Moonglow: A Novel

I could not get into this book, although I did get to the end through a combination of reading and skimming. The jumping around in time was confusing, and none of the characters was particularly compelling. I also found the (apparent) mix of memoir and fiction annoying. I would definitely not recommend this book.

Overlooked by most critics and readers is that Chabon included within this “novel” the true story of Wernher von Braun and his complicity in the use of slave labor, of which 20 thousand died, to produce the V2 ballistic rocket for Adollf Hitler, a serious war crime but one America’s space age hero got away with.(Chabon: “. . .the luckiest Nazi m. . . .er who ever lived.”) Not only is this carefully documented in Moonglow, Chabon listed his sources at the end of the book. What is fiction is how he dealt with the man he once decided to kill. I suggest readers focus on this story in Moonglow then read Chabon’s nonfiction sources for what he wrote about Wernher von Braun.

A good rule for any writer to follow is to not write detailed third-person accounts of your grandparents making love. Maybe something you breeze over?

While an interesting concept, the constant use of "My grandfather...." was difficult to accept. It lacked an immediacy and connection. It felt removed and distant, despite how intimate of an exercise it is.

This book did an amazing job interweaving Michael Chabon's grandfather's stories about his work as an intelligence officer in WW II with the impact it had on both his grandparents and his mother. The story is beautifully told, much like Anthony Doerr's "All the Light We Cannot See". I highly recommend this book - I can't wait to read more of Chabon's work.

Another great book by Michael Chabon, an embroidered memoir about his family - mostly parents and grandparents - exploits, tragedies, horrors and adventures during WWII and afterwards. Fascinating stuff about rocketry, Werner von Braun, mental illness, the burden of guilt, snakes, scary puppets - you name it. Kavalier and Clay is one of my all-time favorite books and this comes close. Highly recommend it, great writing.

The story is a personal one, but its the writing that will grab you; one of those where you read sentences over because they are so delightful in their description. His pulitzer prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay still resonates with me as brilliant writing, there were a few in between that had big shoes to fill so to speak; but this one had me hooked in the same way.

First, I must say it helps to have lived in some of the places in the novel. An to be old enough to have had some of the experiences of the principal character (whose is never explicitly named except as 'my grandfather'). 'My grandfather' was a Phildelphia Jew born about 1922, raised in a seedy South Philly neighborhood, educated at Drexel Tech, and served in the Army in the 1940s. He worked without distinction at Martin Aircraft for a time and was obsessed with rocketry. His consuming passion was going into space and landing a man on the moon. Considering this, he was a early for his time and unfortunately witnessed much of this mostly as spectator.

What makes this book truly interesting is the biography of this most unusual man (fictionalized) who, while brilliant, did not always respect the boundaries of lawful behavior. Impatient and endowed with a fierce temper, he managed to earn a short stay in prison. This combined with his adventurous spirit and landed him a gig in the US Army as a lieutenant risking his life during the last months of WW2. Assigned the precarious task of looking for prized German scientists who might help the US military in future adventures, he realized his full potential. In some ways he played a Jason Bourne like character who wasn't fully alive until he was on an adrenalin rush.

The writing style: I was impressed with the colorful and entertaining prose. It flowed smoothly. I had occasional problems with transitions between present, past, and the distant past. This might be explained by the fact that I am a slow reader. Other times, when the story became exciting (dangerous), I was so eager to see what was going to happen next and I skimmed over some of the colorful descriptive text.

I recommend this. It's well worth your time.

This is a very well written and interesting story. Somewhat like historical fiction, it is based on real people, the author's maternal grandparents, but contains some things that it is doubtful that the author could know. He admits all this. There is obvious affection for the characters, humor often, and some darkness. The grandmother is a tragic figure whose story can be painful to read. The grandfather is taciturn but allegedly told the author the included stories near the end of his life while under the influence of pain meds. Other characters are well drawn and interesting. It's a good read.

Engrossing book that touches some of the ugliest moments in human history and some of the most beautiful and awe inspiring, from World War II and the Holocaust to the first manned mission to the moon, with tons of human drama in between. There are moments of redemption found in the worst of times and unexpected disppointments in the best. The story of a generation, told with compassion and humanity. Definitely worth a read.

"Moonglow" is an absolutely wonderful read--definitely to be savored. It puts the author, and his grandfather and grandmother right in the middle of the 20th-century's major events, including the liberation of Europe and the space race. It's easily the best book he's written since "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay."

A somewhat interesting read about a very dysfunctional family that stretches across three generations and includes mental illness, sexual crimes, deceit, simmering anger and, most of all, abject sorrow. I'm around the same age as the author and reading this book makes me thank God that I grew up in a stable, mid-western family where every day was normal, safe and mostly very happy. I'm guessing that telling this story was part of a healing process for the author. Regarding style, the authors writing is a bit long-winded and his prose a bit too flowery for my taste. It seems like he might be trying a bit too hard. The portions about his grandfathers experiences in WWII made the book worth reading.

I have devoured everything Chabon has written in 3 days or less. I've been reading Moonglow for 4 months and am still not finished. His prose is fantastic, but the book is just boring. Every great writer will put out a dud once in awhile and this is Chabon's. Hopefully, he has gotten this out of his system so we can all look forward to another fantastic novel form this masterful author.

I read a short story in the New Yorker many years ago---"The Talking Dog of the World. It was one of the best short stories I ever read. It lead me to read two of Chabon's novels: the Yiddish Po;icemen's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Both of these novels were engaging, lively, witty and accomplished. I looked forward to Moonglow and was encouraged by the reviews.

I am so disappointed! The blending of genres breaks narrative tension; the narration feels like it has no arc. It seems that the author has a loose hold on the reins. By page 64 I found my mind wandering as I read. I just couldn't care. So disappointed.

And on top of it all, I've been wrong all along about my original source of Chapon impetus: "The Talking Dog of the World" was actually written by Ethan Mordden!

Michael Chabon is a great storyteller and an excellent writer. But, like so many others who tell their tales, he doesn’t know when to stop.

We’ve all encountered people like him. They start off with elaborate, entertaining, and usually somewhat embellished stories about their families, and we respond positively. But those responses unfortunately serve as incentives to tell even more…and more…and in greater detail, until it seems just endless. So we look for an excuse to remove ourselves elsewhere, politely if possible.

That’s Chabon. I got about halfway through his book and I found myself skimming and turning pages at ever greater speed. The less interesting the stories, and the less consequential or meaningful their conclusions, the more detail he seemed to want to provide—a deadly combination.

I do love his wordplay and clever turns of phrase. But after a while even that becomes tiresome and actually self-indulgent (“Look how clever I can be”). I can understand that treating stories like his in purely chronological fashion would be too conventional, but his complete abandonment of that approach results only in confusion.

I had a similar problem with his “Kavalier and Clay”. Great story, wonderful characterizations, entertainingly written, but 100 or more pages too long.

So if you have more patience than I do with this kind of thing, you could do a lot worse than reading this book. But if it reminds you of friends and relatives who are guilty of TMI when they regale you with their exploits—stay away.

I have long been a fan of Michael Chabon's work without necessarily describing myself as a fan; his fictions are fun, thought-provoking, and (when they're one of the longer works) a great illumination of why epic-length fiction can still mean so much on a personal level. I think he's at his best when he stretches past the three-hundred-page mark and beyond; his shorter work (i.e., anything under two hundred, like "The Final Solution") is interesting at best but never quite holds up to the longer stuff. I was hesitant about this book when I saw it was coming out; another high-profile recent release by an author I admire had left me cold. But over this Thanksgiving weekend, I picked up this new book and was glad that I did.

"Moonglow" is the story of Chabon's maternal grandfather (never identified by name), who led a life that is almost as epic as previous characters that Chabon has focused on. How much of it is real and how much of it is the novelist's invention? By the end of the book, it almost doesn't matter; the ride itself confirms what I've long suspected about the power of fiction to tell the truth better than any straight-ahead history of a historical event could. From the ashes of WWII Germany to the bedside of a dying man in California, Chabon transports us through the life of an ordinary, extraordinary man and the woman that he loved and lost, with all the ramifications that come with such a pursuit. This is a love story, but it is a familial love story, of a man and a woman and the family that they tried to make. Again, how much of this is fiction and how much of this is truth (or "truth") is hard to say, and perhaps shouldn't matter.

Chabon has been a consistently interesting writer, even when the material he's working with isn't up to the standards of his best work. I know that he won a Pulitzer fro "Kavalier and Clay"; he should win another one for "Moonglow." That's how good of a book this one is. It blurs the lines between truth and lies, fiction and non-fiction, to wrap up the reader in a story that never seems to be "on the up and up" but which is nevertheless as real and as true as we could hope for. It is, simply, a beautiful story, well-told, and compellingly rendered by a master of the craft of storytelling.

This fictional memoir, although highly praised and an award winner, made me fight to stay awake while reading it. The repetitious use of "my grandfather" and the darting and diving through time and space were annoying; rockets were not a subject of interest to me. Moonglow will be donated to the village library. It did not earn a space on my shelves

I have read one or two of Mr. Chabon's other books, with mixed reactions, but "Moonglow" is -- at least to me -- not only his masterpiece but also a masterpiece. The novel is by turns picaresque, funny, elegiac, engaging, and simply wonderful. Mr. Chabon's portrait of his grandfather is loving but skeptical, humorous but sad, and mesmerizing from start to finish. The supporting cast of characters is no less finely drawn, including his grandmother, his mother and even Mr. Chabon himself. The latter is an incredible accomplishment, as I've often found writers' insertions of themselves into their works to be very difficult to pull off, in non-fiction but especially in a work of quasi-fiction as I suspect this one is.

As I was reading "Moonglow" I began to wonder how Chabon would end the book, and from my perspective it ends wonderfully and brilliantly. However -- and I say this about very few other books, including those I love -- I was sad when the book ended, as I wish it could have gone on for many more pages.

In order to read Michael Chabon’s Moonglow. you have to be willing to accommodate rambling; but I am always willing to do that if the language is right. Chabon’s language is dazzling from beginning to end. Early on, we get this: “A full moon rose, tinted by its angle on earth’s atmosphere to a color like the flesh of a peach.”

The narrative is so artfully and densely woven that it’s difficult to quote more from it without providing backstory. The grandfather who is the center of the book is jailed for a week after assaulting the president of the company he has been employed by. He phones his wife during his jail stay with stories about still being on the road as a salesman, not knowing that his attack and jail sentence have been reported in the newspaper. When he’s released and asks his wife to pick him up at a train station, she coldly refuses., But when he completes the long walk home, there is a welcome, with his wife preparing a coq au vin:

”Look who’s here,” my grandfather said, coming into the heat of the kitchen.

“She looked up from her bowl and whisk. She had set her hair and put on her pearls. The pearls lay against the ruddy expanse between her throat and the cleft revealed by the scoop neck of her black sweater. The pearls seemed to radiate the absorbed heat of her skin. My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.”

“We have an hour before the school bus,” my grandmother said.

The school bus is where he must pick up his granddaughter. The hour they have allows for an erotic encounter.

On an abandoned Florida “feral golf course” on a 95 degree day, “a million insects played a one note tone poem entitled Heat.” Moments later grandfather is cutting through kudzu with a machete: ”The tendrils snapped like guitar strings. “ And hard on the heels of that guitar string simile: “Pain twanged in my grandfather’s shoulder.”

Later the grandfather as a widower is pursued by a 72-year-old painter: “It had been years since my grandfather had been competently teased by an attractive woman. This turned out to be a thing he had not known that he was missing.”

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times has said that Chabon “can write about just about anything,” and for once she’s right. Here he is writing deftly, pretty much in passing, on the birth of two calves:

“Stalzman turned back to the parturient animal in the stall. It was working over its pale pink firstborn with its tongue, raising moist spikes and whorls in the dappled tan coat. The cow lifted its head as if hearing a sound that alarmed it. It made an oddly human sound of uncertainty. It clunked drunkenly two steps to the side. A smell of iron filled the barn. Veiled in its pearly amnion, the second calf squirted out of its mother. The sound was like a boot being pulled from the mud.”

 Try this: “Once a week Mrs. Einstein forced herself to sit down and eat a piece of fried beef liver with onions, and if Uncle Ray and my mother were around, she forced them to eat it, too. Her husband and son had always refused t o eat liver, and they were dead, and she was alive.”

Chapter 32, in which Chabon’s fluency with detail peaks, opens with this sterling paragraph:

“When I was little and we still lived in Flushing, the Whip used to come shambling down our block, a hectic fanfare blowing from its loudspeaker horn. The Whip was a truck with a carnival ride in a wire cage mounted on its flatbed, painted red and yellow like a circus tent. The music that attended its migrations and advertised its arrival had a slapstick wooziness and in hindsight may haver been a tarantella. It seemed as long and as looming as a tractor-trailer to me, but it was probably no bigger than a moving van. If you were already in the street playing when the Whip rolled up, you ran to beg for a quarter. If you were indoors, you heard the drunken music and ran out to meet it with a quarter sweating against your palm.”

Back in Florida, Chabon gives us “a crowd of people dressed in gumball colors.”

If you’ve read Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay and thought he couldn’t possibly surpass that one, be assured that he at least equals it. One of our most fecund writers has given us another book to admire, enjoy and simply be grateful for. I can’t imagine anyone reading Moonglow without raucous laughter and hot tears.

The narrative of "Moonglow" ebbs and flows through stories and memories about Chabon's family, with his maternal grandfather as the anchor of the remembrances. The crafted storyline gives way to a collage of incidents that evolve slowly and at unexpected moments.

Often the things that parents spend so much energy hiding from sons and daughters are revealed in clandestine conversations with grandparents that morph into mercurial musings; or, the things that need to be said are not things their own children knew about or that they want them to know. And so in bits and pieces, or all at once the "truth" comes out; the past becomes present, remembered from grandparent to grandchild.

The power and beauty of the past remembered is the act of telling, the act of listening and questioning, and finally the act of writing it down. The past presents itself to Chabon as a mirror broken into jagged pieces. His task is not so much to put the pieces back together and offer a "faithful" image, as it is to assemble the pieces in a way that offers a gestalt rendering of the past.

Chabon understands that the past can be messy; that it can be cruel and ugly. He has the grandfather at one point say: "I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got half way there[...]All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn't finish." The grandson struggles to reassure him of his worth in many ways: in the way he cares for him and listens to him; in the way he turns his story into a novel. In doing so he replicates his grandfather's work to rebuild a rotted porch that when he was done 'felt sound and solid under his weight, a piece of the world that he just wanted to keep from falling down.' The desire to fight the pull of gravity also finds resonance in his grandfather's quest to explore and conquer space. Here the challenge is more than simply countering gravity forces in an effort to stabilize one's self. Here the challenge is to escape the pull of gravity and enter a state of weightlessness. To land on the moon.

And that is exactly the narrative space that Chabon is attempting to reach in "Moonglow." The weight of all that family stuff needs a sturdy porch in the piece of the world, and it also needs the weightless space in which to find some peace and solace. Chabon's narrative finds sure ground and a sturdy porch from which to view under a moonglow the wonder of a past remembered.

Delirium is a cognitive state that occurs in the setting of illness and or medication and is characterized by inability to tell a story in a coherent fashion. I believe the derivation comes from a term meaning unable to plow a straight furrow.

Chabon wrote the book based on stories he heard from his step-grandfather while his grandfather had bone metastases from cancer and was on opiates. He was able to synthesize what would be an interesting story despite the delirium in which it was revealed to him. He filled in details, wrote it in his wonderful erudite style that is somewhat slow going. Then he edited it back into a delirious mess. Every 3 or 4 pages he switches to another place and time and you read a paragraph or two of erudite prose asking yourself "Who, What, Where????" This is true to the experience of listening to someone who is delirious. The book would be VASTLY improved by editing, even it were just putting the date, time and place at the start of each of the wanderings. No one who is delirious tells a story with the erudition of Chabon and the book is a painful reading experience that i will not complete. I'm reading for pleasure, I don't find this enjoyable at all. I'm angry, more at the lack of editorial gumption to speak up for the reader in the face of an accomplished and generally wonderful author.I read as far as page 110, to the second appearance of Wild Bill Donovan. I will resume reading Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain, which is easier going.

An incredible fusion of fiction and family history.... It’s the caliber of his writing that set's this book apart but it's not without its challenges. The writing is beautiful and crystal clear. He describes everything so thoroughly whether it be moods, landscapes, experiences, places, interactions, emotions, personalities, or life philosophies. For that reason Michael Chabon's autobiographical and fictional "memoir" is an enjoyable read, but there is a but - it is also a frustrating one. Chabon makes a point to let you know that while this story actually happened, his novel is fiction. Admittedly I have picked up this book many times as it took me a while to get into it primarily because I am not interested in the science or mechanics of rocketry. I almost gave up. But I stayed with it and found it a very good read. Sometimes I had to read particular passages twice to be sure I caught the time, context, and character's development. Sometimes I found it confusing as to whether Mr Chabon was talking as himself or of his grandfather or his mother. Nevertheless, Moonglow manages to feel more artful than most memoirs I found it an intoxicating story, (or many stories) touching, sensitive and beautifully written.

In the acknowledgements that conclude MOONGLOW, Michael Chabon mentions the rambling fragmentary memories dictated by his mother’s maternal uncle, who served as a staff sergeant in the 849th Signal Intelligence Service at the Battle of Monte Cassino. According to Chabon, this verbal memoir, dictated by an elderly man who was once a medieval German professor at the University of Texas, is “vivid, intelligent, and wry…” and provided the “spark that kindled” MOONGLOW. Chabon calls this novel, which he positions as a fictional memoir, the “monstrous stepchild” of his great uncle’s reminisces.

In MOONGLOW, Chabon employs an author/character, who his family calls Mike, to relate stories Mike’s normally taciturn grandfather—suddenly talkative from painkillers—tells him while dying of bone cancer. According to Chabon, who can be seen speaking to the JCCSF on YouTube, these stories sort into six different time frames. Not really sure here; but I think these time frames might be:

1) The grandfather has an androgynous adventure during his angry boyhood in Philly.

2) The grandfather is in an intelligence unit during World War II and is trying to stop the Nazi V-2 rocket bombardment of London. (Here, we learn about the crimes of Werner von Braun, while Chabon shows due respect to Pynchon and GRAVITY’S RAINBOW.)

3) The grandfather meets, woos, and marries Mamie, who had nightmarish experiences during World War II and has bouts with incapacitating mental illness, mostly in the 1950’s. In this time period, the angry grandfather does time at Wallkill penitentiary.

4) The grandfather has some mid-life success, thanks to his engineering background, interest in rocketry, and tenaciousness. He finally has a face-to-face with Von Braun.

5) The grandfather has a romantic interlude in the final six months of his life while retaliating for what appears to be the death of Ramon, who is the cat of his girlfriend’s dead husband.

6) Years after Mamie and the grandfather die, Mike interacts in real time. In this time frame, he also miraculously finds records of Mamie’s psychotherapy. These show that Mamie is not who she claims to be.

Despite its six layers of narrative, MOONGLOW is not really a complicated book. But IMHO, some of these narrative layers are less interesting than others. Layer one, for example, seems mostly like a call-out to the LGBT community, where Chabon says he has many loyal readers. Meanwhile, layer six is the old "letter-from-the-past” conceit, where a person, long dead, provides new information and several “whoda thunk” plot twists. Just my opinion; but I side with the grandfather on this and don’t feel these revelations add much.

Chabon is widely considered a brilliant stylist. Nonetheless, awkwardness sometimes enters his prose in layer-six, when the author/character Mike interacts with his own mother or his grandfather’s girlfriend. One quick example from page 327:

“Okay,” I said. I knew that I could not have been that kind of man if I had devoted half of every day to the effort. Part of me never wanted to be anything else.”

See what I mean?

My bet here is that Michael Chabon wanted to separate himself from Mike the narrator of MOONGLOW. This is a literary choice and Michael is definitely a better writer than Mike. Still, the choice produces the occasional clunky sentence.

Chabon has done better but… worthwhile.

While I admit that Michael Chabon is my favorite author and that I’ll read anything he publishes, I won’t go so far as to say that I love every single thing he releases. Gentlemen 0f the Road missed the mark for me, and Telegraph Avenue simply did not connect to my soul like I thought it would.

On the other hand, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is the book I name when someone asks for my ultimate favorite. Nearly all of Chabon’s books are the perfect blend of writing prowess and narrative charisma. He not only writes engaging, relatable stories, but he writes them better from a technical aspect than nearly anyone other contemporary author out there.

So, with all that being said, Moonglow is my second favorite book by Michael Chabon.

Let me tell you a little bit about the plot without spoiling too much. Essentially, in 1989, Chabon visited his dying grandfather. Terminal, Chabon’s mother transported the grandfather from his home in Florida to her home in Oakland. There, while the grandfather fought against death and the painkillers flooding his system, the grandfather did something which had before proven a rare occurrence – he spoke … at great length.

Chabon learned more about his grandfather in that last week of his life than all the years previous. He learned of his grandfather’s misspent youth, his grandfather’s time in the war, his grandfather’s prison stay, his grandfather's kinship with the stars, his grandfather’s struggles with fatherhood, his grandfather’s last months in Florida, his grandfather's obsession with rockets, as well as his grandfather’s passionate love story regarding his grandmother.

Make no mistake, however, this story is not just about the grandfather. The grandmother quickly becomes a star in this book as well. Mysterious, emotional, brave, witty, beautiful, and ultimately unbalanced, Chabon’s grandmother is not what she seems – not to Chabon’s grandfather, his mother, or even to the grandmother herself. In fact, in the end, Chabon is the only one who seems to know the truth about his grandmother. I won’t tell you why or how.

I love this book because his grandfather is the coolest man to have ever lived. You can’t help but think of the best aspects of your own father or grandfather as you read this story, and, believe me, he will remind you in some facet of your own paternal role model. Chabon’s grandfather isn’t perfect, not by any means, but that’s also what makes him so loveable. Plus, as you well know, much like ourselves, our own fathers and grandfathers are not perfect, either.

Chabon also plays with the narrative style quite a bit in this novel. In terms of time, it is not linear. Nothing happens in order, and it’s up to the reader to piece it all together. But Chabon makes it a fairly seamless task for the reader, and in using such a structure, he ultimately builds mystery, suspense, and provides great emotional payoff. Chabon’s choices are right on target; his pacing is a joy to experience; his tone, while at times very somber, is also light and warm in a manner that will draw you in and make you happy. There’s even a great joke about Chabon’s style, delivered from the dying grandfather himself. Be on the lookout for it.

Furthermore, Chabon makes a point to let you know that while this story actually happened, his novel is fiction. He’s the first one to admit that he has taken great liberties without too much care or concern. Some of it is probably word for word truth, and some of it is probably completely fabricated, and the beauty of it is that we, the readers, have no idea how to distinguish one from the other. And to that I say, “Who cares?” In my mind, reality is always a matter of perception. When I read a book, I perceive, interpret, and process the story within my mind, which thus makes the book a part of my own personal reality. As a result, “fiction” and “nonfiction” become a bit of a moot point when it comes to things like this.

I’d also like to say that this is perhaps the most straight-forward of any Chabon novel I’ve ever read. Is it well-executed? Magnificently so! I laugh with my friends that I don’t believe Chabon used the same sentence structure more than once in the entire thing. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but he’s that much of a master at writing. And yet, this novel is easy to digest. It’s easy to follow. It’s not rife with metaphor. It’s got great humor, great sadness, great love, and great action. Oh, what action! The World War II parts of this book set my imagination on fire. In fact, because the grandfather is such an unusual everyman, and because the WWII scenes are so vibrant, I actually gave a copy of this book to my own father for Christmas. I’m not sure when he read a book last, but he made a point today to tell me how much he’s loving Moonglow.

As we live our lives, they, for the most part, probably don’t seem that varied or interesting. Yet, by our life’s ending, I’ll warrant most of our stories could fill a book, and I imagine that most of our children or grandchildren would love to read that story and experience who we were at 15, 35, 55, and even 75. Chabon tapped into something wonderful by utilizing such a concept, and he’s got the talent to make it work. Moonglow has shot to the top of my list of gifts to give friends, family, and coworkers. I truly believe it’s a guaranteed good read for any reader.

How good is this book? The minute I finished it, I turned back to page one and started reading it again. Even better the second time.

A spectacular blooming-lily of a book, Moonglow takes Chabon's grandfather's complicated and hazy-bordered personal family history and reinterprets it through the lens of history, generations, borders, events, and the distance of time. Chabon is a master storyteller, picking up a genre and running with what looks like an effortlessly spectacular success. This book was no less awe-evoking than the other books of his I have read, namely Wonderboys, Kavalier and Clay, and The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Every experience with Chabon's writing is a new one. Moonglow is a text that wanders through the facts and fictions of Chabon's grandfather's life that include WWII, the development of a rocket program he was involved in, love affairs, parenthood, and the million other things we all carry around with us to make up a life. His grandfather's like, even with the fictional aspects included, was an amazing one. This novel presents perhaps the most effective execution of a fictional oral history - it faces down the facts of life and plays with the fictions of memory to create a brilliant and engrossing narrative. It simply is one of the most amazing portraits of a man in the prose format that most closely resembles the way we tell such stories. A wonder of a book.

Chabon's moving and heartfelt novel is a family saga that reinvents the memoir form. It's subject/narrator is Chabon's own "grandfather," perhaps both his literal grandfather and the grandfather Chabon has created for this novel. Through his recollections, the reader is treated to an adventure through the 20th century, births and deaths and marriage and wars... yet, at the end, MOONGLOW is a thoughtful portrait of a grandfather and a grandmother. Readers of Chabon's past work will find him doing something new, and superbly, wonderful here. For readers new to Chabon, this is an excellent place to start.

Moonglow was our July book group read and of the 14 group members, only (1) liked the book (I did not like it).

The book was nearly 500 pages and touted as fictional, non fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel and disguised as a memoir. The story unfolds as a deathbed confession of sorts of a man referred to only as "my grandfather". Over the course of a week the reader hears tales of war, marriage, sex, the space program and more.

Here's what some of our book group members had to say -

--the story seemed to lack focus and was hard to follow and confusing
oftentimes, the players were unnamed and you didn't know who was being written about
--couldn't connect to the characters
--the story switched back and forth in time too often, it was not put together well.
--some really didn't care what happened to the grandfather as he came across as a mean child who grew into a mean man.

I generally fine Chabon's fiction to be highly engaging, entertaining, and satisfying. This latest one only hit the first two of those, so while I enjoyed it in fits and starts, and certainly found scenes and characters that I loved, at the end of it all it fell a little flat. It's hard not to place the blame for this on the highly autobiographical nature of the book -- Chabon has described it as an attempt to grapple with his family history, and with the book's narrator named "Mike," he isn't exactly straining to mask that.

It's basically the story of one set of his grandparents -- his grandfather from Philly who had a bent for engineering that led him into rocketry and an obsession with space travel, and his French grandmother who escaped the Holocaust but carried lifelong mental illnesses from it. The story flips from past to present, telling their individual stories, as well as those of their meeting, marriage, and death.

It's a bit imbalanced though, because the grandfather comes across far more alive and vibrantly than the grandmother. The best sections are those detailing his wartime experiences in London and Germany, as part of a special unit seeking to capture German rocket technology and engineers. Equally strong are the portions about his grandfather's last years in a Florida retirement community, and romance with a neighbor. These all carry the keen sense of place and character, as well as a strong line of dark humor that are too lacking in the sections about the grandmother.

All that said, sub-par Chabon is still better than 90% of the stuff out there, so it's worth checking out, especially if you tend to enjoy his writing.

It’s interesting Chabon labels Moonglow a novel right on the cover, because it’s also has one foot in the memoir camp. The character Michael appears, but the book is only tangentially about him, somewhat about his mother, and mostly about her parents. And what a fascinating set of grandparents he has! The story is based in truth—bolstered by footnotes as an occasional reality check—and leavened with humor. Yet many details and conversations must have sprung from Chabon’s impeccable imagination and his obvious love for two characters called only “my grandfather” and “my grandmother” throughout.
His grandmother, a beautiful and elegant Frenchwoman, survived World War II and the camps. With little more than a set of fortune-telling cards that would be springboards for stories she told her grandson, she emigrated to Baltimore. There the would-be Dolly Levis of the synagogue hoped to match her up with their young rabbi. The night they were to meet at a temple social event, the rabbi dragged his unwilling brother along, and a match was made, just not the one the women expected.
The Frenchwoman had a daughter already (Chabon’s mother), but his grandfather accepted her a hundred percent, as is. And “as is” was not easy. She suffered from severe bouts of depression that resulted in several hospitalizations, and the delusion that a skinless horse lay in wait for her. Nevertheless, they were a good pair. Keeping bad news away from her, as the grandfather insisted upon, “suited his furtive nature. She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”
The main story is the grandfather’s, and the premise of the book is that he was close-mouthed throughout life until the week before he died, when he told Chabon everything. “Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from,” Chabon says.
Chabon skips gleefully back and forth across time and space in recounting his grandfather’s World War II experience (where he participated in Operation Paperclip, an effort to snatch up the German rocket experts before the Russians could get them), his lifelong fascination with rocketry and model-building (NASA obtained some of his precisely detailed models), his prison experience, businesses built and lost, and a late-life romance in a Florida retirement village where a giant python was stealing the pets.
In short, the grandfather reveals and Chabon skillfully assembles and polishes a treasure chest of experiences, Dickensian in their variety, one to be explored with delight and wonder.
For very good reason, Moonglow was selected by numerous publications as a “best book” of 2016.

Sometimes, a book doesn't feel like a book. It feels more like a visit. This was one of those times. Michael Chabon's grandfather moved right on in and sat at my side. Despite the physical description, I couldn't help it--I saw him as Alan Arkin. And there you go.

I was hooked from the start. All the characters were well drawn, made me want to know more about them, felt like people I knew. But it was grandpa--as a young man, as a middle-aged man, as an aged man--that had my ear. And was he telling me a true story all the time? I don't know. I don't know if anyone is, at least all the time. This book was so much about secrets--different people keeping important things from others--that in the end, it felt to me like what mattered was not so much the truth of grandpa's--or, for that matter. grandma's--story, but whether grandpa was satisfied with it. No one can ever know what ruly happened to someone else, especially people who have lived through traumatic events of the maginitude of WWI and the Holocaust. The best they can hope for is to understand the emotional truth from those who were there.

Rising author Michael Chabon is spending the last days of his grandfather's life with the dying man. The old man has finally relented to telling some of the stories of his unique life to the young man. How much of the tale is augmented and adjusted by time, how much by the powerful prescription painkillers keeping the cancer's wrath at bay – and how much by telling one's life story to a man who makes his living telling fantastic moralistic tales?

Author Chabon makes no secret of the fact that this life story of his grandfather blurs the line between fact and fiction, but rather weaves the two components into a touching salute to the man who provided his greatest influence in life. How much is fact, and how much is simply invented? We'll never know. What we DO find out is that a number of influences in the old man's life combined to form, mold, and evolve him - Wernher Von Braun, Alger Hiss, Nevermore the Night Witch of late night Baltimore TV, and some documentary on feral animals in Florida, for example.

Chabon is not above picking on himself, as well, as when Grandfather admonishes the young man to tell his story in chronological order rather than that “jumping then and now” style the boy employs. (NOTE: Chabon does NOT follow this advice in the book – and he revels in it.)

All in all, a loving tribute not only to family, BUT to the America of the 20th century. For Grandfather's tale, triumphs and failures, IS the tale of the United States from the 1930s through the 1990s

RATING: 5 stars

DISCLOSURE: I was provided with a complimentary copy of this book in a random draw without obligation, although it was suggested that an honest review posted promptly would be greatly appreciated.

Michael Chabon plays with memories and the memoir form in his new book, Moonglow, which is billed as a novel. The Chabonic narrator is helping to take care of his taciturn grandfather as he lays dying. The meds have loosened his tongue and his grandson is happy in this one sense: his grandfather is talking at last.

Early on in the book, Chabon’s narrator says: “To claim or represent that I retain an exact or even approximate recollection of what anyone said so long ago would be to commit the memoirist’s great sin.” Is the author toying with us? It would seem so because what we have here, weaving in and out of different timelines, are stories and dialogue that are ‘recalled’ with crystal clarity: the grandfather’s spell in prison, his end-of-wartime exploits as part of an intelligence unit sent to track down the cream of Germany’s rocket scientists and spirit them to the States before the Russians can get their hands on them. (The grandfather - a passionate follower of the space programme and an inspired engineer himself - might even have been a rocket man in another life.) He recounts the story of how he met the narrator’s grandmother, a French refugee with terrible memories leading to profound mental illness. When the narrator, as a young boy, asks why his grandma owns a deck of fortune-telling cards, is it because she is a witch? She replies, “Not anymore.” But she certainly bewitches the grandfather who cares for her deeply. When they first meet, she is already the mother of a young daughter. The grandfather, whose name we never learn, has no blood tie to the narrator at all.

This is a book with tremendous heart: a serenade to family told with Michael Chabon’s customary command and into which he effortlessly injects his own natural warmth and good humour. Despite Chabon’s flagrant flouting of the grandfather’s exhortation to: “Put the whole thing in chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you”, the style reflects an old man’s wandering reminiscences. Moonglow is woven with great tales and dotted with brilliant characters - none more so than the grandfather with whom I ended up quite in love. I would imagine that on book tours this Pulitzer Prize-winning writer must be asked incessantly: “How much of Moonglow is true?” But does it matter? And if this really is a memoir, how I envy the author because the plain fact is that by the time most of us become interested in our family history, it’s too late to get the answers to our questions. Chabon got lucky. So are the readers who love his books.

Michael Chabon’s latest novel, Moonglow, opens with the following:

“In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to the facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.”

Anyone familiar with Chabon’s work will recognize his belief in elevating narrative over “truth,” or to put it another way, to acknowledge that Truth is always out of reach and thus is shaped by narrative. It’s safe, then, to say that we shouldn’t take Moonglow, which purports to be a biography of Chabon’s late grandfather, at face value. Out of fact and fiction, Chabon weaves a tale that spans a good chunk of the 20th century, but never loses sight of the beauty to be found in a life at turns ordinary and singular.

As the story goes, shortly after finishing his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, in 1989, a younger Michael Chabon found himself beside his ailing grandfather’s hospital bed. During his final weeks, Chabon’s grandfather unfolds a sprawling personal narrative of a Jewish-American whose life was disrupted by World War II and who struggled to maintain a family in postwar America, ultimately constructing a sturdy middle class life that was more easily obtainable and also expected in the second half of the twentieth century. Along the way, Chabon’s grandfather (who is never given a proper name) endures a stint in jail and the reverberations of traumas both global and familial.

Moonglow finds Chabon continuing to turn his attentions to the everyday interpersonal lives of his characters, much like his previous novel Telegraph Avenue, which took as its subject two music nerds living in the Oakland area. At the time, Telegraph Avenue was a departure from his more conceptually ambitious works, like The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The most surprising change in Moonglow is Chabon’s more restrained style. You won’t find the kind of stylistic gambles as there were in Telegraph Avenue, such as an entire chapter consisting of a single unhinged sentence or a visit from a pre-presidential Barack Obama into the lives of Chabon’s fictional characters. Some of these artistic wagers worked (the former) while others fell flat (the latter). By reining in his linguistic trickery, Chabon fashions a tone that’s appropriate for a more intimate and personal narrative, even if not everything in Moonglow is to believed.

That’s not to say that Moonglow isn’t a beautifully written novel just like everything Chabon has produced. Read this short passage about Chabon’s grandmother, who escaped Europe only after the atrocities of World War II:

“There were days, however, when being left with my grandmother was not very different from being left along. She lay on the sofa or on her bed with the curtains drawn and a cool cloth folded over her eyes. These days had their own lexicon: cafard, algie, crise de foie. In 1966 (the date of my earliest memories of her) she was only forty-three, but the war, she said, had ruined her stomach, her sinuses, the joints of her bones (she never said anything about what the war might have done to her mind). If she had promised to look after me on one of her bad days, she would rally long enough to persuade my parents, or herself, that she was up to the task. But then it--something--would come over her and we would leave the movie theater halfway through the show, conclude the recital after a single poem, walk out of the supermarket abandoning an entire cart of groceries in the middle of the aisle.” (19)

Just in this passage, you get a sense of Chabon’s innate sense of detail. He makes use of parenthesis to indicate his split understanding of these experiences, one that’s contemporaneous and another that clearly occurs years later. And then there’s how Chabon chooses to reach towards the hidden trauma his grandmother has endured, using pronouns and French words to prevent us from ever fully grasping this penumbral history. While Chabon has largely avoided the syntactical backflips of some of his other works, his writing is just as powerful as ever.

The themes common to Chabon remain in tact. As ever, he’s interested in Jewish identity, nostalgia, and mid-twentieth century history and technology. The most immediately gripping portion of Moonglow occurs during grandfather’s service in WW II. As an engineer, grandfather is tasked with capturing both a V-2 rocket and the Nazi scientist, Wernher von Braun, a man who was never punished for his involvement in Hitler’s regime. Instead, he was pardoned by the United States and enlisted into the emerging space race. The story of Von Braun and the V-2 rocket speak to the multilayered aspect of nostalgia. We venerate WW II as the good war while often overlooking the moral compromises endemic to every armed conflict.

The rocket becomes a reoccurring motif through much of Moonglow. Chabon writes of the V-2:

“None of that, however, could be blamed on the rocket, my grandfather thought, or on the man, von Braun, who had designed it. The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all its analogs in suffering, failure, and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. To pack the thing with a ton of amatol, to hobble it so that instead of tearing loose once and for all from the mundane pull, it only arced back to earth and killed the people among whom it fell, was to abuse it.” (167)

Like William Blake’s “Tyger,” the rocket is both beautiful and fearful. This image of the rocket reverse engineers the technological utopianism found in postwar America. The rocket is a symbol of human endeavor, but in reality more often becomes a tool of violence. This is also a reminder that technology does not exist outside of culture and history, but rather is always bent to the will of its users. In our present age of technological fetishism, it’s useful to consider technological progress does not automatically lead to human progress.

Moonglow can be read as a story of the twentieth century as filtered through a particular American family. In this sense, there are some interesting parallels between Chabon’s latest and the Chinese author Mo Yan’s novel of the mid-twentieth century, Red Sorghum. Like Chabon, much of Mo Yan’s novel takes place during WW II/the Second Sino-Japanese War, and he refers to characters solely in accordance to their familial relationship to the narrator (father, grandfather, grandmother, etc.). Despite the countless amount of reminiscing we’ve spent on the twentieth century, we’re still forced to look back, attempting to make sense of the strange mix of destruction and unbridled optimism that impossibly stood side by side. And in doing so, we might somehow understand where we are and how we might move forward.

For me it was so bad after the first three chapters, I put it down. I also purchased one for a gift, I called my friend and apologized for the gift and told them to not take time to read it.
very disappointing.

Although it is not fast paced storytelling, Moonglow is sure and steady with a couple of surprises thrown in. The stories told in the book are that of the lifetime, predominately the war years and afterwards, of the author's grandfather as told to Michael Chabon while he visited the dying man. A life's tales are always interesting, but what makes these particular recollections a little more unique, perhaps, is their intersection with the hunt for Wernher Von Braun and the space race. Chabon does a good job of bringing that time period to life through the obsession that possessed both his grandfather and American society as a whole at that time. There is also the parallel unveiling of the life story of Chabon's grandmother whose mental illness direly affected the whole family. Two of my favorite parts of the book are the descriptions of the myriad of model space craft that covered the surfaces of his grandfather's house and the late in life courtship of his neighbor, Sally, as they seek her lost cat -- or revenge on the snake? alligator? that may be responsible for its disappearance. These are just some of the small details that weave to form Moonglow and the life that it depicts.

At the start of Moonglow, Chabon's unnamed grandfather - a feisty Jewish engineer with a rocket fixation who served in World War Two and later married a woman who turned out to have mental health issues - is at the end of his life. As the drugs to ease his pain take hold, he starts to tell stories no one in the family had ever heard before. This at least is the premise of the novel, which may or may not be largely true. Chabon as narrator says the book is based in fact - it's dotted with footnotes - but Chabon the novelist is playing with us and does so delightfully. It's a story of love,war, lust and rage and the hero's growing realization that the war widow he married - she has a number tattooed on her arm, just like concentration camp survivors did - is prey to dangerous delusions and may be hiding something from him. It's also a story of survival techniques and how much truth an individual can absorb at any one moment. Even though the narrative regularly jumps back and forth, and occasionally wanders off into a dead end, the book is never lesss that absorbing. The only reason I give it four stars rather than five is that Chabon does rather cheat when he reveals his grandmother's secret, taking a shortcut that seems far too convenient. Overall, though, this is highly recommended.

I really liked Moonglow, so much so that I've been telling friends to check it out. I'm a longtime Chabon reader, but frankly don't like everything he writes. This one, however, is a return to form and a tour de force--to me, MUCH better than its predecessor, Telegraph Avenue. Like Kavalier & Clay and Yiddish Policemen, which I also loved, this one reflects on mid-20th century America and touches on vaguely Jewish themes--his strengths, I think. He's also best with short sentences, which he employs here with precision and grace. The narrative jumps around a lot chronologically, and perhaps some of the details and digressions could have been expunged, but the story builds to a satisfying conclusion that rings true. (The title seems to have multiple meanings: the moonglow of nostalgia, of madness, of the compulsion to reach for the stars.) Do read the acknowledgments, which made me laugh out loud. This novel is sure to score many more book prizes. Congratulations, Michael!

There are flashes of brilliant writing and some great metaphors and I enjoyed the description and action in Florida, "my neck of the woods", particularly along the Spacecoast. Some of the characters are interesting but I had major problems getting back to the book and being lured into more than a few pages at a time. The meandering pace, digressive approach and attention to minutiae got pretty boring at times. Actually had to forestall starting a book I was looking forward to by promising that as my reward once I made it through this. This one just did not work for me despite the quality of the writing.

Moonglow brings Michael Charon back in true form (I didn't enjoy his last novel Telegraph Avenue). Moonglow is filled with the gorgeous writing I've come to expect from Chabon. (Yes, some complain about Chabon's overly intricate prose and detailed metaphors, but I enjoy the excess. Chabon clearly enjoys the English language.) The story is a big family epic that spans generations and locations. It is told in a way that is intentionally disjointed. Just about every chapter jumps to a different character and time period, and it can take some time to figure out where and when you are at the beginning of each chapter. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, but now that I am finished, I find that I still have difficulty explaining to myself the narrative arc in chronological order. The novel's structure makes it difficult to hold on to a cohesive story, but isn't that how complicated family narratives often are? I liked this novel overall.

Moonglow is a fictionalized memoir that focuses, for the most part, on the author's/speaker's (possibly Chabon's) maternal grandparents. I suppose it challenges what truth in writing and what the memoir really means, and probably a lot of other smart things, but I couldn't care less about any of that. When I read Chabon, it's for one thing: the writing. For me it's like eating a big slice of chocolate cake that I want both to devour and savor at the same time. His sentences are beautiful and wonderful and probably self-indulgent with an amazing hit/miss ratio of, I would say, 25:1. If you hate that kind of rich writing, Chabon is probably not for you, especially Moonglow, because, while I really enjoyed it and it's definitely worth reading for Chabon fans, it's not quite as good as his earlier works like Mysteries of Pittsburgh or Kavalier and Clay. But what is?

Fans of finely written literary fiction can celebrate the latest novel by Michal Chabon titled, Moonglow. With the cleverness I’ve come to anticipate from this fine author, Chabon offers this work as a memoir, structures it as a novel, and uses deep autobiographic resources to bring the characters to vibrant life. The novel’s narrator refers to the protagonist as his grandfather, and much of the plot involves what the grandson learns about his grandfather at the very end of the grandfather’s life. Sex, prison, invading Germany in WWII, secrets, lies, regrets, the Space Race: all these elements flow out in rich detail and fine prose. Chabon maintains energy throughout the novel despite adding layers of complexity. This fine writer tells a great story about storytelling, and does it using such finely crafted prose and such insight into character that at times he took my breath away.

Rating: Five-star (I love it)

Michael Chabon is, of course, a gifted prose stylist, and that's the novel's greatest strength. His grandfather's prickly, uncompromising personality is another. I listened to the Audible version, and the dialogue from the grandfather reminded me of A Man Called Ove, another irascible oldtimer. Chabon's grandfather is arguably the more interesting character, but Man Called Ove had a straightforward narrative progression that made it an easy read, whereas Moonglow is rather laborious. I can't say whether the fragmented narrative, which jumps around in time, particularly served this novel's purpose, or not. However, I do feel that the various story lines were, on the whole, anticlactic. A better payoff at the end would have made the book much more satisfying.

There is no doubt that Michael Chabon is a fine writer. He has skills at description, nuance and at times irony. That being said, here he has little to say. This is a book about a dysfunctional family whose lives are for the most part mundane. Even when there is potential impact such as the main character’s relationship to World War II in general and Wernher Von Braun in particular, he wanders into acute descriptions of the man’s sexual and other activities after the death of his wife. The narration is far from linear. The story, if there even is one, centers on the narrator’s criminal grandfather, his psychotic grandmother and his mother’s poor childhood under the direction of her parents. Very little happens of note, although furniture, feelings, aromas, dishes and food are described with acute detail. So, yes, Mr. Chabon is very skilled, but do you really want to read this book? He also does some really strange things. He places actual minor characters into the book and gives them dialog and stature, albeit fleeting and without context. An example is Dr. Walter Wallack, the warden of Wallkill State Prison in New York when the main character was serving a sentence for assault in the 1950’s. As for the prose, while Mr. Chabon is skilled, sometimes he goes off the tracks. The smell of a tooth under the drill? The color of a manila folder? A sound that I could see? Intellectual horniness? Is that what passes for great postmodern literature? Mr. Chabon does well to pay homage to the other postmodernist Thomas Pynchon and his Gravity’s Rainbow. Both novels are virtually impossible to read although Mr. Chabon’s writing loses one through ennui rather than complexity. So, do you want to read a novel by an extremely gifted writer with little to say? I wouldn’t. It would be like seeing Robert Motherwell paint your ceiling white or watching Sandy Koufax go bowling. Sure he’s great, but what he writes, in the end, is not.

This is a book that is hard to categorize. I have not read any of Chabon's other books so I have nothing else to compare it too. I will say that after reading it, it makes me want to read some of his other books. This book is a fictional(?) account of his grandfathers life beginning from childhood to his death in 1990. It is not a sequential narrative and jumps from time and place slowly reveling his grandfathers very complex life and the many interesting people he meets during it. While not obviously fiction, if it is not his grandfather definitely lead and interesting life if it is not. This is a book that is hard to categorize but I can say that it will keep you reading and while there is not a straight forward plot it is definitely entertaining.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon

After reading "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" some years back, I was excited to take a look at Chabon's new book. It's a fictionalized account of his grandfather's life after Chabon had an extended conversation with his maternal grandfather when the old man was dying in 1989.

Chabon's characters are complex, flawed and multidimensional and his grandfather is no exception. His grandfather's story begins when he's a boy and follows him through young adulthood, military service during WWII, married life, a stint in prison and through to old age, assisted living and death. This book is a novel wrapped in an autobiography disguised as a memoir. It's hard to summarize this novel, as the plot is not linear but instead darts back and forth across time and topic.

I did not enjoy the first person point of view. I felt that I was just skimming the book because I could not identify with the main character. It was hard to finish the novel. I found my mind wandering as I read. I just couldn't care. So disappointed.

Reflected light, filtered light, refracted light, radiant darkness, darkness visible, lunar eclipse, new moon, dark of the moon. Sunlight--"how exposure to light and air was destroying what centuries of darkness had preserved." Throughout Michael Chabon's novel, Moonglow, he evokes images of light and darkness, of the "glow" of a "blob" in space that might or might not be a cosmic dust cloud, of the affinity of darkness and silence and night as constants, contrasted with the fluidity and deception and transience of words and daylight. Family relationships, whether ongoing or remembered, are experienced as unstable and undependable, replete with deception, shapechanging, disguise and confusion, constructed characters and personalities belied by revelations of their underlying persons, often absent persons. Presence and absence--whether physical or in the realm of memory, whether experienced or learned by listening to the stories told by a relative who is facing death.

Much of this novel is devoted to the narrative of the life of the main character's grandfather, who is terminally ill with cancer and facing, within weeks or even days, certain death. The narrator (both Chabon himself and not-Chabon but a construct) recounts the stories of the grandfather's experiences, some of which offer him, by inference, information about his own father, whom he has only known in brief encounters, always constructed to conceal the truth of his father's situation. Deception, disguise, failures of communication, all are part of the experiences of the young man whom the narrator has become, trying to sort through the confusions in his memories of his grandmother (a woman who was mentally ill, but fascinating to the young boy who is now grown and trying to remember or understand why she did the things she would do with him), and coming to terms with his mother and the memories of his father. The chronological shifts backward and forward are intricate but accessible as the reader follows the patterns of the competing versions of his family history.

It is important to note that Chabon, in an "author's note," refers to this book as a "memoir," and we are reminded of its basis in fact at the end, so it is to be understood as "based on a true story, as told to the author," and that we must respect. But it reads like a novel and our experience of it is comparable to that of a number of other novels of the past 30 or 40 years, recursive, often lyrical, and always subversive of confidence in the factual basis of memories, of the corrosive effects of passing time on remembered "realities." The epigraph at the beginning of the work is a quotation credited to the rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, a character who becomes central to the life of the narrator's grandfather (and this may be taken as factual, if fictionalized): "There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." As an epigraph, this both illuminates and problematizes the narratives that follow. The novel/memoir is fascinating, sometimes horrific, sometimes quite beautiful. It may be Chabon's best work, though we will wonder whether we have been given a tour of hell.

Part memoir part fictional multi-generational family history (totally intentional – what even is factual memoir anyway? See previous book and general idea that peoples’ memories are notoriously unreliable). Never having revealed a great deal of his life to his grandson, ‘Mike’ Chabon’s grandfather regales him with stories from his and other relatives’ pasts while on his deathbed. The result is really beautiful prose, super stylish storytelling, and that truly Chabonesque combo of eccentricity and hard-boiled truth. Not for those who want a linear narrative, the story is formed more like memory itself: seemingly random and abrupt but carrying with it all the meaning in the world.

Moonglow, by Michael Chabon, tells a fictionalized history of his immediate family centered on being with his grandfather during the last two weeks before he succumbed to a painful cancer. His grandfather was a man not given to personal revelation, but under the influence of powerful painkillers and his imminent demise, he reveals the story of his life with Michael’s grandmother and mother. None of these key figures in Michael’s life are ever named, nor is his father. The reminiscences are possibly incorrect or self-serving as is Michael’s reportage. “Whatever liberties have been taken … they have been taken with due abandon.”

This novel takes the form of a non-linear narrative delving into the history reported by the grandfather on his deathbed. The grandfather was an engineer and has a history wound up in dreams of space travel from starting some time before WW II to the the landing on the moon and beyond. During WW II he was seeking to capture as much as possible of the Nazi missile program directed by Werner Von Braun. The grandfather helped liberate the V-2 complex and attendant concentration camps. He was an engineer enthralled by the possibility of space flight, sharing this dream with Von Braun and others, but his experience in the war showed him that Von Braun was not an innocent scientist and that the U.S. government was amoral in whitewashing Von Braun’s name.

The emotionally broken grandmother is a French jew who comes to the U.S. with a young daughter, Michael’s mother. Grandfather and grandmother meet at an affair at a local synagogue where the local yentas are trying to connect grandmother to the new rabbi, She is tormented by insane visions and is deeply loved by the grandfather. One day she breaks from reality once again, tormented by the image of a flayed horse. The grandfather is subsequently fired from his job and takes out his rage by choking his boss with the cord from a telephone. He is sentenced to 20 months in jail. While in jail he builds model rockets for the warden’s son. The launch of one of these rockets is witnessed by the Michael’s great-uncle who sees a market for these devices. Upon the grandfather’s release he becomes a partner in the company making the rockets for sale.

There is much sadness in this story as well as many secrets and lies. The grandfather is a brilliant and very private man with deep passions and a fascinating history. We never know the grandmother’s real or complete history. The mother is also complex and difficult. The father is more or less absent.

The narrative held my interest as it kept bouncing around in time, revealing a complex and beautiful story. The writing is spellbinding. It has both the ring of truth and the consistent flow of fine literature.

Michael Chabon’s wonderful “Moonglow” is a fictionalized memoir of his family history, based on Chabon’s maternal grandfather’s story, portions of which his grandfather shares at the end of his life. We first meet Chabon’s grandfather in 1957, as he is attempting to strangle the president of the company he works for with the frayed end of a telephone cord. As you might expect, that activity lands him in jail for some time. Of course there is a before attempted murder and an after.

In 1941 (before the ineffective strangulation attempt) after obtaining an engineering degree and specializing in hustling pool, grandfather enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers, where “His frugality with words got interpreted variously but to his advantage as manliness, self-possession, imperviousness.” He enlisted one day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and shortly after his enlistment he is sent to officer candidate school in Virginia.

Due to the proximity of Washington DC, and his apparent restlessness, grandfather writes up a plan to take over Washington DC and begins, with the assistance of his roommate, to plot the bombing of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. That activity gets him promoted to the Office of Strategic Services, where he is sent to Germany and spends much of the war unsuccessfully hunting Wernher Von Braun, the inventor of the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. Von Braun crops up throughout the book. The novel includes chilling descriptions of the Nazi war machine manufacturing facilities.

Grandfather’s brother, Ray, is an unlikely Rabbi and when grandfather returns to the US after the war, he moves in with Ray. Grandfather accompanies Ray to Ray’s synagogue’s Monte Carlo night and meets Chabon’s grandmother (who was supposed to meet and fall in love with Ray). Grandmother grew up in a convent after the rest of her family was sent to and died at Auschwitz. She ultimately became a displaced person and came to America. Grandfather immediately fell in love with her, despite her deep seated emotional issues. “She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”

Grandmother is in and out of mental institutions and Chabon’s mother at some point is sent to live with Uncle Ray, well after Ray has given up the ill suited rabbi thing. Grandfather goes through a variety of jobs and vocations and somehow is always able to keep things together.

There is a lot going on in this book, all of it fascinating and brilliantly described. The novel moves back and forth through time seamlessly. Chabon is a master writer, his descriptions of time, place and feeling are vivid. When grandmother goes missing on Halloween 1952, grandfather goes searching for her and describes the scene as follows: “A dreamlike river of children coursing in and out of shadow, pooling on stoops, and out there somewhere a woman with a crack in her brain that was letting in shadows and leaking dreams.” A description like no other.

This novel is a gem. Read it!

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Near the middle of Michael Chabon’s MOONGLOW, which is framed as a series of stories told by Chabon’s dying grandfather (known only as “my grandfather”) to Chabon himself, his grandfather offers a remarkable statement about the weight of regret: “All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That’s what they tell you to do. But when you’re old, you look back and you see all you did with all that time is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn’t finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn’t last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they’re all still around.” This passage not only sums up a lot of what aging feels like, but also effectively encapsulates several of the themes of the grandfather’s stories as they’re related in Chabon’s account.

These include more recent stories, such as Chabon’s grandfather’s misadventures stalking an overgrown python he suspects of preying on small pets (including a scrappy cat owned by his new paramour) at his Florida retirement community. There are also stories from earlier in the man’s life, such as his rage-fueled attack on his boss, followed by his incarceration at a minimum-security prison, during which he curries favor with the head warden by designing toy rockets for the warden’s son. And there are powerful, harrowing and occasionally funny wartime stories, ranging from his ill-conceived intentions to prove the ease of a malevolent attack on Washington, DC, to his eventual mission that leads him to the infamous Nordhausen concentration camps. Throughout is woven the enigmatic historical figure of Wernher von Braun, as well as the history of the US space program and its dark and complicated origins in German technology during World War II.

Along the way, we are offered glimpses into the relationship between Chabon’s grandfather and grandmother, as well as his own relationship with his grandmother, who suffered from mental illness during most of his mother’s childhood and whose own secrets form the crux of one of the novel’s central mysteries.

The stories are revealed gradually, intercut with one another and with glimpses of the more present-day interactions between grandfather and grandson. Chabon struggles to make sense of all he’s hearing and, later, how much of the conversations (and subsequent research into his grandmother’s story, in particular) he should reveal to his mother, who herself has not heard all these stories in such detail.

Initially, this intermixing can feel disorienting to the reader, as can Chabon’s intentional blurring of the lines of traditional genres (is this a fictionalized memoir? An autobiographical novel?) and his deliberate avoidance of personal names for all but a handful of characters. His departure from a traditional plot in favor of a more impressionistic encapsulation of memory also takes a while to get used to. But once readers are willing to surrender to his often lovely prose and discover, along with the author, the stories that comprise a life, reading MOONGLOW is a pure pleasure.

During that same conversation, Chabon’s grandfather tells his grandson, “After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you.” In the end, no one but Chabon will ever really know where history and memory end and fiction and metaphor begin in these pages. But at some point it ceases to matter, as those questions are outweighed by the value of these stories, which are so beautifully told.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl

It's no secret Chabon is a gifted writer, but this faux-memoir is so convincingly crafted as to cause me to go online multiple times while reading and look up certain facts and people to verify potential veracity. This is a terrifically compelling story of a fascinating man and his mysterious wife set against the backdrop of the American space program with specific attention given to ex-Nazi Werner Von Braun and his rocket science. You won't just be entertained, you'll be smarter for having read this one.

Moonglow is a joy. Moonglow is a disappointment.

Chabon’s writing is so wonderful that it makes Moonglow a joy to read. Every passage, every character, every setting is beautifully crafted and fully engages and immerses the reader. If only other authors had half his talent… Unfortunately Chabon’s gift of writing does little to offset that lack of compelling story.

I was so bored with Moonglow at the half-way point (approx. page 200 of a 428 page hardcover) that I had to set it down for about a month before I could muster the energy to finish it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it – I did. It was just that it was so dull that the more I read the less enthusiastic I was to read more.

I finished it with a flurry as I was anxious to close it for good and crack open the book on the top of my To-Be-Read pile. Though there was so much to like about it, the malaise that accompanied it ultimately compels me to give Moonglow a “Don’t Bother Reading” rating.

Said to be inspired by a stoic grandfather's sudden verbosity on his deathbed, Moonglow is fictionalized account of Chabon's family that focuses mainly on his maternal grandparents.

Like Knausgaard's fictional memoirs, one is never sure where the truth starts or stops, and with that fiction label it really doesn't matter. The story feels true however, and I found myself forgetting at times that at the very least it is truth exaggerated or significantly added upon.

While there is a serious risk of navel gazing with an attempt such as this, I never got the sense that this was so with Moonglow. None of Chabon's contemplations feel useless and his tie-ins from his grandfathers military service to his work with and interest in NASA and Wernher Von Braun were beautifully expressed. What most affected me however was the painful and sincere feeling portrayal of his grandmother's mental illness. Especially since her struggles occurred in a time when such illness wasn't so easy to talk about. Her brilliance and her pain were on full display and I sensed devotion and respect from the author both for his grandmother and her eccentricities and his grandfather and his noble handling of their private pains.

This is a beautifully constructed novel with the kind of readable and brilliant prose that will remind readers of The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay and is likely to be in the discussion for 2017's major awards.

Note: Free ARC received from publisher via Edelweiss

I had previously read another novel by Michael Chabon—The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—and really liked his writing. I’ve had another of his books on my To Read list forever, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. But, Moonglow was getting such attention that I decided to read it first. (And, I liked the cover art.) It’s a very personal novel—his family history. It centers on his maternal grandfather’s life of dissatisfaction and perseverance. But, the entire family is included in the story. Interestingly, the author chose to continually refer to these characters by their relation to him: my mother, my grandfather, my uncle, etc. Therefore, it felt especially personal. I’m not sure why he chose to include his family members’ actual names instead of declaring the novel to be pure fiction populated with anonymous characters. I have a hunch that it is more interesting to the reader knowing that these people really existed and really played a role in making the man Chabon became. Indeed while parts are charming and parts are extremely interesting, it’s mostly fairly boring to anyone other than the author. I suppose boring isn’t the write word. I just mean that it’s not an amazing story most of the time—just average life stories and experiences. And, I suspect that’s another reason he kept it real. But there are certainly interesting stories in his family history and he does not shy away from including the ugly stuff.

I’m not sure that I completely trust Chabon to have told us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is mainly because The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was an “alternate history” of Alaska. The historical background of the setting seemed completely plausible but was entirely false. So, since Chabon is so creative about possibilities and is, after all, a successful fiction author, I’m sure he has taken liberties in his stories within Moonglow. There is certainly much more detail than is plausibly remembered. But, as with the other novel, I enjoyed Chabon’s use of the English language and I liked his story-telling for the most part. I was shocked when he got extremely personal about his grandfather’s sex life a couple of times. I would be surprised if his grandfather actually described the sexual position he and his wife shared on one occasion and his premature ejaculation another time, as examples. And, for such a personal book, I assume he took into account that his descendants would likely read this novel but he decided to put that stuff in anyway. It’s just interesting to me.

The narrator, George Newbern, had a very pleasant voice. He wasn’t the best with different voices, but not terrible. The grandfather’s voice was recognizable and consistent throughout which was most important. Newbern’s accents were pretty good. I give him an A- for this novel. I struggled a bit with the timeframe jumping around in the story as often happens with audiobooks. I’m sure it was easier for book readers because they were able to refer to the written years on the pages. Another disadvantage for audiobook listeners in this case is that the audiobook excluded the many footnotes that appear in the actual book. I happened to grab a free copy of this book at the ALA Midwinter Convention in January so I browsed through it a few times to go back and catch things—particularly the spelling of Aughenbaugh. (I often will give priority to audiobooks because I tend to have more time to listen to stories when I’m in the car and going on walks than to read actual books while my classes are in session.)

I will keep Kavalier and Clay on my To Read list because I would like to read another book by this author.

Simply put, a beautifully written novel. I prefer it to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It is fascinating in that the author can connect the immediate threads of family, love, mental issues, and anger with the larger themes of WW2 and the development of rocketry as guided by Wernher von Braun. And yet, each scene comes across as very personal and intimate.

This is a really wonderful book. I am not a Chabon fan but I had trouble putting this down. No it is not like action, action. But it it interesting, well written, and has a story that keeps you interested. There is humor, it is not ostentatious which some of his books have been. His grandfather is a real character and the stories from WWII are not always easy to read but worth reading and sometimes humorous. This is worth reading. I know it is fiction but it seems like nonfiction much of the time which I really liked.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon is a highly recommended fictional nonfiction account of his grandfather's life. It is: "A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir. Chabon tells us right at the start in an Author's Note that: "In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to the facts, except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Whatever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and the interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon."

In 1989 Chabon traveled to see his terminally ill grandfather. Although he was a terse man of few words his whole life, the strong painkillers he was on helped him overcome this and he shared his memories and stories about his life with his grandson. What results is a tour de force of a speculative family biography. "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 a family history written as a novel, or a "speculative autobiography." The narrative doesn't follow a continuous timeline, but, rather, jumps back and forth in time, much like what would occur when a dying man is telling stories about his past to a grandson. Locations range from South Philadelphia to a Florida retirement village to Germany to New York’s Wallkill prison. This is the span of a lifetime reduced to a novel. His grandfather wanted him to write it all down and make his life mean something. There are also several poignant stories dealing with Chabon's grandmother, who suffered from voices and visions. Her mental illness was evident to her husband and daughter, Chabon's mother.

The writing is outstanding, as one would expect from Chabon. The characters are all well-developed and carefully depicted as real people with flaws and foibles but memorable. While telling his grandfather's story, he carefully provides historical details to set the the time and place. There is a lot of storytelling here with some digressions with related, relevant information, but the end result is worth working through the extra information.

It's a genre bending novel - is it fiction or nonfiction or a combination of both? Perhaps there are kernels of truth with lavish extra embellishments?

Disclosure: My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.

Excellent book touching on so many matters of interest that it begs description. One proviso, though, if you're a reader that can only handle a straight chronology novel, you'll despise this. For all the rest of us, though, Chabon has offered up a delectable treat.

Michael is a word magician, and deserves every award he's received. These are not easy books to read. Very complex, long convoluted sentences, lots of jumping from different events/ times, but ,oh my, the imagery.

Self indulgent and tedious. There are the makings of a great novel in this book if only it were a novel. Or what is it? A memoir? I pushed through to the end, but was reminded of Elmore Leonard’s rule of writing - “I tend to leave out the parts that people skip”.

I'm sorry, but this is simply boring.
It's long drawn out nothing.
I feel the writer confuses the interest he himself takes in his family stories with the interest the reader should take.
I have re-read some of Chabon's stories until the Kindle fell apart, but this here is a prime example of a very well written story that holds next to zero interest.
Everything is fluffed up like a marshmallow, there simply is no substance.

Could not get myself to finish it.

There is no question that Michael Chabon is a prose craftsman. He knows how to weave a story and to create wonderful mind images. In this, his latest, book, he focuses on his grandfather in a sometimes-real, sometimes-enhanced memoir-style narrative. (His grandfather, incidentally, is always referred to as "my grandfather", which can become a little distracting).

His grandfather was certainly a colorful character -- a World War II vet who spent time in prison, a prankster who once set explosives on a bridge, and most importantly, a tender husband who tries to navigate his one-time bride's mental disintegration. Memoirs are meant for "characters" like this. And Chabon also explores that fine line between what is true and the secrets we keep and the lies we tell to keep putting one foot in front of hte other.

But still, I felt there was some magic missing. There were several digressions (the manufacture of the V-2 rocket, for example) and other places where I felt as if I were being "talked at" as opposed to "talked to." It's like hearing the story of a friend's fascinating relative -- the first hour is intriguing but after a while, it sort of wears thin. I freely admit that the problem here may very well be the reader and not the writer. I prefer the fictional worlds that authors -- including Chabon -- create from scratch.

Reading this was like chewing on a tough piece of beef jerky. You can make it through, but your jaw will hurt, and you will wonder why you ate it.
I can't imagine why any writer would go for this "memoirish" sales gimmick after the A Million Little Pieces scandal, but he went there. Plainly not Chabon's best work, but it does have thoughtful scenes dealing with guilt, family and human foibles. As John Mckay might have said, its not an easy read, but the author made up for that by making it about 70 pages too long.

I loved the earlier works from this author. Especially, KAVALIER & CLAY, so I am not entirely surprised that I did not fully fall in love with this read. Although I appreciated the elder wisdom of his grandfather and his reminiscences, like some, I found the reading to be cumbersome with heavy emotions. All in all, worth reading, to be sure, especially, this aspect of generational wisdom, of life lived and the things we learn and come to regret, but give me the little known, SIM0N LAZARUS or even despite some of the corn, TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE over this.

"Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life I heard during its final ten days".
In this autobiographical novel, Michael Chabon uses the information learned at the end of his grandfather's [actually his step-grandfather, but Chabon never calls him that] life to fashion a fictionalized memoir of his grandparents' and mother's lives. It is perhaps the fictional Chabon who fleshes out these interviews--which are, given the grandfather's health and drug-induced mental state, also dubious--with information from others including his mother.
His grandfather, whose name we never learn, was obsessed with rocketry and space travel, including during his service during the Second World War. Wernher Von Braun is his nemesis by the time of the US space program, and from he tells the narrator, this is because of Von Braun's apparent Nazi involvement. He retains an interest in rocketry, imagining the Moon as a better place than the Earth where he has so many difficulties, throughout his life. His grandmother, we learn, also appears to see the moon as a place to escape.
The novel considers the grandmother's mental illness and its impact on the family without indicating that the grandfather also displays some pathology, but one can't expect the protagonist to have such insight.
The book is a fun read, despite its dark elements, and I highly recommend it.

I have said before, and I will say again, that: While any single work by Chabon may be compared (slightly) unfavorably next to a particular work by some other author, on the basis of his body of work, he is our best writer living today.

Be it an epic novel like "...Kavalier and Clay", or a stunning perfect miniature like "The Final Solution", he, simply has no equal.

Indeed, there is almost a minor disappointment with each new work in that we KNOW it's going to be great, the only surprise is how great and in what way.

This latest is great in Chabon's most basically Humanist vein; an epic/intimate work that will have you laughing and crying and nodding in agreement at its universal truths and staring in awe at its statements of facts-we-didn't-realize-were-so until now.

In case I haven't made it clear, I lean towards liking this

This one takes me right back to the Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay - one of my all-time favorite novels.

Once started, you won't finish it - the humor propels you through the darkness, the sadness.

Michael Chabon's "Moonglow" opens with a dramatic confrontation following the firing of his grandfather from Feathercombs, (a company that makes barrettes from piano wire) in order to replace him with a down-on-his-luck, post-Watergate Alger Hiss. As the narrator (Chabon himself) puts it, "He had been known to smile, but not to laugh...It was felt he could be fired without damage to morale." Alas, this plan goes astray leading to an act that ultimately puts Chabon's grandfather in jail and which is just one of a long line of dominoes that will cause problems for Chabon's relations. After that introduction, the narrative braids several main strands into one powerful whole - including Chabon's grandfather's time served in World War II and his recruitment of Werner Von Braun to the US's space program; his subsequent arrival back home with his wife and granddaughter; his grandfather's time in Florida stalking a pooch-eating mystery creature; and his mother's experience growing up with a mentally unstable mother whose claims of surviving the Holocaust turn out to be more complex than originally believed. The past, present and "future" so to speak are woven together masterfully to create a novel which straddles the border between fiction and nonfiction. Subjects as varied as the loss of Chabon's grandfather's friend during the war, the development (and unfortunate source) of the NASA space program, the Challenger disaster, and how the bonds between generations are tested over time are explored with humor and sensitivity.

Thoughts: One thing that bothered me probably wouldn't have if "Moonglow" had been presented as a regular novel: some of the language used to describe the narrator's grandmother. Just knowing in the back of my mind that this character is a) based on a real person, and b) is related to the narrator, made me uncomfortable. However, this was a minor issue. Overall, this was a fascinating book with some disturbing surprises but also heartwarming moments.

Grandfathers retired to Florida are a familiar cliché: tube socked and sandaled, shorts belted at the nipples and garden hose cocked to deter any of “those damn kids” considering trespass. In Michael Chabon’s imagination, grandfathers glow with an other-worldliness: they are lovers, scientists, misfits, and adventurers. If in later years, they notch their Bermudas way too high, what they remember (or we remember for them) is the stuff of family legend. Michael Chabon's family legend is a terrific one.

Moonglow is a marvelous tale—an honest memoir, if only because it admits to being fictitious. It’s the story of hardscrabble Jews growing up in Philly, one son hustling pool, the other the answer to every Jewish mother’s prayer (no, not a doctor, a rabbi—briefly). It is also a generational saga. The author takes a look across the last half of the 20th century at his taciturn grandsire and his holocaust survivor wife and pays them the compliment of seeing them not as “Bubbe” and "Kayde” but as people. Long before they were known by their honorifics, they had names, they had struggles, and passion. They had lives. This is their story.

If I have one complaint (and it’s a minor one) there is a bit too much “at the crossroads of history” in the story with the tale bumping into Wild Bill Donovan, the ghost of Wernher von Braun and the Challenger disaster (all the while putzing about your retirement community.) Even the author's maternal grandfather and paternal great uncle cross paths, in of all places, minimum security prison. Many of Chabon’s stories play with history but personally I prefer when he does so big-scale, in an over-the-top manner—The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Kavalier & Clay, etc. Jews colonizing Alaska and Slovakian golems seem strangely more plausible than mere coincidence. On a small scale, coincidence seems a bit Forrest Gumpish.

The writing in Moonglow is beautiful with gorgeously crafted sentences that are often very funny--and tinged with fatalism. "I'm ashamed. I'm disappointed in myself. All my life, everything I tried I only got halfway there." Overall the tone is more somber and elegiac than other works. The story is less romantic than Kavalier and Clay (though the grandparents’ love is a great Romance--'in between the cracks'), and it is definitely less comic than Wonder Boys. These observations are not at all criticisms, they merely point out a change that may be attributed to something as simple as the author growing older. The acknowledgment that some pain does not heal; some losses are not diminished was always in the author's work, but they are more keen and sharper in Moonglow. Chabon has come a long way from Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and that’s a good thing.

Happily, Mr. Chabon can still slow the reader down with some wonderfully awful puns that send your eyes rolling to the back of your head. The French weather maid named Fay Beau comes to mind and a novelty salesman who sells miniature skeletons (no closet should be without it) is another perfectly dreadful example. The title, borrowed from the Glenn Miller Orchestra is laced with irony. Listeners below it bask in the warmth of Moonglow to the accompaniment of strings and clarinet. The moon in Chabon’s novel is a place to escape to: where a misfit would flee to and finally fit in, where a holocaust survivor could be disencumbered from a world that damaged her: “230,000 miles from the stench of history, there was no madness or memory of loss…” He would have built her a city there, if only he could.

In the end, Moonglow is about the lies family members tell each other, the secrets they keep or at least try to keep hidden from those they love. There is painful irony in the narrator's loathing of von Braun and I found myself practically speed reading to find out how the narrator would handle the secrets he learned. I also found myself, the last 100 pages thinking often of Elie Wiesel's admonition not to judge those who have endured great suffering and Faulkner's observation that the past is never over; it isn't even past.

A friend tells me the Yiddish word for grandfather, Kayde (or Kayda) is also the word for storyteller. This story about a kayde by a kayde is grand. And a reminder not all coincidence is "gumpish." It can also be poetic and satisfying—as is Moonglow.

The estimable Michael Chabon likes saga and is masterful in spinning them out. I'm still enjoying the afterglow of "The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay" after these many years. So Chabon's new book--a fictional work of non-fiction--has the trademark elements of an epic story albeit as an autobiography of the author's grandfather, whose life spanned a big and interesting chunk of the 20th Century. Using an abundance of flashbacks, the man's very colorful life covers the 1930s, fascinating exploits as a GI in Europe during WWII, a turbulent marriage to a Holocaust survivor and a career on the fringes and inside the U.S. space program. With many deeply colorful characters in the protagonist's orbit (including author Chabon himself), it's the story of a life lived hungrily and with passion.

Chabon's writing style here can be a little challenging as the story is not laid out in exact chronology nor in strict linear fashion. The reader may find that going back a few pages or chapters from time to time is needed to keep up. It's worth the effort, in my opinion. The guy's taste for epic-telling has great appeal and is always entertaining.

Wanted to like this book but found it disjointed, self-indulgent and pretentious. Did he really need to use the word "fantod" when a more familiar word would do? I finished it only because it got good reviews.

Michael Chabon has proven once again that he is a wonderful writer with his new book Moonglow. But he missed the mark for satisfying this reader. Chabon's clarity and vision in describing setting is remarkable; not so much when it came to plot or story line with this work. The plot and character development started out 'jumpy', all over the board. They fine tuned themselves toward the middle of the novel giving full dimension to characters and storyline when the work visited the protagonist's WWII memories. But by the end of the book I was left caring very little about the main characters that took over one hundred and twenty thousand words to develop, and was more vested in 'Sally', a minor voice that closed the novel such that I'm wondering more about what happened to her than anything else. This phenomena has me understanding that a great work of fiction does truly take more than fantastic descriptions, word choice, and setting the scene.

4+ stars
"Good morning to all our listeners. This is radio Haifa. An alert has been issued for a possible terrorist attack in the city. People are advised to watch for suspicious packages. The weather will be partly cloudy today, with the chance of a light shower."

The announcement, as nonchalant as the weather forecast starts Dina's day. This wasn't Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but where Dina thought it would be safe for her family especially her six year old son and her unborn child due in a month. Dina , the daughter of holocaust survivors , haunted by their past and the ghost of her mother who she converses with . Through these conversations we see some of the horrors of holocaust and its impact on her parents and consequently on Dina. We hear the heartbreaking stories, of her mother and grandmother, her father's life before he married her mother and the shoemaker's heart wrenching story as Dina , a physician moves through her day. A day in the life of a woman in Haifa but it is more than that , it is also the days of the past, her parents' past that are a part of this day , it's also the days of the future that she fears ,that are in the back of her mind when in 12 years her six year son could have a rifle in his hands.

Throughout the day we see Dina is coming unhinged or is it just too much to cope - eight months pregnant, her marriage falling and fear of what might happen. Certainly this is about the holocaust and the daughter of these survivors and about what it must be like in the present day to live in a place where terrorism is a possibility every minute. Also at the heart of the story is the the love of mothers and fathers for their children and how they would do anything to keep them safe . A well written , emotionally evocative story , an important one reflecting the realities of history and the present day.

I received an advance copy of this book from HarperCollins through Edelweiss.

It was well written, he is certainly a wordsmith as always, but in the end this book is an un-moving one that wanders all over the place ad left me cold. Unlikable characters, odd they have no names throughout (which makes it even less personable), and graphic words about sex that seemed totally our of place and turned me off as they were so jarring (no prudishness here, they just didn't fit the tone). The hype is not worth the copse or time. Returned, and feel duped a bit. I've read better on this topic.

This fellow is Pulitzer winner? Why? I think they give out these prizes like participation trophies. So, looky, this guy wrote a terrible book, but he tried, so let's give him a Pulitzer! A book filled with nonsensical words from a most nonsensical author.

Reading this book is like forcing yourself to eat a soft green vegetable because you think it is good for you. The literary critics LOVE Chabon because they think that someday he will write The Great American Novel. What he has produced is a YA book called My Grandfather. Over the past 70 years the best american fiction writers have produced amazing post war holocaust novels. This book is just literary clutter about an unmemorable greatest American generation character used as a vehicle to produce what? The almost plotless story is told in a series of (out of order) uninteresting vignettes that wear thin after a third of the novel. Still waiting for the great American novel.

Moonglow is a novel in the form of a memoir. The narrator’s maternal grandfather is terminally ill. Under the influence of painkillers and impending death, he tells the narrator numerous family stories, about himself, his wife, and the narrator’s mother. Quite possibly some stories are true, especially considering there are characters named Chabon. But there’s no way to tell. This novel skips around in time and among many characters. Most of them are never named, which seems odd as well as being confusing. The characters are fascinating and endearing. Like Chabon’s best works, this novel is poignant. But it also lacks focus and a strong overarching plot. I wanted to come away with a sense of what the grandfather’s life meant, what it summed up to, and I didn’t.

Absolutely, positively the most boring book I have ever read. It is basically a opus celebrating the author's narcissism. I would only recommend it to lepers, so they could at least feel better about their own lives.

Won't buy from a disgusting man like Michael Chabon, who wished a stroke on our president. My mother died from a brainstem stroke, and suffered horrifically till she died. To wish one on someone shows what a piece of garbage he is.