But Michael Chabon, for all his expansive storytelling gifts, is no Victorian. Dickens' Little Nell, Cathy in 'Wuthering Heights,' Helen Burns in 'Jane Eyre' - all of them went a-gabbing (ph) into their good nights. The morbid Victorians in particular loved these set pieces. Literature provides no greater opportunity for melodrama, windy speeches and schmaltz than the moment when a character who's fading away fast decides to use precious last breaths to talk. MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: The deathbed scene. Chabon's other novels include 'The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh,' 'Wonder Boys' and 'The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay.' It's called 'Moonglow,' and it's loosely based on his grandfather's life. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review of the new novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. would fit into half a pistachio shell.” (Nov.This is FRESH AIR. Listening to his grandfather’s often-harrowing stories, Mike thinks to himself, “What I knew about shame. What seduces the reader is Chabon’s language, which reinvents the world, joyously, on almost every page. Chabon imbricates his characters’ particular histories with broader, detail-rich narratives of war, migration, and technological advances involving such figures as Alger Hiss and Wernher von Braun. Mike’s grandmother, born in France, is alluring but unstable, “a source of fire, madness, and poetry” whose personal history overlaps in unclear ways with the Holocaust, and whose fits of depression and hallucination result in her institutionalization (also one of the novel’s finest sections). His grandfather-whose deathbed reminisces serve as the novel’s main narrative engine-is a WWII veteran with an anger streak (the stint he does in prison after a workplace assault is one of the novel’s finest sections) and a fascination with V-2 rockets, astronomy, space travel, and all things celestial or skyward.

Mike’s memoir is concerned less with his own life than with the lives of his deceased maternal Jewish grandparents, who remain unnamed. Chabon’s ( Telegraph Avenue) charming and elegantly structured novel is presented as a memoir by a narrator named Mike who shares several autobiographical details with Chabon (for one, they’re both novelists who live in the Bay Area).

Moonglow by Michael Chabon