‘Moonglow’ reflects Chabon in rich layers of light
Michael Chabon, perhaps the most accessible of the nation’s great literary novelists since the death of John Updike, has never been much noted for his way with a plot. For that we turn instead to John Irving and, more recently, to Donna Tartt.
A typical Chabon novel is less about what its characters do than what they say and think; texture and atmosphere routinely trump narrative momentum and suspense. Moonglow (Harper, 448 pp., out of four), the author’s latest, is perhaps the apotheosis of these trends in his work. Certainly it’s Chabon’s least linear, most fragmentary novel, achieving its considerable effects by means of an accumulation of layers of feeling rather than from any sense of one incident leading to another and another.
A number of rather fine set pieces unfold — such as the one that opens the novel, in which the unnamed hero, the narrator’s grandfather, takes comically violent vengeance on a boss for dumping him to open up a position for accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss, recently released from prison. But, told as they are out of sequence, chronological or otherwise (and often piecemeal at that), these episodes don’t build into what many readers will recognize as a coherent story. They meld, rather, into a meditation on the Jewish-American experience in the 20th century. There’s a perfectly good internal logic for this. Moonglow is ingeniously constructed as a memoir, told by the narrator (himself unnamed until fairly late in the game) based on his grandfather’s presumably disjointed deathbed confessions, which resist being forced to make traditional kinds of sense. This gives Chabon and his narrator leeway to leaf at will through chapters of the grandfather’s life without feeling obligated to connect the dots. The dots include the grandfather’s multiple roles as a Jewish-American soldier in Europe during World War II, where he first encounters and develops an obsession with the work of the Ger- man aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who designed the V-2 rocket and, later, parts of the spacecraft used in the Apollo missions; as the husband of a theatrical Frenchwoman haunted by her experiences during the Holocaust; and, much later, as an elderly swain in Florida, spending his nights hunting a giant snake believed to have swallowed his girlfriend’s dog.
Readers who have followed the author’s career to this point will recognize Moonglow as a mother lode of Chaboniana, replete with explorations of themes (the Cold War, space travel) that have surfaced in his other novels, from
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Telegraph Avenue. Readers also will have reason to wonder whether the narrator and the author are the same person, at least to some degree, and whether the grandfather’s confessions — inspired in part by a reallife event in Chabon’s past — might have some basis in fact.
Any such speculation will be encouraged by the narrator’s mention of Chabon Scientific Co., a real-life company that once sold model rockets and other novelties via ads in Esquire, Boys’ Life and other magazines at midcentury. One such ad is helpfully included in the book’s first pages, declaring open season.