Writing about one’s own grandparents presents both a paradox and a possibility. All the things they did and who they were and how they lived—not to mention the traumas they suffered—all shove us in the back as we become adults, aware of the particular ways they might have screwed up our parents (who, in turn, have screwed us up). But by the time we finally become curious to hear about their lives, the stories have all hardened, taking on exaggerated and unnaturally bright color, like marbles that we can swish around in our mouths but never chew.

MOONGLOW: A NOVEL by Michael Chabon Harper, 448 pp., $28.99

That’s the paradox. The possibility, which Michael Chabon has embraced “with abandon” in his new book, Moonglow, is that when you squint across that great generational chasm at their blurry forms, you can see what you want to see. You can let your imagination run wild.

And boy did he. Chabon’s new book, Moonglow, is a novel masquerading as a memoir about his grandparents. If his actual grandparents are even a little bit like the unnamed “grandfather” and “grandmother” in this telling, it’s no wonder they became the stuff of myth for him. In this book, his maternal grandmother was a French refugee with a concentration camp tattoo on her arm. She arrived in America after World War II with a little girl, Chabon’s mother, and in the 1950s became a late-night horror TV show host named “Nevermore, the Night Witch.” His South Philadelphia-born grandfather spent World War II with the CIA-precursor Office of Selective Services, hunting all over Europe for Wernher Van Braun, the Nazi creator of the V-2 rocket. He married that enigmatic Frenchwoman, and ended up in an upstate New York prison for two years for strangling his boss with a telephone chord. Behind bars he managed to invent a model rocket that would launch a successful toy company.

These are the larger-than-life grandparents of the “Mike” who tells this story, though we are never told just how closely they are supposed to resemble Chabon’s own family members. A brief “Author’s Note” makes his obfuscation very clear: “I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” This still leaves open the question of whether he’s enrolled in the very au courant Knausgaard school of writing under the classification of fiction only to give more freedom for unfettered memoir. Or is he just playing with the genre of memoir (more in the Rothian school, let’s say) as he makes the whole thing up?

Ever since moving on from his early autobiographical works, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonderboys, Chabon has consistently drawn inspiration from the counterfactual, from a kind of Twilight Zone tweaking of reality. He created a frosty Alaskan promised land for the Jews in The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. In The Amazing Adventures Kavalier & Klay, he imagined an off-kilter version of the lives of the Jewish early comic book gods, Jerry Seigel and Joe Schuster. Even Telegraph Avenue, his latest and most distinctly realist in a long time, had that strange scene at a political fundraiser when State Senator Barack Obama of Illinois starts chatting it up with the characters. So it’s perhaps no surprise that he would one day put his own name between quotation marks.