Moonglow by Michael Chabon

[Monte Davis]

By me it's lesser Chabon (although that's still near the top of fiction in
general). The working out of "what did Mom & Dad *really* do in the war,"
its playing out in their postwar  lives and in the narrator's _bildung_, is
very very good -- and BTW adds even more depth to Chabon's smart reading of
_Bleeding Edge_ as "what we do and don't tell the children."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/07/thomas-pynchon-crying-september-11/

But the V2 - von Braun - space race & modern Florida threads seemed to me
neither as good in themselves nor productively tied to the story above --
almost another book.

In GR, Pynchon ties V2 and death camps together by embedding them and the
Mittelwerk, the Oven myth/metaphor, the madnesses of Blicero and the
Hereros, etc, within one grand critique of everything since Eden. But
without that infrastructure and surround, the connection between the V2 and
the book's genealogy of suffering and emotional scarring doesn't work for
me. No doubt that owes something to my own, maybe idiosyncratic view that
(1) the V2 mattered for what it foreshadowed in the 1950s and 1960s, not as
a uniquely evil or terrible weapon in 1944-45, and (2) that the whole "von
Braun as crypto-Nazi corrupter in the postwar US, if only They hadn't
hidden the truth from us" narrative is a morally vacuous evasion.

Moonglow is definitely worth reading, definitely a hard-won and not
unworthy homage to what Chabon has learned from P -- but also a case study
in the anxiety of influence

On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 9:10 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> Who else has read Moonglow by Michael Chabon?   What did you think?
>
> I’m about 2/3 through and have mixed feelings.   It’s obviously an homage
> to TRP (and I know he has put mention of TRP in many of his books) -  what
> else?   In some way that homage kind of spoils it for me.  I’m not sure how
> to say it.
>
> I love Pynchon  - (YES!)  and I've really very much enjoyed Chabon’s
> works,  especially Kavalier and Clay and the Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
>  Chabon is already great.  It feels like he really didn’t need to do this.
>
> I understand there’s a lot more to Moonglow than the V2 rocket scenes
> (etc.)  and that part is pretty good - inventive, funny and original in its
> own way.  The structure of the book is amazing and Chabon’s sense of humor
> shines through (hilarious in places).    I’m glad Chabon wrote it and I’m
> glad I read it but …. there are these mixed feelings I don’t know what from.
>
> Becky
> https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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