Dont miss Chabons reading at the Central Library at 7:00 p.m. today!
Don't miss Chabon's reading at the Central Library at 7:00 p.m. today!

Michael Chabon’s Moonglow is a life spilled out between painkillers and pudding cups. The fictional memoir focuses on “Mike” Chabon’s ailing, closed-off grandfather. He’s a convict, a hustler, a rocket scientist and a spy who thinks none of his tales the least bit interesting to anyone else. That time he chased the Nazi engineer across Germany didn’t turn out the way he wanted it to, so who cares? His novelty rocket-making company? Not exactly a success. So forget it. And more personally, painfully, the normal life he built for his wife—the so-called “night witch” who survived the Holocaust—didn’t drive away the horrors that haunted her. He suffers the special pain of a man who attempted to “fix” the people in his life as one attempts to “fix” a broken radio, all while setting his own dreams aside like spare parts. No one needs to know about that. Except for his grandson, the family scribe. And, of course, us.

As you might be able to guess, chronological order does not govern this book. You might argue that there isn’t even a plot. Instead, Chabon relies on repeated imagery and characters—a Nazi scientist, a zippo lighter, a popular jazz tune—to jog our memory as the narrator jogs his own. This structure tells us something about the way we conceive of our life's story: Our ability to recall “the best” or “the worst” or the “pretty good moments” of our lives works more like Pandora radio station than a Spotify playlist. You can’t summon up fully the song you want hear, you can only react to little reminders as they come to you.

Chabon illustrates this point at the de facto climax of Moonglow, when his grandfather finally concedes to his grandson’s imagination the rights to his own story, all done up with “fancy metaphors.” The grandfather was born during a lunar eclipse, and he asks his grandson to start the book with that fact. Chabon rejects the idea outright, calling it “kind of trite.” For this, he catches a balled up Kleenex to the face. Instead, his first few chapters cover a nighttime caper (a setting familiar to many of Chabon’s novels), an unfortunate kitten, and a particularly creative way to use a letter opener. In the book’s disjointed, at times jarring narrative, Chabon gets to choose what sticks. But in real life, we aren’t so lucky.

If we consider the novel a race and the memoir a marathon, Chabon has been training for Moonglow his whole career. Like his novels, the action builds quite late in the game, and upon mountains of description. As in his short stories, Chabon proves more than able to render a whole person over the course of a single paragraph. And since we meet each character at various stages of life, in various settings, the book moves quicker, more efficiently, than Chabon’s earlier works. Every chapter reads like a self-contained episode that begs to be savored, not rushed.

Grounded both in historical events and a universal search for purpose in one’s life, Chabon’s novel is a four-hundred page indulgence that invites us to seek meaning not in the destination but in the journey, even if that journey doesn’t seem to us to be particularly interesting.