After he and a military buddy almost blow up a bridge in a joke gone a bit awry, an officer from the Strategic Services of World War II sizes him up-“You’ve been looking for trouble your whole life”-and then immediately recruits him.Īs his grandfather falls in love with a captivating woman who eventually becomes his wife, the traumas and difficulties of war-torn Europe fall away at first. He defies authority and struts through life with a dare on his face. As a child, Chabon’s grandfather is stubborn and impulsive. And since he’s high on pain-killers for his cancer, it feels almost shameful to listen to what the dying man reveals-but listen we must, for the desire to understand bleeds through the narrator onto the very page.Įthical curiosities aside, Chabon’s intrigue as the grandson is palpable, and his discoveries about both his grandparents and their lives transfix him. With enough digging-or enough imagination, I suppose-you would find the many similarities between fiction and reality. I found myself constantly asking that age-old question of “whose story is this to tell?” Indeed, Chabon gets so deeply entrenched in the telling at times it feels as if we are hearing the story directly from the grandfather’s lips. If we were to take the stance that this was a memoir with streaks of fiction, then we’d have to assume that the narrator, Mike, is not the same as the author Michael Chabon, and that his maternal grandparents are not the same as the author’s maternal grandparents.

The publisher dubs it an “autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir.” And Chabon himself states in an introduction, “In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” The form of the story itself is worth puzzling over, both due to the difficulties of defining it, but also due to its dazzling intricacy.

Jumping around in time with this story is like watching a street artist complete a scenic depiction: there is no full picture until the end, but what a masterpiece it turns out to be. Michael Chabon is in top form with Moonglow, in which a grandfather, in his final days, recounts many untold stories to his grandson regarding the tumultuous and sentimental days of his life.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon