The book jacket describes Moonglow as a tour de force of speculative autobiography, a work of fictional nonfiction, a novel disguised as a memoir. That’s a lot to live up to. Moonglow does, especially for those of us who lived through the space race of the 1960s. Based on deathbed memories shared by his grandfather, Chabon spins a novel that hopscotches from WWII concentration camps to Cape Canaveral.
Grandfather, no name given, is sometimes a protagonist, more often a Zelig, experiencing history from the periphery. He does not seek out his beautiful, troubled wife. She approaches him like a femme fatale at a synagogue social and takes over his life. He enters WWII, not as a field soldier, but as a scientist soldier on the hunt for German and French rocket sites and factories. His life goal is to punish Werner von Braun for his calculated treachery at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where X2 rockets were produced with slave labor. Grandfather is always a day late as von Braun is swept up by the Americans to craft their rocket systems. Grandfather’s post-war career is building precise model rockets for NASA that are exhibit and explain their prowess.
One of the funniest sequences is Grandfather’s move to a South Florida Jewish retirement community where he becomes involved with a great lady, a monster cat, and a pet-eating python. Chabon based this segment on a real Jewish python hunter. All told in inimitable Chabon style.
Though sometimes confusing as it jumps through time, Moonglow is a highly recommended read.