Michael Chabon. (2016). Moonglow: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Michael Chabon. 2016. Moonglow: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Michael Chabon, Moonglow: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2016.

Michael Chabon. Moonglow: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2016.

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     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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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal • An NBCC Finalist for 2016 Award for Fiction • ALA Carnegie Medal Finalist for Excellence in Fiction • Wall Street Journal's Best Novel of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Slate Best Book of the Year • A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • A New York Post Best Book of the Year

iBooks Novel of the Year • An Amazon Editors' Top 20 Book of the Year • #1 Indie Next Pick • #1 Amazon Spotlight Pick • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A BookPage Top Fiction Pick of the Month • An Indie Next Bestseller

"This book is beautiful." — A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review, cover review

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 for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather." It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator's grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals 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," the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
   • content:

     "Elegiac and deeply poignant ... Chabon weaves these knotted-together tales together into a tapestry that's as complicated, beautiful and flawed as an antique carpet.... Chabon is one of contemporary literature's most gifted prose stylists.... In Moonglow, he writes with both lovely lyricism and highly caffeinated fervor." — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

     "An exuberant meld of fiction and family history.... It's the caliber of his writing-evocative sentences and indelible metaphors-that gives the novel its luster.... Moonglow prisms through a single life the desires and despair of the Greatest Generation, whose small steps and giant leaps continue to shape us all." — Hamilton Cain, O Magazine

     "A wondrous book that celebrates the power of family bonds and the slipperiness of memory....A thoroughly enchanting story about the circuitous path that a life follows, about the accidents that redirect it, and about the secrets that can be felt but never seen, like the dark matter at the center of every family's cosmos." — Ron Charles, The Washington Post

     "Mix[es] in generous dollops of meaning, a sprinkling of fancy metaphors and an abundance of beautiful sentences so that it becomes a rich and exotic confection. Too strict a recipe would have spoiled the charm of this layer cake of nested memories and family legends.... This book is beautiful." — A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review, cover review

     "A flamboyantly imaganitive work of fiction dressed in the sheep's clothing of autobiography....His most confident and complex performance....Moonglow is a movingly bittersweet novel that balances wonder with lamentation." — Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

     "Like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, and especially The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, this is classic Chabon: an intensely personal story uplifted by the shifting tectonic plates of truth and memory, floating atop his inimitably crafted, sometimes audacious, always original prose." — Jon Foro, The Amazon Book Review, Spotlight Pick

     "A poignant, engrossing triumph." — People

     "An often rollicking, ultimately moving read. And like the song, it's liable to stay with you." — Heller McAlpin, NPR.org

     "Absolutely brilliant.... Stylistically and emotionally, Moonglow took our breath away over and over." — iBooks Review

     "His prose is as luminous as ever." — Entertainment Weekly

     "Chabon renders an entire era within a single deathbed confession—a scale model of life after the Second World War." — Cody Delistraty, The New Yorker

     "Radiant." — Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair

     "A story as much about the art of storytelling as it is about family, history, and the 20th century, Moonglow is a dazzling achievement." — Buzzfeed

     "Vibrant.... A feast for fans of the Pulitzer winner's magical prose." — Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

     "Michael Chabon fills this dashing, Technicolor tribute to his grandfather's generation with outsize mythology. Space travel and sorcery are just two of the novel's wondrous themes. The book, his best yet, cements his place in the front of American writers." — Best Book of the Year, The Wall Street Journal

     "The grandfather is a terrific character:...

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 1, 2016
     Chabon’s (Telegraph Avenue) charming and elegantly structured novel is presented as a memoir by a narrator named Mike who shares several autobiographical details with Chabon (for one, they’re both novelists who live in the Bay Area). Mike’s memoir is concerned less with his own life than with the lives of his deceased maternal Jewish grandparents, who remain unnamed. His grandfather—whose deathbed reminisces serve as the novel’s main narrative engine—is a WWII veteran with an anger streak (the stint he does in prison after a workplace assault is one of the novel’s finest sections) and a fascination with V-2 rockets, astronomy, space travel, and all things celestial or skyward. Mike’s grandmother, born in France, is alluring but unstable, “a source of fire, madness, and poetry” whose personal history overlaps in unclear ways with the Holocaust, and whose fits of depression and hallucination result in her institutionalization (also one of the novel’s finest sections). Chabon imbricates his characters’ particular histories with broader, detail-rich narratives of war, migration, and technological advances involving such figures as Alger Hiss and Wernher von Braun. This move can sometimes feel forced. What seduces the reader is Chabon’s language, which reinvents the world, joyously, on almost every page. Listening to his grandfather’s often-harrowing stories, Mike thinks to himself, “What I knew about shame... would fit into half a pistachio shell.”

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     A faux memoir of the novelist's grandfather, whose life as an engineer, veteran, and felon offers an entree into themes of heroism and imagination.When "Michael Chabon," the narrator of this novel, was growing up, his maternal grandparents were steeped in mystery and mythology. His grandmother was a tight-lipped Holocaust survivor with a fixation on tarot cards, while his grandfather was a World War II Army officer who'd also done time in prison. The novel is largely Chabon's (Telegraph Avenue, 2012, etc.) effort to understand his grandfather's wilder escapades. Why did he try to strangle a former business partner with a telephone cord? What was he thinking when he and a buddy in the Army Corps of Engineers prankishly set explosives on a bridge in Washington, D.C.? What did he feel while he hunted down Wernher von Braun in Germany? And, more tenderly, what did he see in the young girl he met in Baltimore after returning home from the war? A study in intellect, violence, and displacement, his grandfather is engaging on the ground level while also serving as a kind of metaphor for Cold War America. And Chabon writes tenderly about his grandparents' relationship--his grandmother was a horror-flick host on local TV and suffered from mental illness her husband was ill-equipped to handle. Chabon's theme is the storytelling (i.e., lies) people lean on to survive through complicated times: "The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother's deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse." A noble enough theme, but Chabon is an inveterate overwriter who dilutes his best storytelling with more ponderous digressions--on the manufacture of the V-2 rocket, model-making, Thomas Pynchon, and the relationships his widowed grandfather pursued before his death. He's captured a fine story about the poignancy of two souls' survival but also too many others about plenty else besides.A heartfelt but sodden family saga. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from September 1, 2016
     A young writer named Michael Chabon listens in breath-held astonishment as his ailing grandfather, whose lifelong reticence has been vanquished by strong painkillers, tells the hidden stories of his past. The real-life Chabon (Telegraph Avenue, 2012), a master of the ravishing sentence and the entrancing tale, creates, in his most beautifully realized novel to date, avidly realized scenes of mayhem and enchantment as his narrator's ingenious and intractable maternal grandfather, an electrical engineer obsessed with moon missions, recounts his hardscrabble South Philly boyhood, clandestine adventures in WWII Germany tracking down Nazi scientists (especially the man behind the V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun), and his severely tested love for a deeply damaged French Holocaust survivor. A warrior to the end, he also regales his attentive grandson with hilarious incidents of more recent vintage involving his courting a neighbor at an assisted-living community in Florida by hunting a python she fears has devoured her cat. As towering a figure as the grandfather is, all of Chabon's characters are complex and commanding, including his alter-ego narrator's pragmatic attorney mother, who, as a stoic only child, was left with her Uncle Ray, a rabbi turned hustler, after her mother's harrowing struggle with her demons (so eerily dramatized) led to her being institutionalized, and her father's volcanic rage delivered him to prison. Chabon's grandly arching plot encompasses everything from early television to a moment of stargazing awe shared (between bombardments) by a German priest and a Jewish American soldier to the grim symbiosis between science and war crimes as America's military striving gives rise to the space program. All areenacted beneath the bewitching light of the moon, which summons romance ( Moonglow, a jazz standard, offers the refrain: It must have been moonglow / That led me straight to you ), madness, and the high tides of war and ambition. Grandfather tells grandson, After I'm gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Chabon succeeds. By deftly infusing each spellbinding page with historical facts entertaining and tragic, effervescent imagination, exceptional emotional intricacies, striking social insights, brilliantly modulated drama, canny wit, and profound and uplifting empathy and compassion, Chabon has created a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world. Expect the cross-country author tour to get literary-fiction readers buzzing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 1, 2016
     

     Framed as a man's deathbed confession to his grandson, capturing the seesawing intensity of the American century, ranging from South Philadelphia's Jewish slums to the invasion of Germany to a Florida retirement village, covering sex, war, secrets keeping, deep-seated doubt, and mid-20th-century technological advancement, this grand saga blends imagination with acute historical detail. You expected anything less from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon? Rooted in autobiography--the author was inspired by his terminally ill grandfather's floodgates-open revelations in 1989--this book captures history through an individual. With a 350,000-copy first printing and a 12-city tour.

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from September 1, 2016
     

     As the narrator of Pulitzer Prize winner Chabon's luminous new work observes, "Keeping secrets was a family business." So he's tersely attentive when his terminally ill grandfather suddenly spills the revelations forming this narrative, which zigzags from World War II through his grandparents' complicated marriage to his grandfather's final days in Florida. Widowed and with a four-year-old daughter, his grandmother arrived in Baltimore from a displaced persons camp. Over time, her war experiences eventually lead to madness through which her husband, smitten at first sight, remains constant despite his own checkered business career. He's an engineer with a passion for rocketry, but the shattering experience of coming upon the Nordhausen armaments factory as a soldier has refocused his thinking. Throughout, he's one tough and colorful fellow; in fact, all the characters are vividly realized and the historical details freshly observed. Chabon ambitiously layers in a lot of history, family and otherwise, and there are a few slow moments. Still, the story builds to core revelations of wartime horror and postwar heartbreak as powerful as they come, with the author gifting readers by finally observing that happiness is "in the cracks." VERDICT Vibrantly real (Chabon reimagined his own grandfather's memories); for all readers. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/16.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 1, 2016
     

     As the narrator of Pulitzer Prize winner Chabon's luminous new work observes, "Keeping secrets was a family business." So he's tersely attentive when his terminally ill grandfather suddenly spills the revelations forming this narrative, which zigzags from World War II through his grandparents' complicated marriage to his grandfather's final days in Florida. Widowed and with a four-year-old daughter, his grandmother arrived in Baltimore from a displaced persons camp. Over time, her war experiences eventually lead to madness through which her husband, smitten at first sight, remains constant despite his own checkered business career. He's an engineer with a passion for rocketry, but the shattering experience of coming upon the Nordhausen armaments factory as a soldier has refocused his thinking. Throughout, he's one tough and colorful fellow; in fact, all the characters are vividly realized and the historical details freshly observed. Chabon ambitiously layers in a lot of history, family and otherwise, and there are a few slow moments. Still, the story builds to core revelations of wartime horror and postwar heartbreak as powerful as they come, with the author gifting readers by finally observing that happiness is "in the cracks." VERDICT Vibrantly real (Chabon reimagined his own grandfather's memories); for all readers. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/16.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal • An NBCC Finalist for 2016 Award for Fiction • ALA Carnegie Medal Finalist for Excellence in Fiction • Wall Street Journal's Best Novel of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Slate Best Book of the Year • A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • A New York Post Best Book of the Year

iBooks Novel of the Year • An Amazon Editors' Top 20 Book of the Year • #1 Indie Next Pick • #1 Amazon Spotlight Pick • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A BookPage Top Fiction Pick of the Month • An Indie Next...

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