I felt like I needed to 'get my story straight,' so to speak, in my mind and in my heart." He decides to abandon the novel in favor of this family history, and his explanation wryly echoes lines found in many a sincere memoir: "Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth. And in 2013, decades after their deaths, the narrator manages to fill in one of the bigger holes (a revelation I'll leave for readers to discover) during preliminary research for a possible novel about his grandmother's illness. "Lolling on his palliative cloud" of painkillers, this normally reticent electrical engineer recounts his life story - and what a story it is.Īuthor Interviews 'Moonglow' Shines A Light On Hidden Family Historyīut there are gaps in his grandparents' story. space program - not to mention literary works that include Gravity's Rainbow and The Right StuffĬhabon's setup is cleverly convincing: Back in 1989, his narrator, author "Mike Chabon," just off a book tour for his first novel (that would be the highly successful The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), visits his dying, unnamed maternal grandfather - actually, as we soon learn, step-grandfather - at his mother's home in Oakland, Calif. There's also the almost de rigueur intersection of family history with important historical events - in this case, the sinister trajectory of Wernher von Braun, the Nazi aerospace engineer who eluded prosecution for his war crimes and later played a key role in the U.S. Moonglow, a playful twist on the family memoir, slyly incorporates classic elements of the genre, including a deathbed confession and the revelation of a long-hidden, dark family secret. But he is far more than just an elegant stylist: Chabon is an adventurous writer who wields his gorgeous - and occasionally over-the-top - prose in the service of lively narratives that channel various genres - comics, detective, picaresque, historical - often in combination, as in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Michael Chabon turns out more beautiful sentences in a single novel than some writers produce in a lifetime.
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