Moonglow

In this fictionalized memoir, Michael Chabon revisits the beginning of his writing career and the end of his grandfather’s life. The dying man recounts his childhood in Philadelphia, his lifelong interest in rocketry and space exploration, his World War II service spent trying and failing to capture Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun (who becomes something of an arch nemesis), his troubled marriage to an unstable French refugee with a young daughter, his stint in prison, and his late-life romance with a widowed painter.

There was a time when Michael Chabon’s books were as purposefully plotted and paced as they were stylistically evocative, but 2012’s meandering, self-indulgent (though still colorful) Telegraph Avenue put an end to that equilibrium. Moonglow, with its overlapping plotlines and nonlinear treatment of time, does not restore it, but it does strike other balances: between intimate family history and world-altering events, between touchingly poignant sincerity and crassly irreverent humor, and between tragedy and triumph.

As with previous works, Chabon excels at bringing people and places to life. Though neither grandparent is named, both emerge as complex, fully realized characters. The grandfather’s capacity for violence is weighed against his commitment to family and obsession with rocketry while the grandmother’s theatrical gifts mask a tortured past. There is also a rakish, eye-patch wearing pool-hustling ex-rabbi uncle for good measure. Though the narrative moves around a lot – back and forth between Philadelphia, Europe, New Jersey, and Florida – each setting is clearly and convincingly rendered (As a native of northern New Jersey, I got a kick out of reading about the grandmother’s performances at the Paper Mill Playhouse).

For all of these virtues, Moonglow’s narrative structure is nothing short of maddening. The three main plotlines – the grandparents’ love story, the grandfather’s war experiences, and the grandfather’s retirement years – are constantly jockeying for the reader’s attention, and more often than not, they interrupt rather than complement one another. Going from a soldier’s haunting recollection of the horrors of war to a lurid description of an old man’s sexual appetites to a child’s eye view of obscure card games creates a kind of mood whiplash that does the novel a disservice. While this digression-laden, fragmentary approach is not without purpose – it evokes the way that Chabon himself probably heard some of these tales – Moonglow definitely could have benefitted from a more conventional structure.

Moonglow is not quite a return to form, and it falls short of both Chabon’s earlier works as well as the gold standard of family sagas that is Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. However, it is still a bold and touching blend of fact and fiction, one worth cutting through the structural clutter to explore.

7.75/10