I really enjoyed Michael Chabon’s Moonglow. But then again, I’ve really enjoyed just about all of the works of his I’ve read: Telegraph Avenue, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, his first novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and his essay collection Maps and Legends. I even liked John Carter. And the only way I can describe his master work, The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay is that it is so great it will make you angry that other writers can’t write as well.

So I needed no convincing, nor was I unfamiliar with Chabon’s particular peculiarities as a writer. If you’ve never read any Chabon, I don’t know that Moonglow is the place to start.

But I’m not going to write a book report here, or talk about why I think it was a good read. I’m going to talk about what the book meant to me, right now, as I’m writing this just shy of 6 am with a toddler starting to fuss and a few days shy of Father’s Day.

The novel is about Chabon’s grandfather and his life, miraculously divulged to Chabon on said grandfather’s deathbed, plied by dilatuid. This is a novel, not a biography or memoir; one should not read anything other than a passing basis of factual truth in the events depicted. And yet, though unmoored by the strictures of truth, the story nonetheless points to larger truths, and calls in to relief what I actually know, what I think I know, and what the truth really is about me, my dad, my grandpa, and when I think about it, my son too.

Butzie

I was pretty close with my paternal grandparents, in particular my grandfather Bernard, or Butzie. However, he passed away in 1995, shortly before his 70th and my 11th birthdays, respectively. Point being, I never knew him as an actual adult; he was a figure to me, and while an important one, I don’t know how to think or feel about him now.

In no small part, this is simply because there are so, so many questions about who he was that I have no reliable information for. People - my family - who knew him hold his memory with a veneration that is sweet but terribly unhelpful in actually understanding him. And more importantly, they just don’t know certain important facts about him. Conjecture - making up stories about him - is really the only closure I have available to me.

Not that I haven’t tried to verify some things, specifically his service in WWII. What I believe I heard growing up was “European theater, combat engineer.” Beyond that, he simply did not discuss it, with anyone as far as I can tell. I found his draft information here, but for more information about what he actually did in service I’d need to request his files from the National Personnel Records Center. It has a reading room and is even in St. Louis, but I haven’t yet made it up there to see his records. Not that there is a good chance they even still exist: a fire in 1973 consumed an estimated 80% of the records my grandfather’s papers would’ve belonged to.

I’m trying to verify this story: described here or here or here

But there’s precious little evidence one way or the other.

So reading Moonglow really helped me to make Butzie in to a more fully realized character, with dimensions to probe and understand. There were enough similarities to Chabon’s grandfather to project my image of Butzie on to the character. Though he’s been gone for almost 25 years, I somehow felt closer to him reading this than I had in a while. As close as I’ve been since we decided to give our son his name for his middle name.

Felix

My son is pretty great. Full Stop. But even now, at a few months older than 2 years old, he has an impenetrable inner life - a soul - that is mostly unknowable to me as his parent.

I’m also reading Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s book Nurture the Wow, about parenting as a spiritual practice. It’s fantastic, and you should read it too. I’ll do a full post about it when I finish later this week. But this is one of the things she talks about - that being a parent is simultaneuously having a ridiculous amount of control over some things with your child and a heartbreaking lack of control over most things, especially the tragic.

And it got me thinking about how I’m really glad that there’s a part of him he already knows is his own, and his alone. But I am also sad because I want him to know that having something of his own does not make him a part from us, a part from me. All I can do, really, is find ways to be present and acknowledge to him that he is seen and he is heard. Pathos of the Divine and whatnot.

I think I’m doing a good job at that, and hopefully I am able to keep that up for a long time. What I’m less sure about is how I’m doing being me. Or what that even means.

Mickey

Father’s day is complicated for me; I have a complicated relationship with my father. It’s not the relationship I wish I had, and to be quite frank I don’t know that it’s my job to try to fix it.

The grandmother character in this book is mysterious and possibly insane. One relates. My grandmother died only a few years ago - 2011. This is not stepping on anyone’s grave - my grandmother Thelma, of beloved memory, was a piece of work. And whatever secret resentment ate at her one can only guess. But one was certain that she longed for something, some escape, from the life she ended up with.

Not that she didn’t love the people in her life. But escape - one gets the sense that true escape would have been something she would choose.

In the book, the grandfather has an obsession with the moon; about leaving this filthy, tragic, awful place with awful people for the tranquil expanse of the lunar surface. The prison of our atmosphere, he’s well aware, can be broken out of via rocket power. And to that means of escape, the character ascribes a great deal of attention and energy.

But ultimately, no one really escapes. And try as you might, you wouldn’t really want to anyway.

Moonglow starts with an act of rage, and it ends on series of acts of acceptance. Not forgiveness and not even repentence, but acceptance.

“Doc, I’m an engineer, an electrical engineer. That’s my training. Engineers spend a lot of time on what’s called failure analysis…You want to figure out what’s wrong so you can fix it. Maybe I used to look at my wife in that regard. At the beginning, maybe for a long time. Wanting to know what went wrong. Thinking I could fix her. But I don’t want to think of her like that anymore, you know, looking for a bad capacitor. I just want to, I mean… I accept her and I… She’s broken, I’m broken. Everybody’s broken. If she’s not in misery anymore, I’ll take it.”

It turns out, after decades of carrying the outrage in my pocket, ready to strike it aflame, I too am having a hard time finding that outrage now. I don’t want to be carrying that at all, let alone any more. And so, in the unlikely event my father reads this, I want him to know I’m working on accepting him for who he is. That isn’t easy for me, but I’m not painting him with a shit brush. Escape isn’t the route I’m choosing.

Now I just have to figure out how to live.