The grandfather is a fantastic and complicated character: a genius and troublemaker, brooding logician, ethical brute, romantic, funny, macho, unquestioningly devoted to his difficult wife and daughter, both brilliant characters as well. His grandson shrugs this off as “kind of trite.”īy clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. His birth occurred during a lunar eclipse, which he suggests might be “a perfect metaphor for something.” His version keeps numerous parts of the story going at once, ignoring the grandfather’s suggestion that it begin at the beginning, on the day he was born in 1915.

Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you.” Meaning and metaphor are no problem for Chabon, but the mishmash is another matter. “Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. In the course of the deathbed visit, his grandfather explicitly charges the author with telling his story. This delicious if not very straightforward novel from Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” “Wonder Boys” and “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” among others, will delight fans of this author, revisiting his trademark obsessions with history, science and Jewish identity.

“At the end of my grandfather’s life,” explains “Michael Chabon,” the narrator of this novel - a high-spirited pack of lies rakishly masquerading as a memoir - “the doctor prescribed a powerful hydromorphone against the pain of bone cancer.” At this point, Mike, the family graphomaniac, showed up at his bedside, “just as Dilaudid was bringing his soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence,” and spent the next week getting the unexpected lowdown on a life full of secrets, an epic autobiography that begins with a kitten pitched from a third-story window in Philadelphia and wraps up with a quest to save a house cat named Ramon from a killer snake in the wilderness surrounding a Florida retirement village.

Moonglow michael chabon summary