Review: ‘Moonglow’

Michael Chabon clearly doesn't want to be pigeon-holed. Instead, he brings his many talents to bear on a variety of styles and narrative forms. Jennifer Egan, who like Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize winner, puts it this way, 'Chabon has made a career of routing big, ambitious projects through popular genres, with superlative results.”

That 'superlative” has been well-earned, mostly notably by his 2000 novel 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” But even if one were to set that book aside, the rest of Chabon's work is worthy of Egan's praise.

His new novel, 'Moonglow,” is a fictionalized family history built from the reminiscences of his dying grandfather. The book jacket describes it, somewhat unhelpfully, as 'A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir.” Chabon himself plays it coy in both his introductory author's note and his closing acknowledgements.

It would be easy to get wrapped up in questions of facts and truth, but Chabon, true to form, delivers such an appealing yarn that these questions are rendered largely moot. Midway through the book, he also employs a sort of narrative immunization against the notions of cliché and unearned mythologizing. Here, the grandfather surrenders his story to his novel writing grandson:

'You can have it. I'm giving it to you. After I'm gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours... Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night... Very significant. I'm sure it's a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that.”

Chabon replies, 'Kind of trite.” It's a setup, allowing for some triteness of this very sort late in the book. As it turns out, it is satisfying triteness that avoids wrapping things up too neatly. Chabon considers the memoirist's desire to make meaning out of the events of our lives without fully giving in to the impulse. 'Moonglow” is an excellent addition to Chabon's body of work.