by Andrew Hedglin

Michael Chabon has written a marvelous, lyrical, and haunting new novel, Moonglow, that comes out today, one week after the so-called supermoon. Chabon’s grandfather, the main character in the novel, is not just enraptured by the moon’s beauty, but he knows exactly why: “On the Moon there was no capital to grind the working moon man down. And on the Moon, 230,000 miles from the stench of history, there was no madness or memory of loss. The things that made space flight difficult was the thing that…made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity…any spacefarer would be obliged to leave almost everything behind…”

I didn’t start reading Chabon through his well-loved novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (although I do hope to get to them soon), but rather through his lesser known 2009 collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, which captured snapshots of his present-day circumstances and life that lead up to it.

With Moonglow, though, you can read the best of both worlds: it’s a novel in structure and poetic license, but it tells the true life story of his maternal grandfather (whose name is never even revealed within the novel). The frame story revolves around the last week of Chabon’s grandfather’s life, in which the normally intensely private person starts to reveal his shrouded history to his grandson while he is under siege from powerful painkillers.

By that time, Chabon had published his first book, so his grandfather knows exactly the dangerous type of individual he was talking to. In the middle of the story, the grandfather comes to a memory that makes him question the value of this confessional enterprise. Chabon counters that at least it’s a good story, to which the grandfather replies: “Yeah?…You can have it. I’m giving it to you. After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use of lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you.”

Fortunately, Chabon ignores this last dictum. The novel defies a normal dramatic arc, which is the only way to examine and come to the conclusion that Chabon does: that after his grandfather’s death, his life, with all of it’s problems, was a good one.

On the way to that verdict, Chabon tells the story of his grandfather’s life in a pretzel: lost jobs, his time in the army in World War II engaging in Operation Paperclip, his stint in prison for trying to murder his boss, his journey from engineer to modelmaker, and one last twilight romance between two widowers. He touches on the global (the crimes and triumphs of Wernher von Braun) and the personal (his grandmother’s post-Holocaust refugee life and grave mental illness) to tell the story of a life, one life, flickering under the glow of his grandfather’s beloved moon.

Signed first editions of Moonglow are available for order on our website.

by Andrew Hedglin

I was mesmerized by the idea since I saw the cover on the front of the July Indie Next flyer: Underground Airlines in plain text over the half-obscured face of a black man. It encapsulated the concept of the novel so succinctly: slavery in the modern age, the Underground Railroad in the time of jet airliners.

Of course, just because a book has a cool concept does not mean that it is automatically a successful story. It has to be executed well. To show how a system works, you have to find the right human story within the system, and I think Ben Winters has chosen well.

The story is laid out as a classic detective story: a tortured detective with a woman problem is working a regular case when he discovers a conspiracy that goes…all the way…to the top. Here, our detective is Victor (a man of many identities), a former slave forced to work as a bounty hunter for the U.S. Marshals hunting other escaped slaves. He lives with the visage of freedom but struggles with the “duty” he is bound to and the evil it entails.

The woman is Martha, a white mother at his hotel alone with a bi-racial child. After Victor’s mild-mannered persona Jim shows her kindness, she gradually draws him into her quest for answers about the child’s father.

The case Victor is hunting is Jackdaw, an escaped slave from Garments of the Greater South, that draws an unusual amount of heat from his boss at the Marshal service. Victor searches for the truth as he infiltrates a cell of the Airlines in Indianapolis. (The Airlines remain as much a metaphor as the Railroad was, however.) He matches wits against an alternatively idealistic and pragmatic young priest, an undercover cop, and a West African enforcer; everybody uses each other to achieve their own goals.

While the three-dimensional characters are intriguing, the setting is the real show-stealer here: an alternative America that diverged a hundred years before when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated just prior to taking office. Slavery remains legal in a few states called the Hard Four: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Carolina. While most of the country disapproves of the practice, it finds itself ensnared in a series of compromises as it tries to summon the political will to do anything about it. It’s fascinating to see how history bends, changing in some ways and remaining the same in others. For instance, the unstoppable forces of James Brown and Michael Jackson cannot seem to be contained in any version of history.

Now, there is a caveat that feels important to mention: Winters, the author, is a white dude. I don’t know if it feels like cultural appropriation to tell such a story as a white person from a black person’s point of view. This book helped me consider not only the legacy of slavery in this country but also the issue of exploitative labor worldwide–all while removing the distancing factors of geography and history. But as fresh as some of these ideas seemed to me upon first meeting them, they are not new, and writers of colors are writing about them and have been writing about them, and I encourage you to read them as well.

Overall, though, Underground Airlines works as both a story and an idea. It keeps you turning pages and thinking at the same time. It’s a great end-of-summer read that mixes the escapism of summer with serious considerations of our time—as it was, as it might be, and as it is.