Books: Shattering pain

Part novel, part memoir, author Michael Chabon’s latest work is a stunning work of art.

By ELAINE MARGOLIN
Author Michael Chabon (photo credit: BENJAMIN TICE SMITH)
Author Michael Chabon
(photo credit: BENJAMIN TICE SMITH)
Pulitzer-Prize winning author Michael Chabon has written astonishing books overflowing with imaginative brilliance that describe entire worlds of shattering pain and beauty and nostalgic remembrances. In his new masterwork, Moonglow, he is writing at the peak of his powers and has finally freed himself to turn his telescopic lens upon the family dysfunction he endured as a young child.
The result is a staggering work that fuses personal confession and autobiography and combines it with the author’s wild imaginings.
Chabon returns to sit by his grandfather’s deathbed and listen to him as he recounts his turbulent life. He is captivated by his grandfather’s stories since he has never heard any of them before. He explains simply that his “grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms.” But the imminence of death and the massive painkillers have loosened his tongue and Chabon urges him to keep talking.
Chabon’s maternal grandfather grew up poor on the rough-and-tumble antisemitic streets of South Philadelphia, where he was often attacked by the Italian and Irish kids.
He always fought back with a vengeance; unleashing a poisonous anger that seemed to always be with him. In his teens, he learned how to hustle to survive, often running errands in exchange for lemon ices or some other delicious treat. His acts of juvenile delinquency were equaled by his fierce intelligence and obsessive pursuits. He was brilliant in science and math and worked later on in his life as an engineer. He was great with his hands and completely preoccupied by the stars and space and the possibility of space travel which one day might land a man on the moon. But his self-destructive tendencies and violent temper often pulled rank and sidelined him from his more serious pursuits. Projects were left unfinished, jobs were lost, and business ventures often failed.
The war against the Nazis traumatized him in ways he probably never fully understood.
Chabon explains how he was “exposed to the human body’s fragility, its liability to burst open, to be ripped in two, to deliver up its pulp through a split in the outer peel.” He had lost his best friend and accidentally killed a boy who was shooting at him with a burp gun. But the fury that was always present caught the attention of his superiors who used him to pursue German scientists and physicists and arrest them before the Russians did, so they could be brought to America where their knowledge would be put to use in landing a man on the moon. When he got home from the war, he tried to put together a working life that never really took hold.
He met his future wife at a temple dance in Philadelphia and was drawn to her immediately. She had a very troubled past but this was part of his attraction to her. He thought that perhaps they could outrun their demons together. Chabon found out the full story about his grandmother’s life only after both of their deaths when he was able to gain access to pieces of her now dead psychiatrist’s notes about her. She had lost her entire family in Auschwitz. The family had run a tannery business in France. She survived by obeying the forced instructions of an SS commander who fathered her daughter, Chabon’s mother.
After hiding in a convent for a brief time, she escaped with her daughter in tow and arrived in America a shattered woman who would bounce in and out of psychiatric facilities her entire life haunted by the vision of a Skinless Horse. But when his grandfather saw her at the dance, he only saw promise. He thought her eyes “looked the color of twilight in Monte Carlo, when the stars come out to twinkle like ten-watt bulbs and the quarter-moon fans her hem of sequins against the sky.” She was magic.
But the magic faded, and her mental illness wreaked havoc on all of their lives, particularly the life of Chabon’s mother, who developed a distance and reserve as a survival mechanism to her mother’s madness that Chabon always found wanting.
He remembers his grandmother during better times with great fondness. He remembers the stories she would tell him that ignited his thoughts.
There was a story about a clown who woke up to find his face had turned paper- white. And another tale about a widowed rabbi who used his dead wife’s clothes to sew another mother for their orphaned child. He loved playing with her magic cards which she claimed had special powers whether you believed in magic or not. And there were shopping trips that delighted him in which he remembers her tenderly adjusting his disheveled pants in a way his mother never did.
Chabon is a child of divorce. His father was neglectful toward him and left the marriage while he was still a small child.
His mother was often distracted and put off by his intensity and neediness. His grandfather was silent. Only his grandmother was accessible to him and seemed to take genuine delight in playing games with him. But when her madness returned, he would lose her, too.
Chabon took flight as a young man seeking salvation wherever he could find it. He sought out girls and rock ’n’ roll and friends who would listen to him. He tried therapy. But talking about his pain did not bring the healing he hoped for.
He confesses that he still struggles with a mind that occasionally succumbs to an excess of turbulence. He sometime hears in his head a “hatbox of voices” that take hold of him when he is engaged in solitary pursuits.
When he writes, another voice assumes control, and this one feels to him more grounded and self-assured. His long winding sentences are stunning works of art that combine suppressed emotion with meandering digressions. He worries less about plot than his characters who he insists remain free to surprise and fascinate him. He no longer seems certain that talking about past hurts can bring about healing revelations and recognizes that some wounds are simply unspeakable.
One might do as well reaching for his grandmother’s magic cards.