NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWinner of the Sophie Brody Medal • An NBCC Finalist for 2016 Award for Fiction • ALA Carnegie Medal Finalist for Excellence in Fiction • Wall Street Journal’s Best Novel of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Slate Best Book of the Year • A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 … Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Slate Best Book of the Year • A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • A New York Post Best Book of the Year
iBooks Novel of the Year • An Amazon Editors’ Top 20 Book of the Year • #1 Indie Next Pick • #1 Amazon Spotlight Pick • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A BookPage Top Fiction Pick of the Month • An Indie Next Bestseller
“This book is beautiful.” — A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review, cover review
Following on the heels of his New York Times bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us.
In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.
Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.
From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the “American Century,” the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.
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Loved the story. Continually inspired by the writing— evocative, lyrical and richly funny.
MOONGLOW is a one-of-a-kind Novel
This is quite an unusual and, in my opinion, brilliant novel. In its simplest form, Michael Chabon tells the story of his grandparents – a love story that survives the horrors of the Holocaust, recurrent mental illness, and significant separations.
Pieced together by memories relayed to the author by his dying grandfather, Chabon’s structure mirrors the random and somewhat whimsical nature of memory. As you read the book you feel as though you are slowly constructing someone’s life experience, in bits and pieces. Not linear. Not chronological. But truth, in fits and starts.
Chabon’s grandfather was a talented engineer whose own obsession with space flight eventually led to both a successful career and lifelong rivalry with none other than Werner Von Braun. Braun’s shadow hangs over Chabon’s grandfather, beginning with an encounter at the end of World War II.
There’s no way I can describe what makes the book so special to read. It’s partly the stories, partly the structure, and partly the slow discovery that family members, despite deep ties, can really know very little about one another. If you find you’re having trouble sticking with it, keep going. It gets better as it goes on.
I’ve been a fan of Michael Chabon ever since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. That book made me read his earlier work, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a book showing the promise Chabon ultimately achieved. I tried to read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, twice. Ellen liked it, but I stopped halfway on my second attempt. So, his work represents some unevenness to my taste.
Which brings me to Moonglow. Ellen couldn’t get into it, but I enjoyed it. I doubt Chabon principal aim is to satisfy the tastes of the Coppley family (Ellen and I both loved Kavalier and Clay), you may love Moonglow or leave it, based on our experience. However, true to Chabon’s skill, I doubt the writing itself will disappoint.
Moonglow consists of tales from his grandfather, a man nearing the end of his life and who recounts events to his grandson he’s never heard before. The book starts with a disclaimer that some things are true and some is made up, but since I wasn’t after a memoir, who cares?
His grandfather was a troublemaker as a lad, who later became fascinated by rockets and space travel. He entered World War II as something of a spy, parachuting into Europe hunting for Werner Von Braun. Now, that sounds like an adventure novel. No, it’s not that, but it does lend an interesting narrative to the war. The book bounces back and forth in the grandfather’s life. So, you may read about the war interleaved with his adventures hunting a snake loose in his retirement village.
All throughout, Chabon presents wordsmithing that brings a smile to the reader. I recommend it.
Chabon writes beautifully about family, and about fathers and sons…or grandsons. This novel reads like a memoir as it describes the last days of an old man who loved rocketry, and his troubled wife, and his daughter. Like so many other men of the Greatest Generation he never talked about his war experiences or his own life but now, with the help of the pain relievers prescribed for his terminal cancer, he’s ready to reveal some family secrets.
It’s beautifully crafted and a deep dive into the complicated nature of love and family. It’s been on my TBR shelf for a few years and I’m glad I finally dusted it off and read it. Worth waiting for, and well worth reading.
This is a novel written as a memoir about “Michael Chabon” memorializing his “grandfather.” In the last ten days of his life, his stoic grandfather unloads stories about his time in World War II, a stint in prison, how he met his wife, the “grandmother” of the novel, and the trauma of the family dealing with her mental illness. She is institutionalized for a couple of years in the early 1950s and a profound secret of hers is “buried” there only to be unearthed in the journal of her psychologist many years later by the grandson, the fictional Mike Chabon.
The stories of his different family members are beautifully told, as only the real Michael Chabon can write, deeply affecting even. But the use of his family name(s) for the narrator and certain other family members is a very unusual choice, one that ultimately left me scratching my head. While reading the book, I assumed Michael Chabon was writing about his real family and filtering their stories through his writerly hand, adding literary flourishes as he saw fit. He never gives the name of his grandfather or grandmother, while he uses his own name (he’s called Mike) as well as his uncle, paternal grandfather, and the like. But in an article in the back of the book reprinted from BuzzFeed, Chabon cops to the fact that the novel is completely fictional. He tells the reporter, “In a weird way, it’s a memoir of not my life, but my imaginative life…” Again, this led to more head scratching. Why use his own name? Without this article in the back of the book, a reader would assume, as I did, that there was some truth in this book. If there is no truth, then why not give all the characters their own unique, fictional names?
As a writer, this choice did lead to many questions. I did ponder things like: what constitutes a novel? What constitutes a memoir? Where does fact and fiction intersect if you’re looking for truth? What if truth doesn’t matter? And these are fun things for a writer to consider and definitely gets in “nerd alert” territory. But if there are more questions than answers, then does this hobble the book itself? Would I have been more satisfied if Chabon didn’t use his family name at all? Most definitely.
Another curious choice is some very explicit details of the sex life between the grandfather and grandmother, details so graphic that I highly doubt any grandson would recount to anyone in this way. Although it’s only a few paragraphs in the book, I cannot for the life of me figure out why “Chabon” would give these lurid details about his “grandparents” having sex. Very strange literary choice.
Ultimately, this isn’t my favorite Chabon novel. I did enjoy the stories of the grandfather in World War II and his time in prison. They’re beautifully told. But mostly, it just made me realize how much I enjoyed his other novels more than this one. I’d give this novel three and a half stars.
An interesting family memoir or fiction. Which is it? Maybe a bit of both. Michael Chabon takes you on a journey through his Grandfather’s life more of less beginning at the moment he committed an act that earned him a stiff jail term. The story spirals from that moment forward and backward and dazzles the reader with his ability to keep many balls in the air without dropping a single one.
Sometimes I finish a book, and I loved it, but I feel too puny a mind to say anything to do it justice. I just am not learned enough, wise enough, deep enough. I am at a loss for words.
Moonglow by Michael Chabon sat on my Edelweiss shelf for 45 days until I could finally make a space to read it, read ‘out of order’, as I read based on a book’s publication date.
I have enjoyed all the novels I’ve read by Chabon: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Wonder Boys, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I have The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Telegraph Avenue on my TBR shelf. (The real books bookshelf, not ebooks!) And I’d been hearing a buzz that Moonglow is Chabon’s best book yet.
Chabon makes me laugh. That’s golden. Especially in a novel about the effect of war on the lives of the narrator’s grandparents, where happiness is found ‘in the cracks’ between failure and mental health breakdowns, and heroes are found to be villains, and fiction is better than knowing the truth.
Stories told to Chabon by his terminally ill grandfather inspired Moonglow. In the novel, a grandfather reveals what had remained unspoken, a gift for his grandson (Chabon) to turn into an orderly account, with the admonition to ‘make it mean something.’
His fictionalized grandfather, a Drexel Tech graduate, joined the Army Corps of Engineers before WWII; his wartime experiences leaves him with a ‘form of spiritual aphasia’ and searching for purpose. He meets a beautiful girl, another victim of the war, who has a daughter, and struggles for mental stability. Together they hope to ‘fly to the moon’, but the journey is fraught with crash landings and heartbreak.
The back story is told in bits and pieces, interwoven with stories from other time frames, slowly revealing the grandfather’s history.
“You think this explains everything?” the grandfather queries, “Me and your grandmother. Your mother. My time in prison. The war.” The grandson replies, “It explains a lot.” “It explains nothing,,,It’s just names and dates and places,” the grandfather retorts, “It doesn’t mean anything.” And then he adds, “I’m disappointed in myself. My life….you look back and you see all you did with all that time is waste it.” And the grandson sums it up, “Anyways it’s a pretty good story.”
Which is all we can ask from life. A pretty good story in spite of the failures, dreams deferred, the heartbreak, and the craziness.
Michael Chabon covers more territory than any other author. This sums it all up–“A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.”