‘Moonglow’ achieves escape velocity through stories
When his maternal grandfather was dying in late 1989, a 26-year-old Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, Calif. “Ninety percent of everything he told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days,” Chabon tells us of his grandfather in “Moonglow,” a memoir billed as a novel.
“In preparing this memoir,” Chabon writes in his puckish author’s note, “I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.”
But his narrator — named “Mike” and resembling Chabon in numerous ways — also writes late in “Moonglow” that “sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth.”
It’s the tension between these two poles — fiction vs. fact, story vs. history, moonglow vs. the dark side of that lunar body — that defines this book, revolving around Chabon’s grandfather and grandmother: two mid-century Jews, trying to make sense of a world that had murdered his grandmother’s family.
Theodor Adorno once famously said that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. So stipulated. But then what sort of stories might one be permitted to tell, as a means of surviving the unthinkable without going mad?
As it happens, Chabon’s grandmother does battle madness — while nevertheless managing stints on stage and on television. She creates and conveys stories there as well as at home, where she tells Mike tales that give him nightmares.
His grandmother also creates fictions about her dark European past, as a means of coping with her American present. She’s “tormented,” Mike tells us, by “her hidden history of loss, loss upon loss upon loss unending.” “On the outside she was beautiful, but on the inside she felt ugly,” he tells us later. “She felt ruined. And she was so afraid of having that come out.”
On the surface, Chabon’s Americanborn grandfather isn’t as conflicted; he approaches life with low expectations, “to minimize the impact of the inevitable disappointment.” But like most selfstyled pessimists, Chabon’s grandfather is prone to “flights of preposterous idealism.”
Such flights allow him to survive childhood in a Philadelphia slum. Live with the trauma experienced while serving in Europe during World War II. And love his difficult wife through all her darkness while also nurturing the stepdaughter — Chabon’s mother — she’d brought with her from Europe.
Most important of those idealistic flights — and central to this novel — is his grandfather’s lifelong love affair with rocketry and travel to the moon, where one might hope to leave behind the “crushing gravity” that could make his wife seem “heavy at her core.”
“The thing that made space flight difficult was the thing that, to my grandfather, made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her,” Mike writes. “On the Moon, 230,000 miles from the stench of history, there was no madness or memory of loss.”
Those dreams get perverted; covering some of the same ground broken by Thomas Pynchon in “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), “Moonglow” chronicles the story of the German V-2, in which euphoric and innocent dreams of rocketry devolve into the story of a brutalized slave labor force creating an engine of death.
No wonder Chabon’s grandfather later makes his living building model rockets; doing so allows him to create a selfcontained and controlled narrative, in which his dream stays alive and nobody gets hurt.
But as Chabon has been telling us throughout his career, such stories — all stories — are perpetually on the verge of collapse. “Everything got ruined,” young Mike comes to realize. “Nothing was ever finished.”
The existence of this beautiful, brave book confirms that we must nevertheless continue constructing narratives, no matter how ephemeral they are. We cannot fully recover what’s been lost. But we can tell stories like this one, remembering where we came from so that we might somehow keep going.