This is where the work transforms from ordinary to extraordinary and becomes a study in the power and importance of memory, even as a life is fading. They are a chaotic and jumbled mess at times, as is life. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you.” To that end, the narrator does not quite succeed, nor would you want him to-the book jumps from one period of time to the next quite willingly.Ĭhabon’s work has taken the form of a memoir, and memories are not always orderly. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Dying of bone cancer, the man’s tongue is loosened with a dose of heavy narcotics and he is ready to finally tell the story of his incredible life. The novel begins with the narrator, “Mike Chabon,” basking in the success of a debut novel, visiting his notoriously tight-lipped grandfather. He was, in turns, a juvenile delinquent, a pool hustler, a solider, a salesman, a prisoner and an engineer, but he always obsessed with the moon-indeed, with anything celestial.

Throughout, the reader discovers he’s lived a remarkable life. It is a languidly paced hallucinatory haze of a trip through time and around the world, from the grandfather’s beginnings in South Philadelphia in the 1920s to WWII Germany in the 1940s, to the very end of his life in California in 1989. It is life, with a dash of the fantastic. Whatever liberties have been taken…the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.” Author and Pittsburgh native Michael Chabon. Chabon gleefully warns the reader of this in the preface to the novel, writing “I have stuck to facts except where facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Inspired by Chabon’s own deathbed visit to his grandfather in Oakland, California in the 1980s, the author blurs the line between autobiography and outlandish fiction so successfully that the reader has no idea what is true and what’s pure fantasy (although we can hazard a guess at times).

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Pittsburgh-native Michael Chabon’s latest novel is an absorbing fictional memoir that is based in large part based on a dying man’s recollections to his writer-grandson as he looks back on his life.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon