CHABON BASKS IN MOONGLOW
How novelist’s faux-memoir became an actual self-portrait
It seems like the obvious question for novelist Michael Chabon when discussing his new novel, Moonglow.
In retrospect, maybe it was a little too obvious. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s latest literary marvel has been described as a faux-memoir and, by Chabon’s publisher, his “latest feat of legerdemain.” It’s based on the tales a dying man tells his grandson, a novelist who happens to be named Michael Chabon.
What little we learn of our narrator’s backstory seems to coincide nicely with what is known about Chabon’s own history.
So, here goes: How much of Moonglow is true?
“That’s the whole point of the book in a way,” says Chabon, patiently, in an interview from his home in California. “That’s the question the narrator is asking of his grandfather. That is the question that the grandfather doesn’t want to ask about the grandmother. That is the question that the narrator eventually comes to ask about his grandmother as well and that is the question posed by the book and the question that, in a sense, the book attempts to answer. It took me a whole book to answer it, so I can’t really answer it in a single sentence.”
Fair enough. Still, he has been clear in the past that Moonglow is indeed a novel, a work of fiction or, as it’s described on the book sleeve, “a lie that tells the truth.” It may be posing as a memoir, but it also mixes in a touching love story, a coming-ofage tale, wartime adventure and an examination of the JewishAmerican experience in the 20th century.
Chabon says he came up with the idea of writing it in memoir form early in the process, thinking it would be the best vehicle to deliver much of what he looks for himself as a reader.
“It seemed to be that it was very appealing and it would enable me to create a sense of pleasurable doubt in the reader’s mind,” he says. “I love that feeling, when you’re reading a work of fiction and you just find yourself wondering how much of this is true. On some level you know that this is a work of fiction and likely it’s all, or primarily, invented. There’s almost a childlike desire to have it all be true. That combination of wanting to believe and knowing that you are being deceived, with your own consent of course, is something I find very pleasurable and something I thought I could get to in a direct and efficient way by having this narrative pose as a non-fictional narrative.”
Chabon stresses that he was not inventing the wheel here. This approach has been common in fiction writing since the onset of the novel; from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe to the early epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson to Charles Dickens and into the present day.
“It’s sort of a primordial novelist strategy,” says Chabon, who will give a talk as the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Visiting Writer at MacEwan Hall on Feb. 16.
But, unsurprisingly, this strategy takes on new life in Chabon’s hands. The novel examines both the comfort and destructive power of secrets and lies. But we never doubt the experiences of our protagonist, who is only ever referred to as “My grandfather.” He is a man who has largely kept the details of his remarkable life to himself, but even when his story finally comes spilling out thanks to tongue-loosening painkillers, his exploits never enter Baron Munchausen territory.
We follow him through his hardscrabble early days as a youthful troublemaker in Philadelphia, his wartime experiences tracking down Nazi scientists, early courtship of the narrator’s troubled grandmother, a prison stint and eventful retirement years in Florida. Throughout the novel, our hero is obsessed with the mid-century space race. He’s particularly interested in travelling to the moon and rocketry in general, which seems to reflect an inability to escape the lasting horrors of the war that haunt both him and his wife. Through it all, Chabon manages to mix in big themes of love, devotion, madness, sex, war, faith and notions of good and evil.
It’s a stunning feat and Chabon recently told the Globe and Mail that while Moonglow may not be autobiographical, he sees it as an autobiography of his own psyche and “imaginative life.” Which may sound surprising coming from Chabon. It’s not that his work hasn’t always been personal, but Chabon’s insistence on never repeating himself has meant that recurring themes have been explored through an eclectic hodgepodge of genres, tones and formats. His Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay used comic-book tropes to tell its tale. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union mixed a murder mystery with alternative history, while Summerland was a fantasy novel aimed at young readers.
But Chabon believes he invariably appears in all his fiction, even when there is no character directly named after him.
“Gustav Flaubert is famous, of course, for having said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ ” Chabon says. “I think all of your characters in a novel tend to be, to some degree or another, aspects of yourself or anti-selves or counter-selves in some way or versions of people who are very close to you in your life. I think in their obsessions and concerns, writers tend to return over and over again to the same kinds of stories, same kind of themes. In that sense, novels tend to be self-portraits.”