This gives Chabon and his narrator leeway to leaf at will through chapters of the grandfather’s life without feeling obligated to connect the dots. Moonglow is ingeniously constructed as a memoir, told by the narrator (himself unnamed until fairly late in the game) based on his grandfather’s presumably disjointed deathbed confessions, which resist being forced to make traditional kinds of sense. The prose is great sparkling but not as showy as he can write. There’s a perfectly good internal logic for this. Its a long, hairy novel, full of time switches and strange incidents. They meld, rather, into a meditation on the Jewish-American experience in the 20th century. But, told as they are out of sequence, chronological or otherwise (and often piecemeal at that), these episodes don’t build into what many readers will recognize as a coherent story. A number of rather fine set pieces unfold - such as the one that opens the novel, in which the unnamed hero, the narrator’s grandfather, takes comically violent vengeance on a boss for dumping him to open up a position for accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss, recently released from prison.
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