Moonglow

by Michael Chabon

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Following on the heels of his New York Times-bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure-and the forces that work to destroy us.

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis of the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain in the ongoing magic act that is the art of Michael Chabon.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather." It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact-and the creative power-of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow is also a tour de force of speculative history in which Chabon attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire, Popular Mechanics and Boy's Life. Along the way Chabon devises and reveals, in bits and pieces whose hallucinatory intensity is matched only by their comic vigor and the radiant moonglow of his prose, a secret history of his own imagination.

From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York's Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of "the American Century," Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.

Release date: October 6, 2020

Publisher: Harper

Print pages: 480

Sample

1

This is how I heard the story. When Alger Hiss got out of prison, he had a hard time finding a job. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School, had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes and helped charter the United Nations, yet he was also a convicted perjurer and notorious as a tool of international communism. He had published a memoir, but it was dull stuff and no one wanted to read it. His wife had left him. He was broke and hopeless. In the end one of his remaining friends took pity on the bastard and pulled a string. Hiss was hired by a New York firm that manufactured and sold a kind of fancy barrette made from loops of piano wire. Feathercombs, Inc., had gotten off to a good start but had come under attack from a bigger competitor that copied its designs, infringed on its trademarks, and undercut its pricing. Sales had dwindled. Payroll was tight. In order to make room for Hiss, somebody had to be let go.

In an account of my grandfather’s arrest, in the Daily News for May 25, 1957, he is described by an unnamed coworker as “the quiet type.” To his fellow salesmen at Feathercombs, he was a homburg on the coat rack in the corner. He was the hardest-working but least effective member of the Feathercombs sales force. On his lunch breaks he holed up with a sandwich and the latest issue of Sky and Telescope or Aviation Week. It was known that he drove a Crosley, had a foreign-born wife and a teenage daughter and lived with them somewhere in deepest Bergen County. Before the day of his arrest, my grandfather had distinguished himself to his coworkers only twice. During Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, when the office radio failed, my grandfather had repaired it with a vacuum tube prized from the interior of the telephone switchboard. And a Feathercombs copywriter reported once bumping into my grandfather at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, where the foreign wife was, of all things, starring as Serafina in The Rose Tattoo. Beyond this nobody knew much about my grandfather, and that seemed to be the way he preferred it. People had long since given up trying to engage him in conversation. He had been known to smile but not to laugh. If he held political opinions—if he held opinions of any kind—they remained a mystery around the offices of Feathercombs, Inc. It was felt he could be fired without damage to morale.

Shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth, the president of Feathercombs heard a disturbance outside his office, where a quick-witted girl had been positioned to filter out creditors and tax inspectors. A male voice spoke with urgency that scaled rapidly to anger. The intercom on the president’s desk buzzed and buzzed again. He heard a chime of glass breaking. It sounded like a telephone when you slammed down the receiver. Before the president could rise from his chair to see what the matter was, my grandfather muscled into the room. He brandished a black handset (in those days a blunt instrument) that trailed three feet of frayed cord.

Back in the late 1930s, when he wasn’t hustling pool, my grandfather had put himself through four years at Drexel Tech by delivering pianos for Wanamaker’s department store. His shoulders spanned the doorway. His kinky hair, escaped from its daily paste-down of Brylcreem, wobbled atop his head. His face was so flushed with blood that he looked sunburned. “I never saw anyone so angry,” an eyewitness told the News. “You could almost smell smoke coming off him.”

For his part, the president of Feathercombs was astonished to discover that he had approved the firing of a maniac. “What’s this about?” he said.

It was a pointless question, and my grandfather disdained to answer it; he was opposed to stating the obvious. Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention. Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms. He took hold of the frayed end of the telephone cord. He wound it twice around his left hand.

The president tried to stand up, but his legs got tangled in the kneehole of his desk. His chair shot out from under him and toppled over, casters rattling. He screamed. It was a fruity sound, halfway to a yodel. As my grandfather fell on top of him, the president twisted himself toward the window overlooking East Fifty-seventh Street. He just had time to notice that passersby seemed to be crowding together on the sidewalk below.

My grandfather looped the cord of the handset around the president’s throat. He had maybe two minutes before the rocket of his anger burned up its fuel and fell back to earth. That would be ample time. During World War II, he had been trained in the use of a garrote.* He knew that, done properly, strangulation was short work.

“Oh my God,” said the secretary, Miss Mangel, making a late appearance on the scene.

She had reacted quickly when my grandfather burst into her office smelling, she would recall afterward, like wood smoke. She had managed to buzz twice before my grandfather grabbed the handset away from her. He picked up the intercom. He yanked the handset cord from the base.

“You’ll have to pay for that,” Miss Mangel said.

When he told this story thirty-two years later, my grandfather put a checkmark of admiration beside Miss Mangel’s name, but with his rocket only halfway up the slope of its parabola he took her words as provocation. He threw the base of the intercom out the window of Miss Mangel’s office. The chiming noted by the president was the sound of the intercom sailing through a spiderweb of glass into the street.

Hearing a cry of outrage from below, Miss Mangel went to the window to look. Down on the sidewalk a man in a gray suit was sitting looking up at her. There was blood on the left lens of his round spectacles. He was laughing.* People stopped to help him. The doorman announced that he was going to call the police. That was when Miss Mangel heard her boss screaming. She turned from the window to run into his office.

At first glance the office appeared to be empty. Then she heard the tap of a shoe against a linoleum floor, a tap, another tap. The back of my grandfather’s head rose from behind the desk, then sank again. Brave Miss Mangel went around the desk. Her boss lay sprawled on his belly on the polished floor. My grandfather straddled his back, hunched forward, applying the impromptu garrote. The president bucked, and thrashed, and tried to roll himself over. The only sound was the toes of his cordovan bucks trying to get purchase against the linoleum.

Miss Mangel snatched up a letter opener from the president’s desk and jabbed it into my grandfather’s left shoulder. In my grandfather’s reckoning, many years later, this action merited another checkmark.

The point of the letter opener sank only half an inch or so into meat, but the bite of metal blocked some meridian in the flow of my grandfather’s rage. He grunted. “It was like I woke up,” he said when he told me this part of the story for the first time, during the last week of his life. He unwound the cord from the president’s neck. He peeled it from the grooves it had cut into the flesh of his own left hand. The handset clattered against the floor. With a foot on either side of the president, he stood up and took a step away. The president flopped onto his back and raised himself into a sitting position, then sledded backward on his ass into a notch between two filing cabinets. He sobbed for air. When his face had hit the floor, he’d bitten his lower lip, and now his teeth were dyed pink.

My grandfather turned to face Miss Mangel. He plucked out the letter opener and laid it on the president’s desk. When one of his rages wore off, you could see regret flooding his eyes like seawater. He dropped his hands to his sides.

“Forgive me,” he said to Miss Mangel and to the president. I suppose he was also saying it to my mother, fourteen at the time, and to my grandmother, though arguably she was as much to blame as my grandfather. There was scant hope of forgiveness, but my grandfather did not sound as if he expected, or even wanted, to find any.

* * *

At the end of my grandfather’s life, his doctor prescribed a powerful hydromorphone against the pain of bone cancer. A lot of Germans were busy knocking holes in the Berlin Wall around that time, and I showed up to say goodbye to my grandfather just as Dilaudid was bringing its soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence: Out flowed a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve. He had been installed in my mother’s guest bedroom for almost two weeks, and by the time I arrived in Oakland he was getting nearly twenty milligrams a day. He started talking almost the minute I sat down in the chair by his bed. It was as if he had been waiting for my company, but I believe now that he simply knew he was running out of time.

The recollections emerged in no discernible order apart from the first, which was also the earliest.

“Did I tell you,” he said, lolling on his palliative cloud, “about the time I dropped a kitten out of the window?”

I did not say, then or at any point until he sank into the cloud for good, that he had told me very little about his life. I had yet to hear about the attack on the president of Feathercombs, Inc., so I could not point out to him that I sensed a motif of defenestration beginning to emerge in his autobiography. Later, when he did tell me about Miss Mangel, the intercom, and the Czech diplomat, I would choose to skip the smart remark.

“Did it die?” I asked him.

I was eating a cup of his raspberry Jell-O. Nothing else tempted his palate apart from a spoonful or two of the chicken soup my mother cooked for him, following the recipe of my late grandmother—born and raised in France—which called for a squeeze of lemon to brighten the broth. Even the Jell-O was not of much interest to him. There was plenty to spare.

“It was a third-story window,” my grandfather said. He added, as if his native city were known for its adamantine sidewalks, “in Philadelphia.”

“How old were you?”

“Three or four.”

“Jesus. Why would you do something like that?”

He poked out his tongue, once, twice. That was something he did every few minutes. It often looked as if he were passing clownish judgment on something you had told him, but it was really only a side effect of the meds. His tongue was pale and had the nap of suede. I knew from a few precious demonstrations during my childhood that he could touch the tip of it to the tip of his nose. Outside the window of my mother’s guest bedroom, the East Bay sky was gray as the nimbus of hair around his suntanned face.

“Curiosity,” my grandfather decided, and stuck out his tongue.

I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats.