Moonglow

A Novel

By: Michael Chabon

Narrated by: George Newbern

Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

Following on the heels of his New York Times best-selling 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 midcentury, 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 20th 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 nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.

©2016 Michael Chabon (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers

Wonderful novel, terrible narrator

What did you like best about Moonglow? What did you like least?

Michael Chabon is Jewish. I'm Jewish. If the narrator is Jewish, you could have fooled me. Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a problem, but when the novel's narrator and subject matter is avowedly Jewish but the audiobook narrator sounds like he's never hung out with Jews or been inside a Jewish place of worship (therefore mispronouncing Hebrew words in a way that even the most occasional of synagogue- or temple-going Jews would experience like fingernails on a blackboard), the performance becomes a distraction. Too bad. The novel is great. It deserves better.

Would you be willing to try another one of George Newbern’s performances?

No.

Any additional comments?

NO AUDIOBOOK SHOULD BE RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC THAT HAS NOT BEEN LISTENED TO BY PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO PRONOUNCE ALL ENGLISH WORDS CORRECTLY AND ALSO HOW TO PRONOUNCE THE WORDS IN OTHER LANGUAGES THAT APPEAR IN THE TEXT. Really, it's not that hard.

Loved the book. Winced at the pronunciation.

Any additional comments?

The narrator was great with the exception of those words that were unfamiliar to him. There were some egregious errors, including his pronunciation of "Kaddish" and the drug estradiol, which made me cringe each and every time they came up. I wish he had asked for a lifeline or googled the words before performing this book.

Love & Rockets & Family

"I see the hidden lovers, fates entangled like their bodies, waiting for release from the gravity that held them down all their lives."
- Michael Chabon, Moonglow

Fantastic. I needed to chew on this for a night, to stare at the moon, dream and fantasize about what I really wanted to say and write my panegyric in a delicate space after the book.

First, I sometimes wonder if there is a genre Chabon can't master with his metaphors, his exuberance and his fantasy? At this point, he could write a book centered on zoophilic and beastial erotica and I'd gladly plunk down the full-price cost AND read it. Anyway, last night as the stars blossomed and the moon swung up over the Superstition Mountains, I felt a tug of ideas, but I needed to let them seep, to swirl, to swim and sink into the dark side of my brain. Perhaps, I'm ready. Who knows?

I'm not sure if Chabon has even read Karl Ove Knausgård, but Chabon is doing something similar. He is playing with the structure of memoir, but it isn't memoir even exactly. It isn't a biography of his mother, grandmother, grandfather EXACTLY. It is family fan fiction. It is fictionalized memoir, an autobiographical novel.

Chabon, gives it up in his Author's Note:

"IN preparing this memoir, I hve stuck to the facts except when the facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Whenever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon."

There is a scene in the book where Chabon is describing his mother, playing with horses carved by her father. Through the act of narrowing her eyes, squinting, she was able to transform these carved toys into real horses as she played. THAT is what Chabon is doing. He is narrowing his eyes on his family's history. He is letting his imagination take the information he has and bend it, fill in the gaps, expand into an almost magical fancy. It really is a thing of wonder.

The real amazing thing too about this book, is it gives the read the license and permission to do the same thing to his/her own history. We as humans are natural myth-makers. Is Chabon doing anything different than his Jewish forefathers did with the Old Testament's great myths? The telling, and retelling of these "family" stories start to get bent into family folklore. Pieces are added and subtracted until a new story a new myth is constructed. It might not be straight and accurate according to carbon dating, sequences, or people. The ledgers might not quite ever balance, but at its heart ... these family stories/myths contain our BIG truths. They contain us and our humanity, both our ugly, painful, and grounded past, and our lofty dreams of moons, lovers and rockets.

Learn to pronounce words you don't know!

How could the performance have been better?

This is the first review I have ever written of a book on Audible. This narrator is driving me crazy with his constant mispronunciation of words. Proper nouns are mispronounced regularly, and nearly every word that derives from a foreign language is butchered. Settee, Kaddish, précis, fusilier, pince-nez ... just to list the first ones that come to mind. if you don't know a word, look it up! And if you can't keep up with challenging vocabulary (though I hardly think settee qualifies as a difficult word, for example), don't sign up to read Chabon's books aloud!

Bombastic in Story and Style

Michael Chabons prose is always overblown in a 120% style as if he crams everything he ever learned into every paragraph with an almost *wink* see what I did there on every page. This time he pairs it with an equally over the top narrative and somehow the result is magical. This story reaches all the highs and the lows and will have you laughing and crying within minutes of each other. A masterwork.

This story is distinctly Jewish. Audible, it is inexcusable that a narrator be unable to correctly pronounce so many of the Hebrew/Yiddish words in this story. Such a shame.

Narrator butchers basic Yiddish

What a shame! The narrator didn't bother to learn some basic Yiddish terms, making the narration painful in many key spots. The 'Jewishness' of the author's story is important, and it's glaring when key Yiddish terms are butchered.

a gem of a book but recording has a tiny flaw

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Chabon writes so masterfully--he captivated me completely, and it was only after I'd finished listening that I began to understand his ingenious manipulation of the reader. My one quibble is that George Newbern was not coached on the preferred pronunciation of several Hebrew words, such as Kaddish. Every time he pronounced it as KadDISH, I winced.

Liked the [meandering] story; shameful narration

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I would only mildly recommend "Moonglow" to friends and family. The structure of the book meandered to and fro, from one anecdote to the next over vastly different ages of the Grandfather's life. I strongly suspect Mr. Chabon used this structure deliberately as a comment on the meandering nature of one's life, but as an audiobook, it was tough to get into a rhythm that motivates you to come back. On the whole, looking back, I did enjoy it, but it was a long slog. Let me also say that a recommendation would be difficult for me because the narration was very likely the worst I have ever come across on Audible. It wasn't the author's voice (which actually matched the story quite well), but his shameful mispronunciation of Hebrew and Yiddish words (i.e., "K'dish" instead of "Kaddish"; "Shal" instead of "Shul"). For as often as these words appeared in the book, the narrator or the producers should have worked a little harder to get them right.

What did you like best about this story?

The story does cover a fascinating period in American history and speaks to the glory of the greatest generation. There is an element of nostalgia to the story that I enjoyed, and I also really liked the exploration of what made the Grandfather a compelling character, a worthy contributor to, and certain member of, that greatest generation. The Grandfather was a wonderful, fully fleshed out character, and in the final analysis, I did enjoy the time I got to spend with him.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of George Newbern?

Mr. Newbern's voice was well suited to the story, as I wrote above. That said, his mis-pronunciation of Hebrew and Yiddish words very nearly ruined the book for me. So to answer the question, anyone who could both embody the unique voices in Mr. Chabon's book, while getting the pronunciation right of all of the book's words, would be my choice.

Do you think Moonglow needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

Moonglow was a great self-contained story that reached a satisfying end for me. I do not see the need for a sequel.

Disappointing

Would you try another book from Michael Chabon and/or George Newbern?

Yes I would try another Chabon book, but not another read by George Newbern.

What didn’t you like about George Newbern’s performance?

It really seemed like he had no feeling for the story or the characters - his reading was wooden or robotic. Perhaps he simply hadn't read the book in advance of the reading - which few readers can get away with. This was too bad because he has a nice voice and clear articulation; it just didn't flow and I found it hard to get into the story while listening to it.

Was Moonglow worth the listening time?

I stopped listening and checked the book out of the library.

I really wanted to love your new book, Michael Chabon.

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The narrative meanders along with no discernible direction. This book reminds me of "A Soldier of the Great War," another meandering book of beautiful prose with no story that jumps out and grabs your interest. perhaps if I am able to get through the next 10 hours of Moonglow, I will find the point of the story. I like books that move back and forth through time, but this one is too disjointed.

Would you ever listen to anything by Michael Chabon again?

Absolutely! I am a big fan of his previous works.

What three words best describe George Newbern’s voice?

Nasal and boring

Do you think Moonglow needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

No. There isn't a story line to continue.

Any additional comments?

i hated to write this and perhaps I shouldn't have because I am unable to plow through the whole book. Chabon writes beautiful prose, but this book is disjointed to the point that I am unable to appreciate the story he is trying to tell.