Customer Reviews

The Almost Moon

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It is fine to not like a book and to say so, but the reasons many of these negative reviews are giving seem very confused. What I believe has happened here is that Alice Sebold is a very dark writer who takes on subject matters that most authors don't and somehow she fell into great success with the Lovely Bones, which is wonderful. The problem is Alice Sebold isn't a typical best-selling author and by that I mean she isn't a sell out. She doesn't write books to please the masses and that is very clear from this second novel.

The Almost Moon is not a book that's going to appeal to a mass audience, mostly because mass audiences want an "enjoyable" book that has a clear-cut ending and may have dark moments but leaves you with a sense of hope. The Almost Moon is none of these things. But does that make it a bad book? I'd like to argue no.

This book is compelling and strange and never lets you off the hook for a second. It challenges your thinking, your own relationships, and that thin line between normal behavior and the grotesque. This may not be "enjoyable" but it is powerful and worthy of anyone's time. I like dark books that go against the grain. The majority of books being written today are sloppy, commercial crap and this is not.

As for those who hated the ending I challenge you to re-think the book. The point is not to have a wrapped up story. The point is to explore the immediate aftermath (24 hours) of a horrible event in someone's life. It ends right where it should. This isn't some murder mystery crime novel that's going to tie everything into a little package like an episode of Law and Order. It's more complex than that.

I challenge people to take on this book and to see it for it is.

On September 30, 2007, I posted an admiring review about Alice Sebold's first novel, "The Lovely Bones." That book was a literary sensation in 2002 and sold more than ten million copies worldwide.

Sebold was gracious about her success, but seemed a little baffled that millions would interpret it as a sentimental message of hope - because she herself, despite overcoming great personal adversity - isn't a born optimist. In "The Lovely Bones," she parsed violence without being graphic and explored relationships with a delicate hand. Her detached and deconstructive writing style - then and now - reminds me of the great Joan Didion.

Unfortunately, the success of "The Lovely Bones" works against Sebold in "The Almost Moon." I believe it will anger readers who made her first novel a blockbuster. The title refers to someone who's not all there - a celestial body in periods of darkness - hiding bits of itself to the naked eye. It's a story about things we hate about ourselves, things we go to great lengths to hide to meet society's demand to be "normal."

While "The Almost Moon" is a superbly crafted tale of madness, it's also a house of horrors better suited for readers used to the savage imagery of Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Salvador Dali and David Lynch. It's as surreal and unpleasantly graphic as one of Francisco Goya's Black Paintings, a monster eating one's child. Unlike "The Lovely Bones" - which unfolded dreamy observations with subtlety - "The Almost Moon" arrives like a sledgehammer. It feels deliberate and unflinching, as if Sebold had no interest repeating the atmosphere that made her first novel a critical and commercial success.

Helen Knightly is an artist's model near 50. She murders her mother Clair - who has dementia - after Clair loses control of her bowels. (Sebold owns the template for writing dazzling openings too compelling to ignore, pulling you into a riptide that won't let go.)

But "The Almost Moon" quickly takes a sharp turn into the bizarre - and becomes an incessantly bleak novel of mental illness that leaves nothing to the imagination - sometimes in ways more disagreeable than shocking. However true it reflects the things we think about, it's one of the darkest works of 2007. Any non-crime novel that explores, for example, the swirling blood patterns left behind on a staircase wall from a man who falls after shooting himself - isn't aiming to be a breezy read during the holiday season.

During the next 24 hours, Helen Knightly feels liberated and caged. She succumbs to sexual and subjectively deviant impulses others might try to suppress. But she still has the presence of mind to annotate her behavior in ways which show she's no dummy. She washes and drags her mother's body to the basement. She has sex with the 30-ish son of her best friend, who's all sensuality and no substance. She thinks about Clair, her sarcastic, reclusive, once beautiful and now dead mother.

Helen recalls her dead father (loving and gentle but also mentally ill, who liked to carve wood into whimsical shapes). She thinks about her ex-husband Jake (supportive present-day accomplice), her two daughters (apparently normal), her art teacher pal (for whom she poses in classes as a model) and her neighbors (generically nosy and friendly). She thinks about her best friend Natalie (unhappy but in love with a construction worker) and Natalie's son Hamish, Helen's aforementioned one-night paramour.

Is Helen herself insane? Does she get away with murder? Without giving away the ending, we sense her fate can't be as bittersweet as Susie Salmon's in "The Lovely Bones." Life's cumulative disappointments and low self esteem prevents Helen from planning too far ahead or from expecting too much from the world. She's forever trapped in the muck of low expectations.

In sum, Alice Sebold remains a dazzling writer. She doesn't preach, hates sentimentalism and keeps her prose deceptively simple. She cares more about relationships - and the events which pull them in every direction - than about churning out a potboiler every two years. She's become a thinking person's horror writer, exploring the wreckage of dysfunctional people after hooking you with a stunning premise.

But by sticking to her guns, exploring the gory truths of mental illness, adding layers of misery to ensure Helen's story feels plausible - Sebold challenges the paying reader to enter a hell from which there may be no return.

Even if "The Almost Moon" is an accurate depiction of mental illness, I wonder if it really breaks new ground in a work of modern fiction. Ironically, the same uncompromising approach we admire about Sebold - makes her second novel too harrowing to recommend to everyone.

Mental illness, and other serious disabilities, almost always have a profound effect upon families and the individuals that make up those families. The Almost Moon tells a story about one such individual, Helen Knightley, whose mother has suffered from severe agoraphobia all her life and as the novel commences is sliding rapidly into senile dementia. When Helen impulsively smothers her mother, who has just soiled herself and continues to snipe at her daughter while she attempts to clean her up, the severe repression that has always crippled Helen is violently ripped away. In the course of 24 harrowing hours, the truths of Helen's life and identity rush to the surface with almost unbearable clarity.

Sebold wrote The Almost Moon using a combination of stream of consciousness and memory. Readers who are not comfortable with novels based upon irrationality, and inner rather than overt forms of action, will probably dislike this novel. But mental illness is illogical. Watching Helen come to terms with what she has done, and why she has done it, is a slow, unpleasant process. But unlike those who found the ending of this book inconclusive, I found it to be clear and, well, logical. I think I know very well what is about to happen. I won't say more to avoid spoilers.

I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, are other titles that deal with mental illness in a way that seems more palatable to many readers. But, though I find myself in the minority here on Amazon, I enjoyed The Almost Moon as well, dark as it is. Life is not always sunny and warm.

Alice Sebold is dark. Her first wildly bestselling novel dealt with the murder of a child. This novel deals with matricide. It's laid out plainly in the opening line, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." Me, personally, I've never thought about murdering my mother. And yet, I totally understood how this previously law-abiding citizen wound up in the situation she was in. Sebold had me with her every step of the way.

The entire novel actually takes place in just about 24 hours. Forty-nine-year-old Helen is paying a visit to her difficult and declining 88-year-old mother Claire. In a moment of weakness (Or is it mercy?) Helen snaps. She suffocates her mother. This is horrible, but I believe most readers will understand why it happened. Helen had been a virtual slave to her mother for years. Their love/hate relationship is as complex as they come. Although the events of the novel unfold in the course of a day, through flashbacks and memories we really get the story of Helen's relationship with both of her parents as well as her ex-husband, friends, and now adult daughters. Helen is a product of her upbringing. She's become what she had to become. So, when she snaps and kills her mother, I understood it.

But from that one pivotal event, she does everything wrong. She compounds her mistake in truly horrible ways. It is the ultimate downward spiral, and watching it is like watching a train wreck--you can't look away. And I couldn't stop turning pages fast enough. You know it will end badly as she pulls others into her nightmare, but you just have to see how it ends. Now I know, and I find it a bit haunting.

This is that rare and most wonderful of things, a literary page-turner. The writing is fantastic and the plot compulsive. I saw Sebold speak to a room full of booksellers in June. She said, "This is what you're all wanting to know: Does the follow-up to The Lovely Bones suck?" Let me tell you, it does not suck. Sebold's sophomore effort is a triumph. Read it.

No matter how one tries to twist and explain, there is nothing about Helen, her history or her actions over the 24 hours of this book that create any sense of understanding or compassion. "The Almost Moon" may work well for some readers but with less absurdity, could have been a powerful book for many more. A disappointing second novel.

I don't agree that the subject matter was gross and unseemly. I actually found it quite relevant with so many middle-aged people today struggling to care for their elderly and sometimes very difficult parents. And I still think this is some of the best writing (who could ever get bored?) that I've read in a long time. What really set me off, however, was the ending. I frequently find that even the best writers cannot write a satisfactory ending. This one was the worst ever! No ending really. No resolution whatsoever. We are to assume she gets caught, I guess. The question of the morality of what she has done is left hanging. Gosh, I hated it, just hated it. How could someone think up such a compelling story and leave it hanging. Don't buy this book if you hate "non-endings."

This is one of the worst books I've read in a long time. Not because the writing is poor -- in fact, just the opposite. Sebold is such a talented writer that what she's done with this book is nothing short of a travesty.

Am I supposed to feel sorry for Helen, the daughter of a mentally ill mother she ends up killing in her old age? There isn't enough hurt and anguish in her for me to believe she did so out of long-simmering rage. Am I supposed to feel outraged at the brutality of the act? Clair is so unsympathetic that I can't muster even the slightest cringe. Am I supposed to believe that Helen acted out of her own mental illness? If so, there isn't enough evidence to convince me that she's insane.

All in all, the book left me disgusted. Disgusted in the characters, disgusted in the plot, disgusted that I spent so many hours reading it.

There are some impulses that, simply said, should never be acted upon. Unfortunately, people act upon them all too often. What allows a person to let go of their conscience and follow their dark desires? Helen Knightly should be able to tell you.

"Morality was just a security blanket that didn't exist. All of it, what I had done and what I was doing, was not leading me perilously toward the edge of a cliff. I had already jumped."

Helen might have started out as an ordinary child, but living with other-than-ordinary parents molded her into a supremely troubled adult. Her father took himself away frequently on what he called business, but often it had nothing to do with his job. And for as long as Helen can remember, her mother suffered from severe mental issues --- so severe that Helen felt like an outcast in their town. She learned to cope in strange ways.

Helen quietly went about daily living like most people. Then one day, she quits doing what is expected of her. When she does, she does it in a big way. She tumbles into an abyss of human tragedy and takes others down with her. One thoughtless, rash act sets in motion a series of events that rush to ruin not just Helen's family but others in her far-reaching grasp. At every intersecting point, one choice will take her to possible forgiveness; another, total devastation.

During the 24 hours that THE ALMOST MOON spans, Helen makes very few good choices. In fact, she makes such unbelievably bad choices --- one after another --- that it becomes hard to care about what happens to her. If she ever had a soul, it seems to have fled. Still, it is possible that one huge sacrifice on her part might put her back on the road to recovery, but she may yet be beyond salvation.

Certainly Helen's mother, Clair Knightly, sounds like a hard woman to love, although Helen says she does. She also claims to hate her. Helen wonders sometimes if her father, a gentle but essentially spineless man, died to escape his beautiful but unstable wife. Age never softened Clair. Her inveterate meanness persisted, assaulting her daughter with constant criticism and groundless derision. Clair was a woman incapable of being pleased. Yet Helen sacrificed her personal happiness to care for her mother. Whether out of guilt, a sense of duty or merely the strength of familial bond, even she may not understand her reasons. Her own failed marriage and strained relationships with her children probably stemmed from what ultimately tied her to her mother. The urge to be free must have been irresistible.

The line between a soul that is yet redeemable and one that is lost is fragile. Has Helen Knightly gone beyond the turning point? If not beyond, she certainly teeters on the brink. She spends one day after her awful deed indulging in retrospection. She rethinks her childhood, her marriage, her own motherhood, her friendships --- as if she's replaying her life in preparation for what she now faces. If she survives, she will face a burden worse than her abusive mother.

THE ALMOST MOON is as flawed as its main character. Had Alice Sebold chosen one conflict for Helen Knightly to resolve instead of allowing her to explode in many obscenely wrong directions, the result would have been more satisfying. As it is, Helen has too many problems converging in one day for her to adequately work out. With that caveat, this novel will keep you mesmerized, from the powerful opening sentence that will hit you like a blow to the chest to the stunning ending. And when you close the book for the final time, be prepared for a long night. Sleep will not come easily.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Let me get this out of the way up front: Alice Sebold is an extraordinary author. As a fellow writer, I learn a lot from both of her novels just walking through how she handles a scene, or a flashback, or a set of dialog.

Let me also get this out of the way: her subject matter bothers me on levels that I can barely describe. The Lovely Bones was extremely well-written, but, as a father with a daughter, it brought a parent's nightmares to the page. The Almost Moon comes at your from a different tragic perspective, from a middle-aged mother who murders her dementia inflicted invalid mother.

The copy I have read is an Advanced Reading Copy graciously given to me at the recent Book Expo America, so the excerpts that I quote may change in the final copy (coming out in October 2007 according to the book's cover).

The first paragraph of the first chapter sets the stage excellently for the entire book:

When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily. Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My mother's core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers. She had been beautiful when my father met her and still capable of love when I became their late-in-life child, but by the time she gazed up at me that day, none of this mattered.

For the next 24 hours, Helen Knightly confronts the events that unfold from the act she has committed and reflects on the events of her life that led her to this decision. Her relationships with her mother, father (who died before her mother), her two daughters, her ex-husband, her best friend and her best friend's son all act as mirrors both past and present for the person Helen is, how low of an opinion she seems to have of herself, where that low opinion stems from and how it motivated her decision to kill her mother.

My friend John DeNardo at SF Signal has written that a reader/reviewer reads books and comments on them based on many characteristics: background, mood, etc.. Ms. Sebold's novels certainly bring the reader's family background into play. Having neither parent needing care nor suffering from dementia (at least not that I know of, and as the intro says, I'm the one hearing voices), the book's plot shocked me, continues to shock me, and makes me think. I would surmise that a reader with a family history of taking care of dementia-sufferers or with some other reason to hate one of their parents would be less shocked, may have even contemplated similar actions (whether in fantasy and/or reality), but will also be made to think more by Ms. Sebold's story.

The story made me think, even worry and I continue to roll it around in my head. That, combined with Alice Sebold's wonderfully fluid prose:

It had been his illness as well as hers. She just garnered more attention. She was always - day in, day out - there. My father had been pity to her blame, warmth to her cold, but had he not, in the end, been colder than she?

Ms. Sebold has written two excellent novels of difficult subject matter that come off as immensely readable and leave the reader considering the actions in their own context. While I have not read her memoir, Lucky, I am motivated to do so now, to look at her own background and experiences.

I really struggled to get through this book. Very disturbing beginning and I almost put it down. I did finish the book, did not enjoy it and would not recommend it.