In Moonglow, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) takes a beguiling journey along the ever-shifting boundary between truth and fiction in the family stories passed down--or concealed--from one generation to the next.
So many incidents are stuffed into Chabon's novel that it defies easy plot summary. In brief, it's the episodic account of the narrator conversing for 10 days with his dying maternal grandfather, the latter sharing "ninety percent of everything he told me about his life." To describe that life--which included tracking down the document cache of Nazi (and postwar United States) rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and a two-year jail term for assaulting his boss, who fired him to hire accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss in 1957--as colorful is an understatement. Whether he was hunting pythons in a Florida swamp or building model space vehicles for NASA, this irascible but never dull man and his stories reveal a picaresque life lived on his own terms.
But the novel isn't merely the tale of the unnamed grandfather's wartime exploits and some dubious postwar life choices. It's also the sensitive account of the narrator's maternal grandmother's escape from occupied France as a pregnant teenager, and her lifelong battle with mental illness likely induced by that trauma. Moonglow ultimately succeeds in blending these two narratives because Chabon is so adept at pure storytelling. As much as any writer working today, he marries a facility with language to a gift for immersing the reader in worlds such as the Nazis' slave labor camp at the site where they produced the V-2 rocket or New York's Wallkill Correctional Facility.
With an author's note that refers to the book as a "memoir" and confesses that he has "stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it"--as well as the point that a good bit of the narrator's biography as it's revealed in the novel resembles Chabon's own--Moonglow may leave critics and readers guessing about its provenance. But literary parlor games aside, it's a reminder of the tragic fact that too many engrossing family stories either are not shared with younger generations or, if they are, they're unappreciated by their listeners. Chabon gently reminds readers that we should seek out or pass on those stories before it's too late. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Michael Chabon's eighth novel is the picaresque story of an ordinary man's extraordinary life.