Storytelling matters desperately to Michael Chabon’s characters. It’s a way to remake an unhappy reality and exert control (“Werewolves in Their Youth”), a means of grappling with personal or historical disaster (“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”), or, in the case of his elegiac and deeply poignant new novel, “Moonglow,” a tool for connecting the dots of a family’s life and making sense of the past.

“Moonglow” takes the form of a faux memoir by the narrator, Mike, a writer who bears more than a passing resemblance to the author himself. The story centers on tales told by his maternal grandfather as he lies dying of cancer, high on painkillers that have cracked his habit of silence and made him eager to spill “a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve.”

His grandfather’s disjointed accounts of being a soldier in World War II and his fascination with rocketry and space travel have a hallucinatory, drug-addled sheen, and they are tangled up with his wife’s enigmatic and contradictory retellings of her experiences in occupied France. Mr. Chabon weaves these knotted-together tales together into a tapestry that’s as complicated, beautiful and flawed as an antique carpet. The novel would have benefited from some rigorous editing — there are digressions about business travails, V-2 rockets and “Gravity’s Rainbow” that are tedious and superfluous. But the fraying story lines seem to be a deliberate narrative strategy meant to convey the chaos of life and distortions of memory, and the bright threads of meaning that can be extracted, with imagination and will, from the mess.

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

Mr. Chabon is one of contemporary literature’s most gifted prose stylists, and in novels like “Telegraph Avenue” and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” he’s demonstrated his Jedi-like mastery, his ability to move effortlessly between the serious and the comic, the existential and merely personal. In “Moonglow,” he writes with both lovely lyricism and highly caffeinated fervor. He conjures Mike’s childhood with Proustian ardor, capturing his fond memories of his mother (who smelled of Prell shampoo, making him think of those old TV commercials showing a pearl languidly drifting through the mentholated green) and his worst boyhood fears (convinced that a gaggle of evil-looking puppets were lying in wait, plotting to kill him). He makes Oakland, Calif., in the 1970s come alive — and does the same for Baltimore in the 1950s and Florida in the late 1980s.