I never met my paternal grandfather. He died before I was born. Of my maternal grandfather, I have vague memories, but he too died before I was old enough to speak - or write. I never got to show them any of my stories, never got to hear their own stories of living through two World Wars. Had they lived, would they have let me write their memoirs? I hope so. At least, from what I have heard of him, I have no doubt my paternal grandfather would tell me the same things Mike Chabon’s grandfather tells Chabon shortly before he dies. “After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you.”
The end result of the stories Chabon’s grandfather tells him is a book called ‘Moonglow.’ As with most other stories of our generation, this story too is about the reverberations of the Second World War. For, as the author points out, the Second World War has set the tone for nothing less than the entire contemporary world. “Everything is traceable back to the Second World War,” he says. “That’s true not just of politics and the nations that are in contention in various ways around the world. It’s also true socially and in the ways that we all have grown up and have been schooled to look at the world. And, culturally, in terms of stories that have predominated, so many of them are ultimately rooted in some way or another in the Second World War, whether that’s James Bond or Marvel comics or ‘Star Trek.’ You can see the influence of those six years of conflict just absolutely everywhere.”
And so, in ‘Moonglow,’ the narrator’s grandfather is on his deathbed, with his inhibitions loosed by pain medication. He recounts his life’s adventures, from his childhood in Philadelphia to his experience as a soldier during the invasion of Germany, his career at NASA, his time in prison, his marriage to a holocaust victim, and, finally, the last days of his life in Florida and in Oakland, where he lies dying. The reader never gets to know his name. Instead, the narrator Mike Chabon calls him, ‘my grandfather.’
Only, he is not really Mike Chabon’s grandfather (nor step-grandfather to be precise). He is a half real, half imaginary figure in this story written by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Michael Chabon. Similarly, neither is the narrator, Mike Chabon, totally real nor totally unreal. At times Mike Chabon in the book is the real Mike Chabon who writes the book (Author Chabon like the narrator Chabon was with his grandfather during the last ten days of his life. His grandfather too died of bone cancer). At other times Mike Chabon in the book is a totally imaginary character who -coincidence galore - happens to share the same name as that of the author who writes about him.
If this is not confusing enough, Chabon writes in the Author’s Note, “In preparing this memoir I have stuck to facts except when facts refuse to conform with memory...” warning tongue-in-cheek that he has taken liberties with the truth with due abandon, even while calling it a memoir. Chabon says he chose this method because a memoir would have been so boring; “there’s nothing to write,” he explains. “That’s the problem with life.” So he wrapped what was true in “a pack of lies.”
The most crucial facts about ‘Moonglow’ however, is not whether the grandfather is real or lives only in Chabon’s imagination. What really matters is the poignant love story about the narrator’s grandparents, who could never entirely be free of the terrors they witnessed. The war is forever present in the grandmother, prodded into insanity by nightmare visions of a skinless horse. When Mike’s grandfather marries her and becomes her daughter’s stepfather, it is with the hope that he can “mend what the war had broken.” In fact, it is noted that “from the first that was part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose...He thought that if he took on the job of loving this broken woman, some measure of sense or purpose might be returned to his life. He thought that in mending her he might also be mended.”
In keeping to his grandfather’s wishes the narrator uses many ‘fancy metaphors’ in his story that can only be called ingenious inventions. Take this description of falling in love: “At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.” And of how they got on so well: “She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.” And how they lived: “My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane.”
Among all the beautiful prose of this novel that centers entirely around some of the most precious people in our lives – our grandparents – giving us a glimpse of the lives they led when they were young and healthy in a world totally alien to us, there is a long passage where the narrator and his dying grandfather talk about the point of it all. This dialogue so aptly sums up the difference between the present generation and the older generations.
“You try to take advantage of the time you have. That’s what they tell you to do. But when you’re old, you look back and you see all you did with all that time is wasted. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn’t finish. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“I’m not ashamed of you,” I said. “I’m proud.” My grandfather made another one of his faces. This face said that what I knew about shame, what my entire generation, with its deployment of confession as a tool for self-aggrandizement, knew about shame would fit into half a pistachio shell.”
No doubt, this would probably be the look of all grandfather’s in the presence of their 21st century progeny. That is why ‘Moonglow’ so wonderful. The fantastic stories of Chabon’s grandfather might make you think they are a world away from where you live but they will always turn out to hit home.
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