Neither does the book cover reveal the curious genre obfuscation of Michael Chabon’s creation. As the book cover states, Moonglow “revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week.” That the grandfather’s memories are jumbled and often topsy-turvy is something the reader only discovers by delving into the book. Love, insanity, elation, despair, and endurance. In just a few days, the narrator hears details of his grandparents’ courtship and marriage, exploits of his grandfather’s youth in the pre-World War II Jewish slums of South Philly, hints of his grandmother’s wartime experiences in Germany, anecdotes of successes and failures that range from space program triumphs to New York’s Wallkill prison to Florida retirement ennui. And those nostalgic musings necessarily are untidy. Sitting by the bedside of his dying and normally taciturn grandfather, the narrator records a suddenly garrulous spate of reminiscences that no one in the family had ever heard before. The novel is, after all, a retrospective composite of memories expressed by an elderly man. In retrospect, however, I recognize Chabon’s brilliance in crafting Moonglow in such a convoluted fashion.
The circuitous storyline, which drifted in time and often wound in on itself, didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
While I was reading Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, I found myself growing impatient.
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