Michael Chabon's new book is described on the title page as "a novel," in an author's note as a "memoir" and in the acknowledgments as a "pack of lies." This is neither as confusing nor as devious as it might sound, since Moonglow is less a self-conscious postmodern high-wire act than an easygoing hybrid of forms…"After I'm gone, write it down," Chabon's grandfather instructs him. "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." Moonglow both obeys these instructions and rebels against them, preserving the mishmash and mixing 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, which have been arranged with painstaking haphazardness…Whatever else it is—a novel, a memoir, a pack of lies, a mishmash—this book is beautiful.
The New York Times Book Review - A. O. Scott
…elegiac and deeply poignant…Mr. Chabon is one of contemporary literature's most gifted prose stylists…In Moonglow, he writes with both lovely lyricism and highly caffeinated fervor. He conjures Mike's childhood with Proustian ardor…He makes Oakland, Calif., in the 1970s come alive—and does the same for Baltimore in the 1950s and Florida in the late 1980s. There are sharp, funny portraits of the many eccentric characters who wander through the lives of the narrator's family, but it's Mike's grandfather who bestrides the novel—an Augie March-like hero who careens through life like a wildly thrown bowling ball, knocking over those who stray into his path while nearly crashing his own dreams. He goes at things freestyle, and often seems like the very embodiment, in Mr. Chabon's mind, of America itself—proud, romantic, naïve, impulsive…Moonglow …is never less than compelling when it sticks to the tale of Mike's grandparents—these damaged survivors of World War II who bequeath to their family a legacy of endurance, and an understanding of the magic powers of storytelling to provide both solace and transcendence.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
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
Absolutely brilliant…. Stylistically and emotionally, Moonglow took our breath away over and over.
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.
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 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.
An often rollicking, ultimately moving read. And like the song, it’s liable to stay with you.
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.
His prose is as luminous as ever.
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.
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 poignant, engrossing triumph.
A marvel of melancholy enchantment.
A dying grandfather transports the reader through an entire era via lyrical tales of war, love and model rockets.
Fascinating.
A high-spirited pack of lies rakishly masquerading as a memoir.... Delicious.
Vibrant…. A feast for fans of the Pulitzer winner’s magical prose.
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.
You will not find better, funnier, more varied writing in a novel this year.
Sparkling, richly satisfying.
Top Fiction Pick BookPage
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.
A story as much about the art of storytelling as it is about family, history, and the 20th century, Moonglow is a dazzling achievement.
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.
Chabon renders an entire era within a single deathbed confession—a scale model of life after the Second World War.
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.
Chabon writes with the aplomb of a test pilot,
Intoxicating.
If we consider the novel a race and the memoir a marathon, Chabon has been training for Moonglow his whole career.
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.
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.
A magical family narrative that is as grand and mysterious as the literary form in which he presents it.
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.
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
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.
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.
The Pulitzer Prize winner’s most probing and substantial book yet.
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.
[Very powerful]…. Gorgeously written and shaded with sadness, a story of recklessness, bravery and loss that spans the 20th century.
Moonglow is another literary tour de force by one of America’s great writers, extraordinary rich and poignant.
This novel is Chabon’s Apollo mission to the past, launched with the same combination of ingenuity, dedication, and wonder.
Radiant.
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 dying grandfather transports the reader through an entire era via lyrical tales of war, love and model rockets.
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.
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.
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.
Chabon has created a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.
Chabon has created a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.
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.
Fascinating.
A magical family narrative that is as grand and mysterious as the literary form in which he presents it.
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.
★ 09/01/2016
This smoothly flowing novel plays out like a duet between Michael Chabon's characters and plot twists and George Newbern's narration. The story sounds like it’s composed of what might be family tales. An old man's memories of youth, war, marriage, and his ongoing pride in the NASA models he has created are juxtaposed with his grandson's observations of dramas that occurred on the distaff side of the family. Further complications ensue through other telling details of confusions arising from both misplaced blunt honesty and wishful prevaricating. Newbern's accents and pacing ably make each family member sound real, giving the listener a sense of immediate access to each individually and as part of the rich tapestry of each other's interpretations. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
