Much of Michael Chabon’s career as a novelist has been spent mining a rather specialised niche: examining the Jewish history of the 1940s using the styles of pulp fiction. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) saw the Holocaust through the eyes of two New York comic-book writers, while The Final Solution (2004) had an ancient Sherlock Holmes come out of retirement to investigate a case that also led back to the death camps. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) was a Raymond Chandler-style pastiche set in a parallel reality, where Israel was wiped out in 1948 and Europe’s Jews were resettled in Alaska (there to be known as “The Frozen Chosen”).
His latest, Moonglow, is not so obviously indebted to a particular genre, and takes place much closer to reality. It is a novel posing as a family memoir, but it shares the same distinctive sensibility, in which a hyperactive storyline and a facetious tone jostle with historical atrocities.
The story begins in 1957, when Mike Chabon’s grandfather is sacked as a travelling salesman, and tries to strangle the president of the company with a telephone wire; he is only roused from his fury when his victim’s secretary stabs him with a letter opener. Then we flash forward to the old man’s deathbed in the early 1990s, where powerful opiates end a lifetime’s “habit of silence” — and out flows “a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve”.
The old man turns out to have been an intelligence officer, with a back-story out of a thriller by Frederick Forsyth or Ira Levin: he was sent into Nazi Germany at the end of the war to track down Nazi rocket scientists and bring them to America. At the centre of the book is the figure of Wernher von Braun, who designed the Nazis’ V-2 rocket, with the help of slave labourers living in unimaginable horror; he then reinvented himself in America as the inspirational designer of the Saturn V, which took the first humans to the moon. Von Braun, says our narrator, stood “ankle-deep in slaughter” as he “reached for the heavens”. (Or, as the old joke goes, he aimed for the stars — but sometimes he hit London.)
But this is not all. There is also a stretch in prison, a second career making space-themed novelty toys, a bearded lady and a romantic subplot set in a Florida retirement community, centred around a hunt for a pet-eating python. And, of course, there is a love story, the tale of his grandfather’s passion for his wife — a French Jew spirited out of a displaced persons’ camp to Baltimore, but followed by demons from the old country. Moonglow has a bit of everything: humour, derring-do, shocking reversals of fortune, joy, heartbreak.
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Like all of Chabon’s work, the novel is very charming and very readable, once you have anchored yourself in the swirling flashbacks and flash forwards. The prose is smooth and chipper (a prison thug’s eyes glint “like dimes lost between sofa cushions”). The imagery and the themes — the moon, rockets, escape, longing — are neatly interlocking and readily comprehensible. His dialogue is perky: “Your wife wasn’t ‘upset’,” says one straight-talking nun. “She was out of her cotton-picking mind.”
Whether it really makes an impression will depend on your tolerance for cartoonishness. In Chabon’s world, a rabbi becomes a pool shark, or a woman experiences terrifying delusions, and then you move on to the next lively episode. There is a strange weightlessness about Moonglow. It feels like a scale model, the work of an ingenious adolescent, rather than a fully fledged artist.
Read the first chapter on the Sunday Times website
Fourth Estate £18.99 pp430