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Moonglow: A Novel
Moonglow: A Novel
Moonglow: A Novel
Audiobook14 hours

Moonglow: A Novel

Written by Michael Chabon

Narrated by George Newbern

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Following on the heels of his New York Times–bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us.

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis of the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain in the ongoing magic act that is the art of Michael Chabon.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow is also a tour de force of speculative history in which Chabon attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire, Popular Mechanics and Boy’s Life. Along the way Chabon devises and reveals, in bits and pieces whose hallucinatory intensity is matched only by their comic vigor and the radiant moonglow of his prose, a secret history of his own imagination.

From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of “the American Century,” Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateNov 22, 2016
ISBN9780062225580
Author

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, among many others. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

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Reviews for Moonglow

Rating: 3.9508841021611003 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantastically touching to the father of a son and the husband of a crazy lady
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful book - Chabon at his best, IMO. The subjects are his grandparents, and the book is presented as a memoir, complete with a narrator named Mike, who is a writer. The twist is that it's actually fiction (although perhaps the grandfather bears some resemblance to Chabon's own - that we aren't told). The book jumps around in time, and it's hardly a conventional novelistic plot. But it's a total delight and for me, a real page-turner.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Fictional account of part of the narrator’s grandfather’s life, as told from his hospital bed during his last days. Filled with non-linear vignettes, portions of the story relate to such diverse topics as WWII, the American space program, mental illness, a New York prison experience, and a python on the loose in Florida. After reading another of the Chabon’s books that I enjoyed immensely, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I was disappointed to find this book a bit of a jumble. I was not inspired to care about the characters, the story jumped around so much that it was hard to recall where the last bit left off, and certain episodes appeared to have no discernable point. It contains unnecessary references to bodily functions, his grandfather’s sexual activities, and vulgarity. Early on we are led to believe the grandmother was in a concentration camp during WWII but no one ever asks how her baby daughter would have survived such a camp. Ultimately, I found it a promising concept that led nowhere.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    2022 book #50. 2016. The author tells the (maybe true) story of his grandfather who led an interesting, if excentric life. Told in a non-chronological order it was hard to follow at times but an enjoyable story anyway.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Supposedly, in 1989, Chabon spent a week visiting his dying grandfather and the stories the older man imparted about his life inspired this book. This is a wonderful book, and much as I wanted, as I was reading it, to believe it all basically happened, Chabon has called this a work of fiction. The events might have sprung from Chabon's imagination, but the emotions resonate as universal truths about family, love, and self.I found myself thinking a lot about my father, born a decade after the "grandfather" of the novel. My father, a space buff like the "grandfather," also served during World War II and also kept his feelings close to him. There were many moments in the book that brought forth a memory of my own, from a simple dinner of salami and eggs to "The Whip," a mobile amusement park ride in a truck. I'm not a reader who seeks to identify with characters and situations, but when it creeps up on me, it's an added pleasure. And by the end of the book, as implausible as much of it seemed, I wanted it to all be real. Whatever sparks of reality inspired this decades-spanning story doesn't really matter. Chabon is an amazing storyteller and this is an amazing book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a fictionalized account of the life of the author's grandfather. It is written as a memoir taken from deathbed confessions. Admittedly, it is all made up. In interviews, Chabon states that you can actually find a lot of himself in the grandfather's character.It is the story of a man who lived a full life and who did have a couple of great passions--his beautiful but mentally ill wife, and his love for the idea of space travel. The majority of his life was devoted to both of these pursuits.The grandfather and his haunted wife both carry scars from World War II. She endured personal trauma after losing her innocence and entire family to the Nazis. This affected her health over the years and required multiple stints in mental hospitals, thereby affecting the rest of the family; namely, "the grandfather" and his stepdaughter.He was a Jewish-American soldier who never got over the loss of a great friend during the war or by his disillusionment about the true character of one of his long-time (science) heroes, the creator of the V-2 rocket, Werner Von Braun, who was a member of the Nazi Party and was (shamefully) snatched up by Americans at the end of the war in order to give us an edge in the Space Race against the Russians. There is a segment of the story about the grandfather's time spent in Germany during WWII including meeting a priest who just so happens to also have a focused interest in space travel and has a surprise stowed away inside a barn.The grandfather has a stint in prison after trying to kill his employer and once again, finds a like-minded soul with a fondness for astronomy. This friendship leads to a future employment opportunity for the grandfather who later builds model rockets for N.A.S.A. It's all very Forrest Gump-like but it works.The story itself is not fast moving nor necessarily exciting; however, the writing style is incredible and you cannot help but get drawn in by the characters of the grandfather and his wife. As they age and near the time of their demise, you grieve for them and feel for the author/narrator's loss, as if this were actually the story of his real family.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Masterful, subtle and deep and very enjoyable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Michael Chabon writes with such engaging originality and imagination that I’d read anything he puts out. This novel combines a look at the complex relationships in his own family with some of the historical events of the 20th century. In writing about the people in his own family, he shows how world history affects generations in very personal ways, or how the personal often reflects profound social issues.There’s a lot of beautiful writing here, with the moon and rocketry a symbol for the escape from the difficulties and horrors of life on earth. Similarly, a lot of Chabon’s images are so stark or unusual that they stick in the mind – the hermaphrodite in the trailer, for example, the conversations with the German priest, the dream of the horse, the snake hunt. These seem a lot of disparate images, but Chabon uses them to highlight the memorable story of his grandfather’s life.Chabon’s grandfather wants to escape from the antisemitism and poverty of the USA in the 1920s and ’30s, and from the isolation that he seems to experience even within his own community. He joins the army, but is sent to join an intelligence unit. What he finds in searching for the U2 rocket construction sites leaves him unable to separate the aeronautical dream from the slave labour death camps overseen by rocketeer Wernher von Braun. This becomes even more complicated when he falls in love with a French refugee who is dealing with mental health issues that were compounded by – or maybe rose out of – her experiences in the war. Finally, he comes face to face with von Braun at an astronautics conference, and feels nothing for him but pity. In the end, Chabon concludes, his grandfather found love and outlived von Braun.The role of storytelling is one of the themes in this novel, as it was in other books by Chabon. Storytelling offers a way to make sense of one’s life, as Chabon’s grandfather seems to be trying to do. It’s also a way to create a new life, as both his grandmother and von Braun have chosen to do. Chabon sees this as a house of cards: the stories his grandfather tells are pieces of some kind of building, although the building is unstable and prone to falling apart. Nevertheless, putting them together allows Chabon to find a kind of order in the bizarre series of events that he discovers make up his own family. The links between fiction and reality is another theme in Chabon’s writing that comes out here. The book’s subtitle says that this is a novel, although it reads as a fairly straightforward retelling of his grandfather’s last days. Chabon’s gift as a writer is to make even the bizarre seem realistic. But perhaps the subtitle is merely meant to explain imagined lines of dialogue that Chabon wasn’t present for, or to provide a cover for the criminal events that he describes. (Family meetings might be difficult if he has to justify all the stories in the book.) But it made me wonder how much of this story is made up, as I did in Chabon’s Cavalier and Clay book. It also leads to the question of how much conventional history is a story. The whitewashed story of Werner von Braun and the American rocket program, for example, was clearly embellished to suit the needs and political objectives of the time. Not long ago, I read The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie Macdonald, which has surprising parallels to this novel. Both seem to use elements of the authors’ family lives to explore the compromised history of the rocket programs of Germany and the United States, within a complex social context that includes family lies, racism, sexual abuse and criminality. Both are powerful reflections on the ideals of the space race coming into conflict with personal and political ends, and by extension with the idealistic stories we tell ourselves and the reality they hide.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a solid effort from Chabon, an improvement over his overindulgent Telegraph Avenue. Here, he delivers a "memoir" (of dubious truthfulness) of his grandparents' relationship, as revealed to him at the end of his grandfather's life. The story jumps through time (though one core story proceeds largely sequentially), place, and perspective, as Chabon writes from both his own present day point of view and a third person POV centered on his grandfather. It's funny, if a little on the self-knowing side, but it isn't a funny book; it's a blackly humorous sad story of crime, mental illness, and family secrets.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    adult fiction (ww2/holocaust/family secrets partly inspired by stories told by the author's family).

    I only got to p. 142 (ch 13); I really enjoy reading Chabon's fantastic, dream-like adventures, but will come back to this when I have more time (and when there aren't 100 people waiting for this library copy). This has received a lot of great reviews so I can definitely recommend it in the meantime.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In the final weeks if his grandfather's life, the author spends time listening to his most important life stories. Chabon brings his excellent prose to the undertaking. A passionate marriage to a Holocaust survivor with serious mental illness, a beloved daughter, a wartime hunt and lifelong hatred for Werner von Braun, a brief stint in prison, and a lifelong fascination with rockets comprise the primary threads of his grandfather's life tapestry. What a complex and fascinating life! Excellent read!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Okay, I went in with the healthy dose of skepticism that always accompanies me when I pick up a book that has been praised to the rafters. Also, although I am in awe of Chabon's command of vocabulary, his short stories have consistently disappointed me; I always think he should quit 4/5 of the way through, and he never does. But Moonglow captivated me, apart from a bit of obsessiveness over rockets. A mystery, a character study, a family novel, a trick, truth and fiction mixed together as a fictional memoir of someone else's history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In this novel disguised as a memoir, the narrator, Mike recounts his grandfather's life as pieced together during his life, but largely filled in during his dying days. The narrator often recedes to the background as his grandfather's tale takes over, providing details he could have no way of knowing and it's a little hard to believe they could be remembered so thoroughly. But thorough it is, providing examples from his grandfather's boyhood that reveal him to be both a rogue and a softy -- he had no use for mindless standard conventions and rules, but he also couldn't abide injustice and was always on the lookout for someone to save. His choice of wife was a case in point: mentally fragile, physically beautiful, a seeming survivor of a WWII concentration camp by the tattoo on her arm, he falls quickly and deeply in love with her and her young daughter (Mike's mother) refugees of war. He himself fought in special ops in the War, being among the early liberators of Germany and on the hunt for Nazi leaders, particularly those associated with the development of rockets, like Werner Von Braun. History is deftly mixed with fiction in his accounts of that era, and the description of his grandfather's obsession with and respect for space and gadgetry forms a spiritual backbone of the novel. As an agnostic Jew, his grandfather had little other use for faith. Mike adds his own memories of his grandparents from when he was little -- his fear/discomfort with Mamie's mood swings, tarot cards, and stories and he prods a bit at his mother's experience of living with Uncle Ray, a hipster rabbi and con man, during the 50s when her mother was in a mental health institution and her father was in jail -- another interesting facet to this man's colorful, though unobtrusive life. The story telescopes skillfully and humorously between the recent past: the years Mike's grandfather lived without his grandmother after her death to cancer, during which he lives in a FL retirement community, becomes involved with Sally and goes on another saving crusade for her cat lost in the Everglades, and is a special employee of NASA, building scale models of rockets, space craft and even a lunar settlement-- and the distant past: his grandfather's childhood, war experience, early job and business ventures. Like a satellite, the story makes a complete arc to tie up nicely with a fuller understanding and appreciation for Mike and his mother of the complex man his grandfather was and the Forrest Gump-like ways he intersected with 20th century history. He comes to a deeper understanding of himself and his family too.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    3.5 stars. An enjoyable story, its chronology scattered across six or so decades, written in a straightforward, at times precise style.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Quite good, written with deep meaning throughout. Unusual a fictional autobiography in which the author appears as himself, but it works.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    On his deathbed, a grandfather tells the story of his life to his grandson. It is true that the grandson's name is Michael and his father's family name is Chabon. However, this is a work of fiction, inspired by family stories.

    The grandfather's life has been a full one. On his death bed he reveals his story in nonsequential flashbacks, which probably is the way such a narrative in this situation would be told. On the plus side, it allows the author to keep back some secrets that get revealed later. But to me it was not only confusing, but annoying when the story was disrupted.

    Educated as an engineer, Michael's grandfather is very clever with mechanics and electronics. Sometimes this gets him into trouble and sometimes it gets him out of trouble. Werner Von Braun figures initially as a great influence in his life until his disillusionment in WWII. Still, he remains wrapped up in the space age mania of the 50s and 60s, gazing at the night sky and making models. Above all, the grandfather is loyal to his wife, despite her many problems. His ideal is to eventually live on the moon with his family.

    This is a big ambitious book - a family saga - at times very funny and at times very poignant.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A confusing story... I had my warm, glowy moments with it but could not finish it. Hope to take it to the beach one day.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A memoir/novel of a "Michael Chabon" telling the story of his grandfather's life while on his deathbed. From his time in WWII, to his obsession with rockets and Werner von Braun, and the trials of his mentally ill wife. Its a very poignant story that seems all too real, but was only loosely based on his real grandfather. He was inspired to begin writing the novel when he saw a vintage ad for a model rocket company called Chabon Scientific, a company he or no one in his family had ever heard of. Chabon is one of my favorite writers, so it was a must read for me, and a good one it was as well.This edition was purchased at Hudson Books in an airport somewhere and the introductory letter Chabon wrote to Hudson's customers, was hilarious and almost worth the price of the book alone.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.On a clear night in blacked-out countryside, in between bomber runs, when the tracer fire ceased and the searchlights went dark, the stars did not fill the sky so much as coat it like hoarfrost on a windowpane. You looked up and saw The Starry Night, he told me; you realized that Van Gogh was a realist painter.As soon as he elevator doors closed and we started to go up, I felt a djinn of expectancy or dread (there was no difference) flicker to life in by belly.8/10 S: 10/15/18 - 11/16/18 (33 Days)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It is written as though it is autobiographical, although Chabon playfully suggests in the prologue that much of it is imagined. Michael’s grandfather is the central character in the book. In the last few weeks before he dies in the early 1990s, he tells Michael stories that tie together various strands of memory and family folklore. The book moves back and forth in time to various episodes in the grandfather’s life. The central mystery – which is revealed only at the end – is Michael’s grandmother, who was a traumatized refugee after WWII, suffered from severe mental illness throughout her adult life and, it turns out, invented most of the central elements of her life story. (The grandfather intentionally asked not to be told this secret, which came out during a hospitalization.) Although she claimed to be the daughter of affluent French Jews who owned a tannery and who perished in the Holocaust, she actually “borrowed” most of this life story from a friend she met in a refugee camp. WWII was also the pivotal time in the grandfather’s life. He was an intelligence officer whose mission is to kidnap Werner von Braun. This episode triggers the grandfather’s lifelong fascination with rockets and space exploration, which is a leitmotif through the book and the inspiration for the title.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A complex character study based on the author's grandfather who was obsessed with rockets and, during World War II, was tracking down Dr. Von Braun, the Nazi who led in the design of rockets and was later a critical part of the US space program. The grandmother is a mentally ill but seductive survivor of the war in Europe... who escaped with her daughter, the author's mother. Life for all was constantly in chaos, due to the grandmother's insanity and the grandfather's smoldering anger at the world. At the end of his life, the grandfather shares stories of all their lives with the author, who fictionalizes at it suits him.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great mishmash of a novel. It didn't grip me straight away, but after I tuned in to the themes (and got my head around the timeline) I was rewarded with an excellent story of love, ambition, Jews and the Moon. A fine book to remind us all that old people weren't always old - and being old isn't being dead, either..!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A tour-de-force of narrative and character development, Moonglow combines family history--and its inevitable secrets--with gripping historical settings. This is Michael Chabon at his best.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It took me a while to read it because I enjoyed it and did not want to finish it. Hope Chabon releases another book within the next couple of years. Reading this one also made me miss my grandpa so much.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Moonglow is a fictional memoir based on Chabon's conversations with his grandfather just before his death. In the memoir, the narrator tells about his grandfather's eventful life, much of the details of which he did not know until those deathbed conversations. His grandfather grew up in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia, served in Germany during the war, and on returning home, married a French refugee with a daughter (the narrator's grandmother and mother). He worked a couple of sales jobs, spent some time in prison, and retired in Florida after his wife's eventual death from cancer. Other family skeletons wear the clothes of mental illness, revenge, and grief, with a possible side of mafia-related criminal activity (on the part of the narrator's father.)Due to the author's note where he mentions all the liberties taken with facts and memories, I expected to experience some ambiguity about what was true, but still approached this story from the perspective of it being about Michael Chabon's real life and family. I didn't realize until reading the excellent interview in the back, that it's basically all fiction. A sort of fiction in the guise of a memoir. Perhaps there's a certain voyeuristic intent in reading any biography, so maybe this will change how people read it, whether they know. At any rate, I'm still not entirely sure, but not surprised, knowing Chabon's tendency to blur genre lines.I love Chabon's writing, but I was ready to give this one three stars after not being as engaged with the beginning as I'd like. As it went on, and especially toward the end, I did get into the story more, and now I think I was probably just too distracted during those first few chapters, and couldn't give it my full attention. The audiobook reader is good, but Chabon does so much with subtle metaphor and intricate wordplay, that perhaps it's best taken in with a print copy.It hasn't displaced my top Chabon favorites, but it's still very good overall, and I will read it again someday.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent! So well written, but subtly so. A very interesting twist of one story running with four or five threads in time (current, recent past, past, distant past, far distant past) all slowly revealing more and more of a man's life and story:led and heart ache. He is a flawed but admirable person who loves a broken woman. if the author made up the whole thing, genius. If it really is based on real life, it is still so believable in its incredulity. Really, you can't make this stuff up. The running theme of space travel and the moon works well. Beautiful writing, with excellent descriptions that are detailed but never schmaltzy or over done, but still so poetic and picture-painting.Amazing diction, comic relief. This one is a winner.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a beautifully written volume. The verbiage is so wonderful to read.What a wonderful way to honor a grandfather. Michael Chabon's grandfather is dying and Michael is listening to the stories that the man is sharing with him about his life, which includes stories about his grandmother, mother, etc. I was so taken by this story, that I was compelled numerous times to Google information about World War II references, rockets references, Jewish references, etc. In doing so, I learned many things that I didn't know about a lot of things. Great tribute, even if it is considered fiction.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved this novel. It took some getting used to, the lurching narrative pace, the narrator's use of "my grandfather" and "my mother" to denote characters rather than ever establishing them by name, these initially created a disjointed reading experience. But, once the characters took on their full three-dimensionality, I was enchanted and engrossed. Mike's grandfather is dying of cancer and Mike manages to persuade him to tell his story, the story of Mike's family history. Most of the story centers around his grandfather's efforts during WWII to track down the inventor of the V-2, a rocket with a murderous purpose but also one important chapter in the complicated history of rocketry and space exploration. That history serves as a parallel to the history of the family; some might find it distracting but for me it served as the anchor for the grandfather's life. His passion for rocketry feels so real, so imperative to his character. His love for his wife (Mike's grandmother) and his acts of heroism and cowardice in various moments of his young adult life make a good story. But the thread of rocketry and its intersections with those heroic and cowardly and passionate moments is what pulls it all together. That said, this novel is not about rockets or rocketry. It is a family saga and a poignant story of the devastating effect of war. It is the story of mental illness born of deep trauma. It is the story of love and loss, anger and aging. And it's brilliant.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Couldn't get into this one. Disjointed memoir of the author's grandfather, moving between a variety of time periods and surrounding characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really liked this book. As you'll see from some of my other reviews, I think Chabon's a genius, a captivating storyteller, and an extraordinary wordsmith. My opinion certainly didn't change after reading this book.I will say it took me forEVER to read it. I have no idea why. Normally, I pick up a Chabon book and ignore life around me until I finish it. This one took me the better part of three months to read. I don't know whether to attribute that to the busy nature of my life at the time I was trying to read it, or to the fact that the book is episodic in nature, so it was easy to read a bit, set it aside for a little while, and then come back to it. I'm going to guess the former.Regardless, the book is wonderful. And I can't help wondering how much of the story was real, how much Chabon's actual family resembles the family in the book.I've somehow forgotten how to specifically review a book. I'll just say that I loved this one mainly because Chabon creates fully fleshed out, believable characters who you can't help caring about. You want to know what happens to them and why they make the choices they do. You feel something when you read his books.I'm sure I'll get Chabon's next book as soon as it's available. He's one of my all-time favorites.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Michael Chabon tells the story of his maternal grandparents in MOONGLOW. It is fiction, dressed up as a memoir. He warns the reader that he “stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” The narrator, a thinly disguised Chabon, goes to Oakland to visit with his dying grandfather, who relates his story through a haze of painkillers. As one might expect from such a setting, the narrative meanders over time and place, but the old man remains hopeful that his clever grandson will fix it up, throwing in a few of his well honed metaphors. Of course Chabon resists that temptation (except for the metaphors), thus giving the reader a realistic experience of what it must be like to learn about the life of a beloved but enigmatic relative from his deathbed.The old man’s story proves to be quite remarkable and indeed serves as a metaphor for post-WWII America. It takes us to the Jewish slums of South Philadelphia where he spent his childhood. Grandpa relates his experience in post-war Germany where he was assigned to track down Wernher von Braun for America but becomes disillusioned by this hero when he sees first hand the deplorable conditions at the Nordhausen slave labor camp where inmates were worked on the V-2 rocket. The old man describes his stint at New York’s minimum security Wallkill Prison where he was incarcerated following an aborted attempt to strangle his boss with a telephone cord after being laid off to make room for, of all people, Alger Hiss. His story travels to 50’s Baltimore where he founded the Chabon Scientific, Co., a mail-order novelty company making scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets. We see him forced to leave his stepdaughter, Mike’s mother, in the hands of the unsavory Uncle Rey during his own incarceration and her mother’s commitment to a mental hospital. And we go to a retirement community in Florida where grandfather enjoys a late life fling with the widow, Sally, after agreeing to hunt down and kill the alligator? (boa constrictor) that ate her little dog. Of course Chabon has much, much more to tell us in MOONLIGHT. These are just a few of the highlights.His unnamed grandfather turns out to be reminiscent of one of Chabon’s superheroes. He was a brilliant engineer with an inventive imagination. He evinced many endearing qualities, including chivalry, generosity, bravery, idealism, and loyalty. Yet he could be caustic, stubborn and quite violent. He was not averse to risky behavior, like attempting to blow up a bridge across the Potomac, just for the hell of it.The focus of Grandpa’s life was Chabon’s grandmother, also unnamed. While his grandfather was the practical American, she was the dreamy European. She was a mysterious French Holocaust survivor with a young girl in tow when she dazzled Grandpa at a synagogue social. Unfortunately her wartime experience permanently damaged her psyche. One of the novel’s high points recounts her breakdown while working as a hostess for a television horror movie show. She disappears, suffers from hallucinations involving a demonic skinless horse and sets fire to tree before finally being apprehended and sent to a mental hospital. She never fully recovers and the old man is ill equipped to deal with her condition. She dies prematurely from treatment-related problems and Grandpa never quite gets over it.In the final analysis, the question of what is true and what is made-up in MOONGLOW is mute. Grandpa’s full life is a wonderful reading experience. The scattered narrative becomes part of the mood that Chabon creates. Its picaresque and cartoonish quality shares much with Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”, a novel Chabon credits as inspiration. His approach captures the humor and slapstick quality in Grandpa’s life, but unfortunately, misses much of the pain and regret that undoubtedly were there as well.