I’m happy to report that I have a review of Michael Chabon’s latest novel Moonglow in the inaugural issue of the Hoxie Gorge Review.

The review is the result of a friend recommending the novel to me. Somehow I had gotten into my 40s without actually ever reading Michael Chabon, despite his work being semi-ubiquitous. For a short period, it was almost a kind of literary cultural truancy to have not read any Wallace, Franzen, Lethem, and Whitehead.* (Rough guess: this moment perhaps ran from around 1996 until 2008.) But now I’ve finally broken the seal. Here are some leftover notes.

I was intrigued by how WWII and the Holocaust were used as a device in this novel. I have another friend in a book group and it seems that all of their novels have something to do with WWII and the Holocaust. That is, the novels rely on WWII in some large expositional way. The books get their narrative or moral momentum somehow from the war, even if the books aren’t otherwise about that historical event or time period. I am of course generalizing massively and will shirk the duty to cite actual books here. (This is just a general feeling, dig?) Sometimes I have the snarky half-thought: It would be interesting to read a contemporary American novel that didn’t use WWII as a source of exposition.

Freud and WWII: one could argue that these are the hidden engines in the postwar, American novel, the first as an explication for any character’s motivations, and the second as history’s Big Bang: the atrocity from which all characters and family histories spring. I am exaggerating, naturally. I fully well realize that WWII was a cataclysmic historical event; I am not trying to diminish its actual historical importance. But the way it is used as an Allen wrench of explanation in so many contemporary novels is astonishing. It steadily drives past the main street of historical dutifulness and enters the suburb of helpless reflex. It begins to feel like a curse of contemporary narrative — a hex key indeed.

Regarding the overwhelming narrative legacy of Freud, see contemporary children’s movies. No one character is ever intrinsically a jerk. They are a jerk as the result of some childhood trauma. It’s a device that’s used jokingly but taken seriously, perhaps the most dangerous type of device because it means that screenwriters — if that’s who we could pin this on — believe in it. Humorous use of backstory is recognized as a device, hence the jokiness, but it’s still routinely, desperately deployed, as if it’s the only explanation for why people misbehave. Turns out Iago was once left out of dodgeball. Furthermore, these explanatory backstories often become movie sequels themselves. It’s a kind of narrative cancer, these endlessly replicating tentpole explanations. Stories never finish. Nothing is ever whole. Each new movie simply a software update.  

The surprise in Moonglow is that the grandmother is not simply a Holocaust survivor but someone who appropriated the biography of a Holocaust survivor. The grandmother is a grand trickster figure. She tells the young Michael stories while shuffling a deck of tarot cards — grandmother as fortune teller/author.

While I had my quibbles, I definitely think this is an interesting use of WWII/the Holocaust. It’s certainly not invoked one-dimensionally, though, to be sure, the scenes where the grandfather is in the battlefield strike me as the most generically filmish. They remind me too much of Wes Anderson. The details seem chosen too much for their innate quirkiness. (For example, as the grandfather makes his way through post–D-Day invasion France, he’s attacked by a man with a bow and arrow. And the preacher who provides him shelter just happens to share all of the grandfather’s non-invasion related astronomical interests, etc.) All the details seem cute in an overly symmetrical way. Rather than existing as artifacts from the world of these characters, the details seem chosen to alleviate some inner need for alignment within the mind of the creator. I realize this can be a legitimate artistic mode, but it tends to leave me cold and it seems to suffocate the possibility of actual drama. Perhaps my disagreements with Chabon’s choices for the WWII bits are a consequence of simply having seen too many films and TV shows about war, so that unless I am confronted by a raging hellscape of verisimilitude, I don’t really believe any of it. Or perhaps this narrative trail is just so well worn that it’s hard to make the sites look interesting again.

In a way Chabon’s use of WWII is a recognition that the war functions as a narrative trope. There is a John Barthian or perhaps Paul Austerian black hole in the center of the novel: the grandmother is not a clean embodiment of 20th-century horrors but a kind of narrative mirage. Part of my beef with the novel is that the narrator’s discovery of this mirage doesn’t seem to have any consequence, so as a reader I am uncertain what to make of it. Is it one of those self-referential gestures who’s central point seems to be It’s all make believe! or Isn’t make believe wonderful? or Aren’t we all tremendously silly for believing such a thing as this very novel?! I have always hated gestures like this — not self-referential moves in and of themselves but moves that seem to exist for the primary purpose of calling attention to themselves.

For me of course the ur-text of self-referentiality is “Duck Amuck,” the cartoon where Daffy Duck argues with and is tormented by his creator, who turns out to be Bugs Bunny. The cartoon starts as a joke, turns into a riddle, and ends in a black hole. The joke is that Daffy has beef with his creator. The illustrator is a cruel master preventing Daffy from doing his show. The fundamental revelation of any kind of self-referential move within a narrative is to remind the audience that all of this is chosen, placed, controlled and not in any way natural. The riddle is the revelation at the end of the cartoon that Bugs Bunny is the illustrator — the master of Daffy. This makes a kind of cosmic sense, since Bugs is the central trickster character in the Looney Tunes cartoons and slyly controls all of the other sub characters, who are always made into fools because they think they can control their own destinies. The black hole part is the infinite mirror reflection inherent in the idea that all of the animated characters are the projection/illustration/creation of another animated character, that the entire series is occurring within Bugs’s mind or as the result of Bugs’s controlling, artistic will. But then, who has created Bugs? Who is the illustrator’s illustrator? Once you have peered downward there is no end to this spiral staircase.

I realize that I have strayed a bit too far into bong-logic turf now, but such is the consequence of self-referentiality within any kind narrative art. To this artistic impetus, one wants to say, we get it. It’s make believe. We accept the premise that this is all happening in a book (or a movie or up on a stage or in a painting). We understand the invisible handshake inside the transaction. Repeatedly underlining this point, no matter how eloquently, will only grow tiresome. (See, e.g., the endings of most Nabokov novels).

In Chabon’s defense, Moonglow doesn’t go Full Referential. But it’s far from straight mimetic realism. For that I am grateful, and it’s that middle-distance aesthetic ambiguity on this self-awareness spectrum that has stayed with me the longest and has given me the most to think about afterward. Now on with the show. 

*Full disclosure: I regret to say I still have not read any Whitehead.