The narrator tells us the "recollections emerged in no discernible order," but don't believe him. He knew that, done properly, strangulation was short work." And, when he's interrupted by an intrepid secretary who stabs him with a letter opener, as soon as his rage recedes he says, "Forgive me."įrom that incident, Chabon propels the reader to 1989, setting up the frame of the old man living out his last days at the home of his daughter, Mike's mother, and telling his life story. His method gives us a tantalizing clue to his past: "During World War II, he had been trained in the use of a garrote. In a news report he's "described by an unnamed coworker as 'the quiet type,' " and the narrator notes that "my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms." But his attack on the president of the company that just fired him (to give his job to a historical figure, one of many in the book) is triggered by his intense and protective love for his wife and daughter. It lays a trail of breadcrumbs that will lead us through his life. The story of the grandfather - he has no other name, nor does the grandmother, the novel's other star - begins with a hair-raising and darkly funny chapter about the time he tried to kill his boss back in 1957. Counting those beans just gets in the way of the story.Īnd Moonglow is all about storytelling.
Is it true, is it the real story of Chabon's grandfather? Who cares? All fiction is autobiographical to some degree, and none of it is entirely. As Moonglow tells it, he unwound quite a tale.
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