the ones remaining. These boys most likely never return to the story. Possibly we could have brushed over them in a few words. The fact that they were reading Superman is the important point here, but we have gathered from many other places throughout the book that all teen and pre-teen boys were reading Superman at the time. This is just another example to make us understand the culture of comics at the time. And all I’m saying is maybe we don’t need another example. And if we get one, maybe we don’t need to know every detail about the example.
Again, it probably doesn’t seem like much with only two excerpts, and I am most likely coming across as a lazy reader, which may be true (I don't know if you noticed above where I mentioned finishing Ulysses). But stack thousands of these sentences on top of each other and the result is a heavy book. A book that could possibly have lost some physical weight somewhere along the way and not have lost any of its cerebral weight along with it. And, if nothing else, at least I’d be more than a third of the way through it.