Games & Entertainment

Amazing Adventures
How does the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay end?

I know this is blasphemous asking how a book ends, but I read it a few years ago and can’t remeber how the dang thing ends. The last part I remeber is they are on trial, but I can’t remeber what happens after that.

OK, I ‘m going to give you the whole summary but really why not read it again?

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of Josef Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Besides having a shared interest in drawing, the two are also fans of the Jewish stage magician Harry Houdini, and share several connections to Houdini: Kavalier (like Steranko) has actually studied escapology, which aided him in his departure from Europe, and Klayman is the son of the Mighty Molecule, a strongman on the vaudeville circuit.

Klayman gets Kavalier a job as an illustrator for a novelty products company which, due to the recent success of Superman, is attempting to get into the comic-book business. Renaming himself Sam Clay, Klayman starts writing adventure stories, and the two recruit several other Brooklyn teenagers to produce Amazing Midget Radio Comics (named to promote one of the company’s novelty items). The magazine features their character the Escapist, an anti-fascist superhero who combines traits of (among others) Harry Houdini, Batman, the Phantom, and the Scarlet Pimpernel; the Escapist becomes tremendously popular, but, as often happens, the writers and artists get a minimal share of the publisher’s success. Kavalier and Clay are slow to realize that they are being exploited, as they have private concerns: Kavalier is trying to rescue his family from the Nazis, and has fallen in love with a bohemian girl with her own artistic aspirations, while Clay is exploring a secret homosexual life.

Kavalier, driven by hatred of the Nazis, leaves his pregnant would be-fiancée to enlist in the Navy. He returns from service only to find his cousin and former love a couple; the remainder of the novel follows the three characters’ attempts to reconstitute a family, and to find a new creative direction for comics.