Chabon's novel is a fictional memoir of the narrator's maternal grandfather. The grandfather was a mechanically gifted but easily angered young man with a consuming interest in rocketry and space travel. He ends up in a form of secret military special forces looking for V2 assets for the US in Germany after WWII. He meets his future wife after the war. She is a war-damaged apparent holocaust survivor with a daughter by a previous marriage. The vicissitudes of this family related in a partially time shifted account is the structure of the novel. Chabon is a pleasure to read, and his Jewish mixture of comedy and tragedy is compelling. In an interview at the end of the text, Chabon admits that the memoir's grandfather has many of his own characteristics. He comments that, "My stories are all .... tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat." and "by being almost completely fiction, the book manages to get at essential truths about himself that memoir would not have been able to access."