Moonglow by Micheal Chabon

I’ve read several Chabon books with varying success.  The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay is phenomenal-a recommend from me with high honors.  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was ok-I don’t remember being blow away by it or anything.  Moonglow was one of those books I picked up in a hurry off the B&N discount rack-I saw Chabon’s name and thought, eh, why not?  

The summary on the cover was NOT helpful-upon starting I was not sure if I was reading a memoir, a novel, a historical account of his grandfather’s life, or something altogether different.  Having finished it, I’m still not sure.  Was Chabon actually the grandson retelling his family’s story?  Was the whole account fictional?  At the end of the day, I don’t think it matters.  The story was compelling, the characters deeply flawed and equally relateably human.  A delight.   

The family in the story was Jewish and their history was intertwined with Hitler’s Germany and World War II, without actually taking place much outside of the US.  On his grandfather’s opinion regarding his uncle’s sermon on Haman:  “Jewish wiles and bad luck (aka God) had put a stop to Haman’s plans; Hitler had simply run out of time.”

On his mother’s relationship with the man who had raised her since her childhood:  “My grandfather loved my mother and was reasonably certain that she loved him in return, but there was some negotiated basis to their relationship that she understood more clearly than he did.  His fatherhood was a kind of grant that she bestowed on him, a tenancy of which she was the lessor.”

His grandmother’s mental health issues were a recurring theme in their marriage and on one occurence of her disappearing Chabon put together this treasure of a paragraph:  “Was it best to start at some arbitrary perimeter and work inward toward an indefinite center, or to proceed by quarterings?  The grid of streets to be covered was a mishmash of orthogonals and diagonals, and searching it posed interesting questions in topology.  Clearly, any useful algorithm for maximizing the number of individual blocks searched at the lowest cost of time would have to integrate a Euclidean metric of distance as covered by transverse streets with a non-Euclidean metric of the zigzag distance imposed by square city blocks.”

Upon arriving at a hostel to retrieve his wife and begging the gatekeeper to release her to his care:  “He was going to say that he loved my grandmother, but that did not feel like something one man ought to bother another man with.  “She’s broken, I’m broken,” he said.  “Everybody’s broken.  If she’s not in misery anymore, I’ll take it.””

Another demonstration of Chabon’s mastery of the English language:  “They might have been separate parties at a pancake house, awash in the syrup emerging from a Wurlitzer organ, played by an old Jew with a Shinola-black pompadour, dressed in a curious tan coverall or jumpsuit and platform shoes.”

On his grandfather’s essential feelings towards his religion:  “He had always believed that the only real satisfaction offered by the experience of attending synagogue lay in the knowledge that church would be even worse.  The presence and sound of the organ, he felt, went a long way to erasing that advantage.”

And this too:  “First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expect and a redemption he knew to be impossible.  Then he told God all the nice things God seemed to need to hear about himself.  Finally, he wished for peace as it was conventionally understood, which he supposed was unobjectionable if no more likely than the coming of a messiah.”

And a wish that many a person, Jewish or not, has had with respect to the world at large: “…the concluding lines of the kaddish might have been interpreted as a wish that God and everyone else would just, for once, leave the speaker and all his fellow Jews alone.”

A good philosophy for life in general:  “Since the days of his release from prison, he had never once gone looking for trouble.  This turned out to be surprisingly effective as a means of avoiding it.”

In his dotage, he found a companion who took her own view of his hobby-how often do we think this of things that other’s are desperately proud of:  “It was all very impressive, but in her view it was not necessarily admirable.”

One tiny slice of life:  “Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner?”

And finally, the beautiful summation of the book:  “She went crazy.  His business failed.  They couldn’t have children of their own.  He went to prison.  HRT gave her cancer.  I shot his brother in the eye and then married a man who cost him his business.  When were they happy?” 

“In the cracks?”

Yes, and sometimes, the cracks are enough.

Rating:  #3 Enjoyed It Very Much