Final Installment, Summer of Chabon: Moonglow

 

I chose Moonglow as the final novel for my summer of reading only books by Michael Chabon. Dutiful readers of this blog will recall that I took a break to cleanse my palette with some short stories somewhere in late August, but mostly, these four Chabon novels were the only fiction I’ve ingested for the past several months: Wonder Boys, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Telegraph Avenue, and Moonglow.

 

To start. It’s amazing to me how different each of these books were, and how varied my reactions could be to writing by the same author. I suppose experiencing an author’s oeuvre, in broad view, is much like looking at a person’s life: a series of changing influences and expressions, many years divided into sections, one person seemingly many different people at different times.

 

So. How would you begin to tell the story of a life? What if that life was inextricably tied to yours, while you were growing and changing and becoming new versions of yourself all the time? What if you love the person, and that colors your perspective? What if you’re a writer of fiction by birth, and your world is further colored and texturized by your impulse to create and find meaning? What if the person whose story you want to tell is leaving you, and you must face the abyss that will follow your telling?

 

This seems to be the task Michael Chabon set for himself with Moonglow, after he spent a week with his dying grandfather, who, in his last days, told many anecdotes from his life. Spending these final moments with his grandfather became the spark for this novel, which reads in many ways like a memoir and which has inspired endless debate as to its genre. People want to know: Which parts are true? Why didn’t he just tell the story from his grandfather’s point of view? How could he possibly know or remember some of those details?

 

My book club was no different; they had questions. I chose this for our September read and we discussed it last night. Being a writer, I think I have more patience than perhaps others do for matters of genre. I’m usually content to let a book be whatever it is. I don’t really care what a book might be called, and while I was reading Moonglow, I didn’t really care what was true and what wasn’t. I was happy to follow along with whatever Chabon intended. It was full of tender, relatable moments and vivid details that resonated and in the end, it struck me as a work of incredible love, of conscientious reverence, of grudging and precocious creativity. And what memoir is entirely true anyway? We tell our own stories from the limits of our singular viewpoint, perspective and memory, and telling the story of someone else introduces more levels, more gaps, more subjective interpretation.

 

As for plot, Moonglow unfolds as a narrator, “Mike,” spends time with his grandfather near the end of the old man’s life. The grandfather tells about his time in the war and brushes with the law, his intellectual obsessions, and the complicated marriage he shared with the narrator’s grandmother. If anything, it’s an exercise of speculation, as the narrator expands the stories into realms he cannot have witnessed. The story has a timeline of sorts, but it jumps around in time and place. With this, the book club also took issue. Perhaps in this regard, the novel could be considered a bit messy. But again, I have more patience with that, I think. Life strikes me as a very messy business, not always lining up in an orderly queue of experiences. Even in this occasional haphazardness, I felt the deep chord of truth. What can I say? I got the feels from Moonglow and I found myself thinking about my relatives who have passed and the stories they told, and the pictures and memorabilia that remain, and the deep, deep grooves they left in the road of my life, my story. If I were to try to tell the story of any of them—of my recently-passed mother, say—I think it would be much like this: things she said, things I remember, things I make up in my head. It seems to me all fiction may fall into this very category, one universal genre, and I’ll be thinking about Michael Chabon’s contribution to it for a good, long while.

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The Ordering of Place

I was reading a memoir recently, and the author talked about sitting down to draw a detailed map of a home where she felt safe and happy when she was a child—her grandparents’, I think—and I took a breath because I have done the exact thing; once, I pulled myself from bed to draw a recollection of my grandmother’s house, blueprint-style, with what I imagined was true-to-proportion squares and rectangles for each bedroom, the hallway, and the kitchen where it was always cool, clean, and bright. My grandma had a house that would be considered cramped by today’s standards—three small bedrooms, a living room, a dining area within the kitchen. No family room, no loft, no “bonus room.” And yet in it, she raised three children with my grandpa, and continued to live there after he died in his early sixties. I was eight years old when he passed and do remember my grandpa a bit, but I still think of the house as hers. To this day, I can visualize her well-organized closets and cupboards and what was kept in each one. I remember the sheen on her dining room table, the pattern in the dark green carpeting.

I wonder if everyone thinks about special places this way, or if it’s those of us drawn to some sort of creativity. Among writers, there’s lots of talk about place and how it figures into the stories we spin. But when we say “place,” surely there’s much more involved than the placement of linens, the size of a bathroom, the view from a quiet bedroom to the empty clothesline outside. It’s not where the rooms are, of course, but how we felt in them.

Perhaps this compulsion to document the layout of my grandmother’s home is a way to begin to give order to memory. This ordering must come first, because while it’s very well and good to talk about how wonderful it was at Grandma’s, someone has to make sense of it—the whys, the hows, the everlasting ripples of memory, what it meant to be warm and safe and happy within those walls. This sometimes unwelcome task falls to the creative types, I suppose, just as certain tasks fall to grandmothers, and grandfathers, and children whose only job it is to absorb, and live, and love.

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Chasms and Second Chances

A new television program called Resurrection premiered the other night. I am rarely, if ever, enticed to start watching something new but this commercial drew me in and so, I set the DVR. The premise of the show is that people who have died start appearing again, resurrected, if you will, at the same age they were when they passed. So a young boy who died thirty years ago is reunited with parents who are now in their 60s and a man meets his adult daughter who is now roughly his same age. Make sense? I suppose the dramatic tone of the commercial appealed to me, the incredulous looks on the actors’ faces as they discover their loved ones, in the flesh once again, standing before them. It’s almost like time travel, isn’t it, the idea of visiting someone at another time in their life, in your life? Second chances and new hope.

The other day I was participating in a chat online and told another author that her novel seemed to deal with memory, perception and regret. These things are reservoirs in my own writing, I said. Maybe they are for every writer. We stew in the chasms that exist between people, don’t we? Sometimes the chasms are created by death or the passage of time; sometimes, they exist between people living in the same home. We like to pay close attention to those things that might make another squirm—uncomfortable moments, unrequited emotion, loneliness. When you create different characters existing in the same story, you have to think about perception and how our memories might differ from someone else’s. You have to consider what your characters might do, if given another chance.

And that’s the appeal of that television show, I think. Don’t we all wonder if we’d be the same person if given another chance? Would we do something different? Would we treat someone differently? These daily contemplations are part of the human condition. I watched the episode of Resurrection last night. It was intriguing but will end up being driven by the mystery of the individual deaths and the overall mystery of why these people are returning, more than by character interaction and revelation. But it did have a good amount of that, too. Someone assessed it as "Touched by an Angel meets X-Files." That's probably fair, although I never watched either of those. I liked this one enough to see the second episode, enough to think about it and write this. That’s something.

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