Doug suggested this book - all 400-and-something packed and small-print pages of it - since we were having a long summer break, and because he had really loved it.
It's a book that plays excitingly with the concepts of reality and fiction, told in the mode of a memoir in which the narrator shares the name of the author, and with very much the feel of authentic autobiography, but prefaced right from the start with this statement:
In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except where facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.
The book consists of the story of the narrator's grandfather's life, as told to him from his deathbed. It's a story of a somewhat wild urban Jewish childhood in thirties Philadelphia, post-war marriage to the narrator's grandmother, a French Jewess and single mother rescued by nuns from a fate under the Nazis, his lifetime project to cushion her from her consequent bouts of depression, and a engineering career founded in an early-planted obsession with travel to the moon and the V-2 rocket designed by Germany during the war.
The story emerges piecemeal, in a non-linear fashion, as it is related over days to the narrator, and is interspersed with the narrator's own non-linear childhood memories of his grandparents. There is, however, a grounding linearity in the narrative frame, that of Chabon being told the story and sitting listening.
Everyone loved this book - except for John, who had basically been unable to read it, which flabbergasted Doug. The book begins with an episode in 1957, when Chabon's grandfather has been working as a travelling salesman of 'fancy barrettes' in a break from his engineering career which we will later discover has been made necessary by the need to pay for his wife's psychiatric treatment. He has however been pushed out at Feathercombs by nepotism and, in blind fury, bursts into the president's office brandishing a broken-off telephone cord which he will pull around his neck. Like the whole of this book, the incident is related in a cool, wry and almost urbane tone:
For his part, the president of Feathercombs was astonished to discover that he had approved the firing of a maniac. 'What's this about?' he said.
It was a pointless question, and my grandfather disdained to answer it; he was opposed to stating the obvious.
John said that he found the tone too light and objective for the situation and the obvious distress of the protagonist; the wit and urbanity of the narrator was foregrounded over the emotional state of the protagonist. It put him off the rest of the book and he stopped reading. None of the rest of us, however, had this reaction - we felt there was deep empathy behind the measured and witty tone, and something that Ann would later say was that the book had great humanity: all of the characters were flawed, yet all were treated with understanding and made sympathetic - in this way she found a similarity with Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13, which we discussed
here.
Everyone was very impressed by the way the story of the grandfather's engineering career unravelled the Nazi link with the American postwar space programme, and the moral ambiguities involved. Ann pointed out the contrast with McEwan, who tends to insert research-based lectures into his narratives; here everything was organically embedded in the story and the psyche of the protagonist.
Jenny said she had really liked the book but it was 'too long'. However, she compared it to Dickens and said that she had looked forward to reading it in bed each night. I got the impression that she had read it over time and rather as an episodic picaresque, and there were comments that implied that this was how others saw the book. Someone said that they couldn't really see the point of a very early episode in which the pre-pubescent grandfather comes upon an intersex woman seemingly imprisoned in a shack, and people also found a little strange the fact that as a child he threw a cat out of a high window, which seemed out of character. Unlike the rest, I had been remiss enough to leave reading the book until the last minute, and so was forced to read it much more as a single whole. As a result, for me the book had a clearer overall narrative arc than I guess might seem from episodic reading. The episode with the intersex woman was highly symbolic, totemic of the trajectory of the rest of the grandfather's life. Steeped in a comic-book fantasy of rescuing a young woman by taking her to the far side of the moon, his impulse is to rescue the 'hermaphrodite', and when she won't be rescued, he is left with this impulse unfulfilled, later to be fed by his obsession with gravity-escaping rockets and the rescue of first his wife, the narrator's grandmother, and then, in widowed old age, another woman. The way he tries, even in a retirement home, to be this last woman's hero, is to save her cat which has run off into a python-infested wasteland, which brings his life full circle back to the cat-throwing incident in an act of redemption.
I said I had one problem with the book. Years after his grandfather's death, narrator Chabon conducts some research and uncovers a very different story about his grandmother's origins, which, if true, she kept hidden from her husband, Chabon's grandfather, and her daughter, Chabon's mother, and of course Chabon himself, for the whole of their lives with her. In the light of this new (and fairly shocking) information, narrator Chabon tells us, he needed to reassess everything his grandfather had told him on his deathbed. He had been trying to turn it all into a novel, but he now decided he needed to write it as a memoir in order to 'get my story straight'. I wished that once he had done so he had gone one step further and shared with us that reassessment by actually revisiting and reassessing episodes for the reader (a form that is more usual in novels), since what had gone before was so lengthy and meandering that I found it impossible to do this for myself. One revelation is that before his grandmother met his grandfather she had adopted someone else's name, and it occurred to me at this point that I did not know by which name she was known in the family - whether it had been her adopted name or her own; I had no recollection of her having been given any name at all. However, I felt unable to sift back through the wealth of material to find out. Ann said something similar. It turned out that the deceptiveness involved had been missed by one or two people in our group, which perhaps adds weight to the notion that the book could have done with a more pared down and novelistically elliptical structure.
Someone, I think Jenny, added that the explicit sex scenes between the grandfather and grandmother made her feel uncomfortable, and others agreed - it always seems something of an intrusion to envisage one's parents' or grandparents' sexuality in graphic detail - which is another problem that could have been overcome by a more wholeheartedly fictive presentation.
Nevertheless, we very much enjoyed and admired the book, and all Doug could do was shake his head at John.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
