08/01/2016
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.” (Nov.)

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: difficult, complex, admirable—at once unique and typical of a generation…. Audacious and accomplished, Moonglow is a four-hundred-page love letter to that generation, and one is thankful to Chabon for having brought one of those characters so vividly back to life.” — Francine Prose, New York Review of Books

“An exercise in exploring the slippery nature of truth, memory and what makes a compelling story. Are stories ‘just names and dates and places [that don’t] add up to anything?’ like Grandpa suggests? Or are they, instead, something more illusive, more aching, more mysterious and meaningful. In terms of Moonglow, it’s definitely the latter.” — Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle

“Moonglow is most fundamentally a credible and carnal love story. You so love the two grandparents that you have a stake in their literal existence. You want the world to be like this, not just some book. Art, such magical stuff is called.” — Robert Christgau, The Village Voice

“A magical family narrative that is as grand and mysterious as the literary form in which he presents it.” — Kevin Nance, Poets & Writers

“Perhaps the most accessible of America’s great literary novelists since the death of John Updike.” — Kevin Nance, USA Today, starred review

“The Pulitzer Prize winner’s most probing and substantial book yet.” — Michael Upchurch, Boston Globe

“A high-spirited pack of lies rakishly masquerading as a memoir.... Delicious.” — Marion Winik, Newsday

“Moonglow explores the war, sex, and technology of mid-century America in all its glory and folly. It’s simultaneously Chabon’s most imaginative and personal work to date.” — November Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated

“A dying grandfather transports the reader through an entire era via lyrical tales of war, love and model rockets.” — Time

“You will not find better, funnier, more varied writing in a novel this year.” — Katy Waldman, Slate

“Chabon aims for the moon and successfully touches down on the lunar surface.... An emotional tale of love and loss; fabulous, at times magical, writing. Moonglow floats through time and space to carry the reader to a fascinating new world.” — Jonathan Elderfield, Associated Press

“Sparkling, richly satisfying.” — BookPage, Top Fiction Pick

“Chabon writes with the aplomb of a test pilot,” — Michael Merschel, Dallas Morning News

“Refreshing honest, funny, and succint: Chabon in a nutshell.... Moonglow is a long, elegant mess that feels like truth. It is both elegiac and immeditate, balanced between rambling, wrenching emotion and clean descriptive precision.” — Emily Simon, Buffalo News

“This novel is Chabon’s Apollo mission to the past, launched with the same combination of ingenuity, dedication, and wonder.” — Adam Kirsch, Tablet

“There’s rarely a moment in this book ... when Chabon isn’t delivering some of the liveliest and richest writing to be found on the current fiction scene.” — Chris Barsanti, PopMatters

“His most beautifully realized novel to date ... a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.” — Booklist, starred review

“Luminous.... The story builds to core revelations of wartime horror and postwar heartbreak as powerful as they come.” — Library Journal, starred review

“Utterly enchanting. Chabon makes you believe, even as you know you’re being pulled along by the romance of a good story. Moonglow is a novel about faith in storytelling itself.” — Christine Pivovar, The Rumpus

“All stories worth telling are at their hearts mysteries, a search for missing pieces. This is true of both fact and fiction, a point the book deftly makes by the sly counterpoint of those categories. In Moonglow, Chabon has taken on that search with a quiet, cosmic playfulness.” — Talya Zax, Forward

“Charming and elegantly structured.... What seduces the reader is Chabon’s language, which reinvents the world, joyously, on almost every page.” — Publishers Weekly

“[Very powerful]…. Gorgeously written and shaded with sadness, a story of recklessness, bravery and loss that spans the 20th century.” — Kevin Canfield, Kansas City Star

“Moonglow is another literary tour de force by one of America’s great writers, extraordinary rich and poignant.” — Jonathyan Kirsch, The Jewish Journal

“Intoxicating.” — David Wright, Seattle Times

“A marvel of melancholy enchantment.” — Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

“Moonglow blurs the line between autobiography and fiction in interesting ways, and manages to feel more artful than most memoirs and more true than most novels.” — Bookish

“If we consider the novel a race and the memoir a marathon, Chabon has been training for Moonglow his whole career.” — Julia Cook, The Stranger

“Fascinating.” — Harper Barnes, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Inventively fuses family history and fiction but leaves cracks for happiness and meaning to shine through.” — Rebecca Foster, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A poignant, engrossing triumph.

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.

An often rollicking, ultimately moving read. And like the song, it’s liable to stay with you.

Absolutely brilliant…. Stylistically and emotionally, Moonglow took our breath away over and over.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His prose is as luminous as ever.

A dying grandfather transports the reader through an entire era via lyrical tales of war, love and model rockets.

Intoxicating.

Chabon renders an entire era within a single deathbed confession—a scale model of life after the Second World War.

Vibrant…. A feast for fans of the Pulitzer winner’s magical prose.

The grandfather is a terrific character: difficult, complex, admirable—at once unique and typical of a generation…. Audacious and accomplished, Moonglow is a four-hundred-page love letter to that generation, and one is thankful to Chabon for having brought one of those characters so vividly back to life.

A magical family narrative that is as grand and mysterious as the literary form in which he presents it.

An exercise in exploring the slippery nature of truth, memory and what makes a compelling story. Are stories ‘just names and dates and places [that don’t] add up to anything?’ like Grandpa suggests? Or are they, instead, something more illusive, more aching, more mysterious and meaningful. In terms of Moonglow, it’s definitely the latter.

There’s rarely a moment in this book ... when Chabon isn’t delivering some of the liveliest and richest writing to be found on the current fiction scene.

All stories worth telling are at their hearts mysteries, a search for missing pieces. This is true of both fact and fiction, a point the book deftly makes by the sly counterpoint of those categories. In Moonglow, Chabon has taken on that search with a quiet, cosmic playfulness.

If we consider the novel a race and the memoir a marathon, Chabon has been training for Moonglow his whole career.

Refreshing honest, funny, and succint: Chabon in a nutshell.... Moonglow is a long, elegant mess that feels like truth. It is both elegiac and immeditate, balanced between rambling, wrenching emotion and clean descriptive precision.

Sparkling, richly satisfying.

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.

Radiant.

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

Moonglow is another literary tour de force by one of America’s great writers, extraordinary rich and poignant.

Chabon aims for the moon and successfully touches down on the lunar surface.... An emotional tale of love and loss; fabulous, at times magical, writing. Moonglow floats through time and space to carry the reader to a fascinating new world.

Fascinating.

Moonglow explores the war, sex, and technology of mid-century America in all its glory and folly. It’s simultaneously Chabon’s most imaginative and personal work to date.

Inventively fuses family history and fiction but leaves cracks for happiness and meaning to shine through.

Moonglow blurs the line between autobiography and fiction in interesting ways, and manages to feel more artful than most memoirs and more true than most novels.

[Very powerful]…. Gorgeously written and shaded with sadness, a story of recklessness, bravery and loss that spans the 20th century.

A marvel of melancholy enchantment.

A high-spirited pack of lies rakishly masquerading as a memoir.... Delicious.

You will not find better, funnier, more varied writing in a novel this year.

His most beautifully realized novel to date ... a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.

Moonglow is most fundamentally a credible and carnal love story. You so love the two grandparents that you have a stake in their literal existence. You want the world to be like this, not just some book. Art, such magical stuff is called.

This novel is Chabon’s Apollo mission to the past, launched with the same combination of ingenuity, dedication, and wonder.

The Pulitzer Prize winner’s most probing and substantial book yet.

Chabon writes with the aplomb of a test pilot,

Utterly enchanting. Chabon makes you believe, even as you know you’re being pulled along by the romance of a good story. Moonglow is a novel about faith in storytelling itself.

From the Jewish neighborhoods of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Floridian retirement communities to penal colonies at home and war camps abroad, Chabon’s newest journey proves well worth the wait.

Chabon has created a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.

A nearly 500-page epic, Moonglow explores the war, sex, and technology of mid-century America in all its glory and folly. It’s simultaneously Chabon’s most imaginative and personal work to date.

This is Chabon’s finest work in years. It is at once a story of the horrors of war and the compromises we make for love and family.

A dying grandfather transports the reader through an entire era via lyrical tales of war, love and model rockets.

Chabon has created a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.

A poignant, engrossing triumph.

Sparkling, richly satisfying.

Moonglow blurs the line between autobiography and fiction in interesting ways, and manages to feel more artful than most memoirs and more true than most novels.

Moonglow explores the war, sex, and technology of mid-century America in all its glory and folly. It’s simultaneously Chabon’s most imaginative and personal work to date.

His most beautifully realized novel to date ... a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.

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

His prose is as luminous as ever.

A dying grandfather transports the reader through an entire era via lyrical tales of war, love and model rockets.

This is why you read Michael Chabon—for the self-deprecation and insight and brio all packed tight into sentences, fantastic stories and wild novels that you may think are a world away from where you live but always turn out to hit home.

Radiant.

Forget Joycean or Bellovian or any other authorial allusion. Telegraph Avenue might best be described as Chabonesque. Exuberantly written, generously peopled, its sentences go off like a summer fireworks show, in strings of bursting metaphor.

Telegraph Avenue is so exuberant, it’s as if Michael Chabon has pulled joy from the air and squeezed it into the shape of words....His sentences spring, bounce, set off sparklers, even when dwelling in mundane details….Fantastic.

06/01/2016
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.

2016-07-19
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.