In his new novel, Michael Chabon tackles truth, lies and family legends
Michael Chabon’s new novel tackles truth, lies and family legends.
‘ Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth,” says the narrator of Michael Chabon’s Moonglow late in the piece. After a respectable tally of novels, Chabon, now in his fifties, claims that Moonglow is a memoir, his version of all the things his grandfather told him before he died. But broad hints tell us it’s probably prudent to see Moonglow as a novel with a slim basis in fact even if, every so often, the raw truth butts in.
Chabon’s maternal grandfather (who is never given a name) had an eventful life. He suffered a roughhouse adolescence in a Jewish neighbourhood of Philadelphia, with a developing interest in engineering, rocketry and ballistics. He indulged in a crazy prank in wartime Washington DC by booby-trapping bridges with explosives. For his ingenuity, he was drafted into the OSS (a precursor of the CIA) and sent to Europe to grab Nazi rocket scientists and their secrets before the advancing
Red Army could nab them. Returning to the US, he married the narrator’s grandmother, a French Jew who survived the war hidden in a Catholic convent.
But here’s the rub. Both Grandfather and Grandmother have their obsessions. Grandfather is permanently angry at how the US space programme is tainted by its recruited ex-Nazis ( especially Wernher von Braun). He later does time in jail for assault. Grandmother is mentally unstable, has nightmares about a threatening “skinless horse” and does time in a psychiatric institution.
So, how can the narrator believe anything either of his grandparents says? The question becomes urgent in one of the last chapters, when the narrator discovers documents completely refuting one major story he has always believed.
If you want to squeeze Big Ideas out of this lively, capacious and very readable novel, you could find them here, in the interface between truth and fiction. Also in the notion (often enough implied) that elaborate fictions are what many people need to survive horrendous realities.
But there’s a lot more going on here, with discourses on the basic amorality of applied science and whether lives are moulded by hard work, providence or sheer dumb luck.
Significantly, the narrator’s great-uncle is a rabbi who gives up on God and becomes a professional gambler.
As in most big Jewish-American novels, there is a religious element. Atheist-inclined agnostic though he is, the narrator admits to having a “kosher belly”; he observes traditional dietary laws and, in spite of himself, is moved by the traditional kaddish for his grandfather. Catholic clergy – a kindly German priest, the nuns who look after Grandmother when she is raving – are treated with wary respect.
In Chabon’s universe, there’s an outside possibility there might just be something to this God business. But probably not.
Moonglow is an elaborate yarn. It has its glitches – Grandfather’s old age in Florida does not fit well into the rest of the novel – but you keep turning the pages, an acid test of quality, even in
highbrow novels.
Significantly, the narrator’s great-uncle is a rabbi who gives up on God and becomes a professional gambler.