In Moonglow, the narrator, named Mike—like the author, Michael Chabon—recalls visiting his dying grandfather who relates to him the story of his colorful but hitherto hidden life. The literary conceit of this vicarious memoir, embedded in the real history of the 20th century, allows Chabon to play creatively with the two narrators’ reliability. But, writes Wynn Wheldon, the tricks in the end fall flat, while the stories of the grandfather, an “almost picaresque hero,” have little depth:

The grandfather, when not saving people and things, is occasionally killing them or blowing them up. And when he is doing neither, he is dreaming of traveling to the moon. (From time to time the ghost of Forrest Gump hovers.) . . . The central portion of the book is largely taken up with grandfather’s war exploits. Some of the writing here comes close to the absurd genius of Evelyn Waugh, but the trick of the book hits a curve it cannot navigate when the hero reaches the Mittelbau-Dora slave-labor camp at Nordhausen. “‘You want to know what happened at Nordhausen?’ he said in his regular rasp. ‘Look it up.’” Fiction for once cannot match fact, and the tonal difference is marked. We are given a more or less straightforward history lesson. . . .

Little bits of Yiddish fleck the narrator’s prose, but Chabon’s Jewishness hasn’t the ingrain of Malamud’s or Roth’s or Bellow’s. It seems to rest on the surface of his characters’ knowledge of themselves: “Ordinarily, my grandfather distrusted Jews who wore bow ties.” . . .

Although Chabon is famed for his grasp of metaphor and simile, in actual fact his facility is hit-and-miss. As often as [his figures of speech] interrupt with their brilliance they befuddle with their oddness. Their cumulative effect is to undermine the seriousness of the project. They distance the reader from the characters, who look or smell or behave “like” rather than as themselves. Then again, they may be the reason that so many readers enjoy Chabon. There is something of the soufflé about his writing: it is lighter than it looks.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.