It’s 1957, New York City, Fifty-seventh Street. A strong-shouldered, tight-lipped salesman at a ladies’ hair barrette company called Feathercombs learns he’s been fired (a higher-up gave his job to Alger Hiss) and snaps. The son of a German-Jewish immigrant family from Philadelphia, the salesman counted on that salary to support his emotionally unstable wife — a raven-browed French war refugee with an “an Ingrid Bergman smile” who had once hosted a horror TV show in Baltimore — and her teenage daughter, whom he’d raised as his own. Unhinged by fury, he storms into the company president’s office wielding a phone with a frayed, dangling cord [(he’d ripped the phone from its base) and starts strangling his boss, deploying garroting skills he’d picked up in the OSS on special detail for Wild Bill Donovan in WWII London and Germany — like a real-life Pirate Prentice from Gravity’s Rainbow.
That irate garroter was the grandfather of Michael Chabon; the raven-browed woman was the author’s grandmother; and her daughter was his mother, according to Chabon’s new novel, Moonglow. Retelling the Feathercombs assault, as his grandfather had described it to him, he writes, “The president tried to stand up, but his legs got tangled in the kneehole of his desk. His chair shot out from under him and toppled over, casters rattling. He screamed. It was a fruity sound, halfway to a yodel.” A secretary prevented the assault from turning fatal by plunging a letter opener into the attacker’s shoulder. Chabon explains, “The bite of metal locked some meridian in the flow of my grandfather’s rage. He grunted. ‘It was like I woke up,’ he said.” Out on bail after a week in lockup at the Tombs, awaiting sentencing, the grandfather only had “enough money for a shave, a bus, a Zagnut bar for my mother, and coffee and a donut for himself.” He went on to serve a year and a half in a low-security prison, where he invented a model rocket that later made him and a business partner rich, for a while. In 1962, that business partner’s nephew married Chabon’s mother, and the next year, Chabon was born. So: no Alger Hiss, no Michael Chabon. What about these dramatic doings would you say stamps them as Chabonesque? Is it the dogged, ingenious charisma of the underdog hero? The nostalgia for postwar coastal metropolises? The sultry horror hostess? The Zagnut bar? Is it not, in fact, all of it?
A kind of DNA resides in the sentences of every writer, especially consistent in the works of the greatest, revealing a continuity of mind, art and worldview. If you were to extract a handful of passages from Great Expectations or David Copperfield and throw them onto a tabletop, unlabeled, alongside passages from For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms, or Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, you could sort them into Dickens, Hemingway, or Vonnegut without looking any of them up. This principle holds abundantly true for Chabon. Moonglow contains echoes of his earlier masterpieces — like Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Telegraph Avenue — just as those books contain echoes of the stories he remembers in Moonglow, which “consciously and unconsciously found their way into my work.” But in this novel, he redoubles the identifying strand: the DNA of his storytelling is not only literary, it is literal. Moonglow relays the rich, complicated history of the author’s own family, reshaped through fiction.
How much of what Chabon writes here about his relatives and himself is true; and how much is invented, or embellished? He will not say. In an author’s note, he declares, “I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” Further hedging his accountability, he adds that any “liberties” taken with “names, dates, places, events, and conversations,” not to mention with actual historical figures (notably Wernher von Braun, inventor of the V-2 rocket and bugbear of Chabon’s rocketry-obsessed grandfather), “have been taken with due abandon.” Yes, this is Chabon all right; tantalizing, precise, and polytropic, gazing with a scientist’s enthralled raptness at the creatures that divide and grow, seethe and Rorschach, beneath his microscope. But where observation ends and re-imagination begins here is never entirely revealed.
The seeds for this book were planted in 1989, the year after Chabon published his debut novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh. His grandfather — who, the book explains, was not his biological grandfather but acted as a paternal figure in important ways to Chabon’s mother and her sons — was dying of cancer. As the author, then twenty-six, sat by his sickbed, the grandfather grudgingly filled in episodes from the family’s past that he had not formerly disclosed. He did not want to romanticize himself, or even to think too hard about himself. “My grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms,” Chabon explains. But he told his grandson: “After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours.” He added, “Start with the night I was born. March second 1915.”
Chabon, of course, started in his own way, but it took him a quarter century to work up the will to do so. The facts his grandfather told him about himself and his wife, whom Chabon knew as Mamie (pronounced mah-MEE, French for “grandma”) erased the familial certainties Chabon had absorbed from boyhood, certainties that had shaped his identity. He learned that his loving, high-strung, witchy grandmother — reader of fortunetelling cards, baker of tarte tatin, teller of nightmare-inducing fairytales (“wicked children received grim punishments, hard-earned success was forfeited in one instant of weakness, infants were abandoned, wolves prevailed”) — had not been who she said she was. (Not wanting to spoil things, I’ll hold off on exposing her shifts and prevarications here.) This discovery “messed me up for a long time,” Chabon writes. “One by one I began to subject my memories of my grandmother, of the things she had told me and the way she had behaved, to a formal review, a kind of failure analysis, searching and testing them for their content of deceit, for the hidden presence in them of the truth.” His determination not to be misled helps explain his caginess about the reliability of this novel-cum-memoir. It took fiction for him to restore logic and plausibility, if not exact truth, to his personal biography, assembling an ancestral narrative so rich in turbulent adventure that it makes Baron Munchausen look like a shut-in.
Moonglow unfolds in the roller-coaster style familiar to readers of Chabon’s other novels, loosely following the grandfather’s chronology — from his scrappy youth, scavenging coal in the Philly train yards, to his World War II experiences (in Germany he stalks Wernher von Braun, outraged by the scientist’s diversion of the utopian goals of rocketry from space travel to warfare), to his courtship of his wife and their marriage. Interspersed amid this picaresque trajectory are flash-forwards to a love affair in the grandfather’s final year, at a retirement home in Florida, when, long widowed, he takes up with a new resident, whose cat has been devoured (she thinks) by an alligator in a nearby swamp. Gallant as Don Quixote, the grandfather takes up a lance and goes after the malefactor (it turns out to be a python).
But this late romance can’t compete with the “freight-train rumble” of his passion for Mamie. Describing his grandfather’s besotment with his wife, Chabon writes, “In her pain and her vividness and her theatricality, she seemed to have access to some higher frequency of emotion.” In a chapter about one of Mamie’s hallucination-fed breakdowns, a few years before the Feathercombs incident, Chabon mentions a luna moth, which his grandmother had found “expiring with languid wingbeats on a tree in the backyard” and pinned to a bulletin board in her sewing room, “its viridescence fading with time to dull dollar green.” Marking that detail, you shiver, recognizing the touchstone that would recover its glow in the eerie comic book goddess Luna Moth, who makes the fame of Chabon’s Kavalier and Klay. In that novel, Luna Moth sought an earthly warrior to don her green wings and “right the world’s many wrongs.” When her chosen messenger protested that she wasn’t up to the task, Luna said, “You will find . . . that you have only to imagine something to make it so.”
This superb novel shows Chabon at his best; his documentary impulse here reins in the ornate language that can sometimes make his other work gaudy. He loses none of his audacious agency by harnessing his art to biography. But is Moonglow fundamentally a novel, or a memoir? Why quibble? As every novelist knows, it’s in fiction that the important truths get told.
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Sig Nordal 