The debate about lit-genre hybrids launched a thousand tedious essays, but the trend produced some good writing, much of it by Chabon himself. During the 2000s, he led a charge of literary writers into the colorful trenches of genre fiction in books like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) and in editorial collaborations with McSweeney’s. With the slim and charming coming-of-age debut The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) he was also a best seller with a loyal audience. In the parts of the grandfather’s tale that intersect with these men, he emerges as a tortured hero, a hard man animated by a spark of boyish wonder preserved from his hardscrabble Philadelphia youth.Ĭhabon began his career as a straight realist.
Three historical figures play small but decisive roles in his life story: Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS (precursor to the CIA) the Nazi and NASA rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and the accused spy and convicted perjurer Alger Hiss. Many stories flow from his mouth, dutifully recorded, reconstructed, and embellished by his grandson. The old man has never liked to talk about himself, but a regimen of opiates has loosened his tongue. The narrator, a young writer named Mike Chabon, has come to Oakland to help his mother care for her father, who’s dying of untreated bone cancer. The frame of Michael Chabon’s new novel Moonglow is a deathbed confession.
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