DEATHBED PROFESSIONS
MICHAEL CHABON’S MOONGLOW IS THE BIOGRAPHY OF A LIFE STRAIGHT OUT OF A NOVEL
With his new novel Moonglow, Berkeley, California writer Michael Chabon mines the explicitly personal for a novel with a nearly staggering reach, a small, intimate story with the range of a saga. It’s a balancing act most writers would be reluctant to even attempt, an ambitious marriage of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s si x- volume My Struggle with, well, one supposes, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
The novel unfolds from a seemingly straightforward premise: in the wake of the 1989 publication of his first novel, Chabon is called to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, where his grandfather ( always referred to in the text as “grandfather”) is dying of cancer. Chabon arrives at his bedside just “as Dilaudid was bringing its soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence.” Over the course of a week, Chabon listens as his grandfather talks, “as if he had been waiting for my company.”
“Out flowed a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve.”
From that premise, readers will likely have a certain expectation: that Moonglow will be the story of one man’s life, a biography in novel form. Of course, with Chabon, nothing is that straightforward.
The first sign that things may not be so simple should come in the book’s epigraph: “There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.” Readers who came of age after the early 1970s will recognize the lines from “Eclipse,” the last track on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Chabon, however, credits the phrase to Werner Van Braun, the Nazi scientist who developed the V2 rocket and who, after the war, was spirited away to the United States where he was instrumental in the development of its space program.
As if to further press the question of credibility, in the author’s note on the following page, Chabon asserts his fidelity to “the truth as I prefer to understand it,” stressing that “whatever liberties have been taken ... the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.”
“Abandon” is the perfect descriptor for Moonglow. The novel unfolds with a seeming heedlessness over the course of much of the 20th century, a quixotic epic that resists linear narrative, circling constantly between themes, jump- ing through time in a manner that might suggest the ramblings of a Dilaudid-assisted storyteller but is, in fact, tightly controlled and thematically unified.
Grandfather is a character for the ages: a pool hustler in his youth who enlists in the army the day after Pearl Harbor; an inveterate tinkerer who becomes an engineer; a malcontent who is selected to serve as a spy; and, finally, a retiree in a Florida seniors’ community.
When we first meet grandfather, though, he is about to kill his employer at a New York novelty company after being fired to create a sales job for communist and suspected spy ( and architect of the United Nations) Alger Hiss. Chabon also suggests that his grandmother “was as much to blame as my grandfather” for the crime, which results in his imprisonment.
It’s an impressive life, one a novelist would have delighted in inventing, and one that Chabon reveals elliptically and loosely, allowing only hints and glimpses before connecting all the dots.
Through the story of his grandfather’s life, Chabon also incorporates the lives of his grandmother, his great uncle Ray, his mother and, to a lesser degree, his father’s side of the family. Chabon also works himself into the narrative, describing key events in his own childhood ( including his grandmother’s stories, inspired by her deck of fortune- telling cards, which she hides from his grandfather) and his process of piecing together the disparate elements of his grandfather’s life and stories.
Chabon’s imagination, and his delight in embracing then overturning genre conventions, are much in evidence here. As he follows his grandfather through the Second World War in pursuit of Werner Von Braun ( see how it all comes around?), readers may be reminded of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which similarly subverts the tropes of conventional war stories ( and, like Moonglow, features Jewish soldiers in pursuit of Nazis).
Ultimately, though, it is the “family memoir” genre that is explored and overturned most thoroughly here. Is this really the story of Chabon’s grandfather and his family?
Chabon has been fairly forthright in answering that question in recent interviews, but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter: regardless of verisimilitude, a good story is a good story ( and the tension between truth and fiction adds a considerable frisson). True or not, Moonglow is a delight from start to finish, a celebration of one man’s life which becomes, inexorably, an examination of the nature of relationships and of secrets, of history and the push to the future (I haven’t even touched on grandfather’s obsession with rockets and spaceflight, a key thread to the book), of sadness and fury and joy. It’s the perfect marriage of heart and art, its bravura style easy to overlook in the face of its emotional force.
IT IS THE ‘FAMILY MEMOIR’ GENRE THAT IS EXPLORED AND OVERTURNED MOST THOROUGHLY HERE.