Review by New York Times Review
"WHEN all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." That's the first sentence of Alice Sebold's new novel, which follows her best-selling "Lovely Bones," the story of the rape and murder of a girl who tells her tale from beyond the grave. "The Lovely Bones" was Sebold's second book. Her first was an account of her own rape, a memoir wryly titled "Lucky." "The Almost Moon" matches those early books in acts of violence. Not only does the novel's narrator - a professional art-class model named Helen Knightly, the divorced mother of two grown children - murder her mother in graphic fashion, but she also describes her father's bloody suicide, relates the story of the hit-and-run killing of a young boy and eerily alludes to the time her mother dropped Helen's infant grandson on his head. You have to be in awe of that first sentence, though. Dostoyevsky had to write hundreds of pages before getting to the act of patricide in "The Brothers Karamazov." It took Oedipus two whole plays to realize he had killed his father and to "work his way through it," as we would say, so he could find terrible redemption at Colonus. But in "The Almost Moon," right there at the get-go, at the beginning of the long journey that will take her from the motivations for committing her unspeakable crime to some sense of "closure," Helen is, you know, cool with murdering her mother. She isn't being arch, in case you were wondering. "The Almost Moon" doesn't waste our time with dark irony winding itself around complex psychology, à la Humbert Humbert, who described his own mother's death with a parenthetical indifference verging on happy relief in Nabokov's tediously multilayered novel. Sebold may not be as dreadfully earnest as Sophocles and Dostoyevsky, but she is sincere. Very much so. After suffocating her mother, which also involves breaking her nose, Helen tells us she "thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world ?rushed in." Though she has just killed her mother, Helen is a generous person. She never forgets that other people are suffering and dying too. In "The Almost Moon," Sebold is out to lasso some big ideas about the relationship between parents and children, especially mothers and daughters. Murdering her mother - who, we learn, was mentally ill and had colon and breast cancer - inspires Helen to ruminate on her parents; her failures as a wife and friend; her reasons for having sex, right after the murder, with her best friend's son; and her life as an art-school model. ("Having lost all shyness by having spent my career taking off my clothes in public," she thinks, relaxing with a good, hot shower just hours after asphyxiating her mother, "I enjoyed how demure the steam made me seem.") The book's title refers to something her father once told Helen when she was a girl. "The moon is whole all the time, but we can't always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. ... We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides." Later, Helen connects this to a big idea about her relationship with her mother: "The idea that my mother was eternal like the moon. ... Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one's whole life." If you welcome the unreal disjunction between killing your mother and reflecting afterward how lucky you are compared with the children of the dead, "uncared for" mothers in Rwanda and Afghanistan, then this book will make you clap your hands with joy. If you find the idea that mothers shape their children's "whole" lives original rather than simultaneously banal and puerilely overstated, then Barnes & Noble, here you come! This novel is so morally, emotionally and intellectually incoherent that it's bound to become a best seller. Sebold is mining a popular and lucrative vein in contemporary fiction: peg your book to some heartrending tragedy or act of violence and you're almost sure to be greeted with moral seriousness, soft reviews and brisk sales. Whether it's because the American novel is becoming Hollywoodized, or because the disjunctive tone and disassociated content of the news have numbed us to disjunctive and disassociated fiction, or because we're losing the capacity to imagine other people's pain, writing callously and sunnily and profitably about tragedy is now an established American genre. Sebold sashays blithely from ludicrous descriptions of sex ("I bit my lip. I writhed ... and hoped that no one's God was watching") to ridiculous shifts in tone ("Her voice hit the still house with its usual force factor") to "we're sorry but we cannot offer you any M.F.A. funding for next year"-type sentences ("I felt the tears in my eyes and knew they would fall"). There's no plot in this novel. It's all free disassociation. "The Almost Moon" is really like one very long MySpace page. Sebold isn't imagining people and events; she's just making stuff up as she goes along. After Helen murders her mother, she asks her ex-husband, a sexy artist, to come all the way from Southern California to suburban Philadelphia to help her. ("He had aged in a good way. The way wiry men who seem unconcerned with their appearance but who have deep habitual hygiene and exercise habits age.") She tells him what happened, and they have the following exchange: " 'What did you think putting her in the freezer would achieve?' 'I don't know,' I said. I could feel the shelf I kept the laundry supplies on gouging into my back. 'I don't know.' " You find yourself struggling simultaneously with the juvenile contrivance of Mom in the freezer, the icy cynicism of such a conceit and the utter unreality of the conversation. It's like having the Marx brothers chase Margaret Dumont around your cerebellum. There's no light at the end of Sebold's bouncy tunnel vision. After the freezer moment with her former hubby, Jake, the two share a comic moment over Helen's memory of her psychotherapist and why he had been so bad: " 'His shelves were full of I. B. Singer, and the statues on his tables were that lost-wax Holocaust style. Lots of dismembered trunks of tortured people wrapped in barbed wire and mounted on poles. I would be talking about my mother, only to look up and see a legless, armless torso reaching out for me.' Jake laughed." Even the schlockiest popular novels of yore - "By Love Possessed," "Marjorie Morningstar," "The Chosen" - had accurate, if mundane, social and psychological perceptions. Danielle Steel has that. You and I have that! It's beyond comprehension that Sebold can publish a novel pretending to reflect reality that's so severed from reality. The source of her vacuum-packed perceptions is perhaps an impenetrable moral narcissism - not for nothing does Helen the art-school model compare herself to Virginia Woolf and Maria Tsvetaeva, two legendary literary suicides. So it will come as no surprise that Helen's murder of her mother turns out to be more mercy killing than outright homicide. But Helen also extinguishes her mother's life because she can't bear the burden of caring for her any longer: "I was determined now to explain what I could to my children and to carry the shame of my mistakes." For heaven's sake. Well, don't worry, Helen. To paraphrase the old joke, "Oedipus, shmedipus, as long as they love their mother." The real shame is that "Reading Alice Sebold" isn't listed in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." After you've finished this insult to the lumber industry, your health care provider won't cover your search for a cure. Lee Siegel is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author, most recently, of "Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television." His "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob" will be published in January.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
"In her highly anticipated second novel, after the groundbreaking The Lovely Bones (2002), Sebold strikes two notes: grim and grimmer. Within pages, Helen, a middle-aged, depressed divorcée, kills her elderly mother; she spends the next 24 hours reliving her miserable childhood and her attempts to break free of it, coming to the realization that she had seen the yawning tide that was her mother's need and fallen in. It's not until Helen reaches high school that she realizes her mother is mentally ill, her father is emotionally absent, and her primary purpose is to be her mother's proxy in the world and to bring that world back home. Although she eventually marries and has two children, moving far away in what she hoped would be the geographical cure, she ends up divorced and living blocks from her childhood home. With an unwavering focus and detached, downbeat prose, Sebold follows Helen on her seemingly inevitable psychological descent. The result is an emotionally raw novel that is, at times, almost too painful to read, yet Sebold stays remarkably true to her vision, bringing readers close to a flawed woman who lives in a very narrow world, one full of duty, obligation, and pain. Sebold brings to the portrait such honesty and empathy that many will find their own dark impulses reflected here; however, it is so unremittingly bleak that it seems unlikely that it will be greeted with the same enthusiasm as her debut."--"Wilkinson, Joanne" Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sebold's disappointing second novel (after much-lauded The Lovely Bones) opens with the narrator's statement that she has killed her mother. Helen Knightly, herself the mother of two daughters and an art class model old enough to be the mother of the students who sketch her nude figure, is the dutiful but resentful caretaker for her senile 88-year-old mother, Clair. One day, traumatized by the stink of Clair's voided bowels and determined to bathe her, Helen succumbs to "a life-long dream" and smothers Clair, who had sucked "the life out of [Helen] day by day, year by year." After dragging Clair's corpse into the cellar and phoning her ex-husband to confess her crime, Helen has sex with her best friend's 30-year-old "blond-god doofus" son. Jumping between past and present, Sebold reveals the family's fractured past (insane, agoraphobic mother; tormented father, dead by suicide) and creates a portrait of Clair that resembles Sebold's own mother as portrayed in her memoir, Lucky. While Helen has clearly suffered at her mother's hands, the matricide is woefully contrived, and Helen's handling of the body and her subsequent actions seem almost slapstick. Sebold can write, that's clear, but her sophomore effort is not in line with her talent. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Helen, who has always sacrificed herself to others, finally takes a different approach-and kills her mother. With a five-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Sebold (The Lovely Bones, 2002, etc.) once again navigates dark territory, this time the inner landscape of a middle-aged woman who impulsively kills her aged mother. Since her divorce years earlier, 49-year-old Helen, the mother of two grown daughters, has lived in the Pennsylvania town where she grew up. She works as an artist's model at the local college but mostly takes care of her mother Claire. One evening, undone by frustration at 88-year-old Claire's increasing incapacitation and dementia, Helen suffers a momentary lapse of reason and suffocates the old woman in the house Claire has not left for years. Helen has been equally trapped, both hating and loving her mother to the detriment of everything else in her life. Now Helen hides Claire's body in the basement freezer and calls her ex-husband Jake. Although they have not seen each other in years, he immediately hops a plane from California to help her through the crisis. Meanwhile, for reasons that never quite wash, Helen has sex with the 30-year-old son of her best friend. Soon after Jake arrives, he acknowledges that he never wanted their divorce. Then the police find Claire's body and begin asking questions. The novel follows Helen's inner turmoil as she confronts what she has done and relives her past--particularly her terrible childhood: As a mother, Claire could be charming but was increasingly mentally ill, and Helen's gentle, loving father made Claire largely Helen's responsibility from an early age while he escaped to his secret haven. Helen now plans her own escape. She steals a gun to commit suicide, as her father did. But realizing that she has enjoyed the love of good men and wonderful children, Helen has a change of heart and waits to face her fate. Sebold may have her finger on the pulse of a certain middle-aged zeitgeist here, but her navel-gazing central character is more tedious than tragic. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
