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.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/down-the-memory-hole/