The novel stays close to Helen Knightly, its narrator, through each detail of the murder, starting with the senile Clair calling Helen "bitch" and soiling herself. Helen starts to clean her, and then impulsively presses the towel over her face until she suffocates. Helen refers to this as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.The painful ambivalence of mother-daughter relationships are so familiar - and the problems mentally disabled elderly parents can pose for their adult children so well-attested - that I suspect it is a rare person who will not feel a thrill of sympathy for the murdering daughter or, along with Helen, pangs for a mother who was always neurotically tormented. As Helen tells us the successively crazier things she's doing - dumping the body in the deep freeze, summoning her ex of 23 years earlier, having sex with her best friend's son - she also takes us back over her life's previous 49 years of discoveries about her family and herself.She divides the world into two classes - the normal, and those like herself and her parents who are "totally fucked". She made an early bid for normality by going away to university, marrying and having two kids; but then she chose craziness, moving a thousand miles to look after Clair. We quickly learn that Clair was bitter about her marriage, which landed her in a boring Pennsylvania suburb. When Helen discloses that she was also agoraphobic, though, I became less tolerant of these revelations. Wasn't it enough just to have a mother who was critical and unloving? But the justifications for murder or instances of craziness-es, however contradictory, keep being larded on, culminating in her father going mad and shooting himself. It's as if the author, having quite literally lost the plot (of mother-daughter ambivalence), had been reading a manual of mental disorders and just threw in everything.As storytelling, I have to say this works. Jolts of titillation do build suspense and that, I guess, is what many readers want. But books we call literary explore, digging out fresh pockets of subject matter or language, describing what we haven't seen captured in words. Novelty can be overvalued - but so can suspense. Sebold seems to want to explore the psychological realities of families and how they shape the lives of their members.
Suggestive insights are dropped in, but the need to continually amp up the action constricts truthful investigation. I wondered if her publishers pushed her toward the sensational - or if her chosen subject was just too hard to portray.The Almost Moon builds on The Lovely Bones the way that the earlier novel (narrated from heaven by a 14-year-old rape and murder victim) built on Lucky, Sebold's rape memoir. It's an inversion: in The Lovely Bones the victim is young and innocent and the killer serial; in The Almost Moon the victim is old and hurtful, the killer barely a murderer at all. There's a similar alertness to the ways in which everyone's a victim and everyone has murderous feelings, and outlandish acts again come out of a need to love and feel loved.In The Almost Moon, what initially seems so grounded in relatable-to feelings turns out to be a kind of fantasy in its extremes: instead of mere dissatisfaction and divorce, the father's madness and suicide; instead of resentment and placing the mother in a hospice, murder - an acting out of improbable what-ifs that is less and less realistic, but disguised so. Almost every family does, in real life, have something crazy to it, but not this crazy - not craziness this various and psychotic. The Almost Moon is unrealistic, but it's leavened with realistic description, much as the previous novel's hard-to-swallow heaven is made semi-palatable by the ordinary community and family scrutinized from it.So I'm still waiting for the book that fully engages with a daughter psychically married to her emotionally with olding mother; or a novel about an adult child's identification with and fear of an aged, demented parent that comes close to Alice Munro's portrayal of living with a spouse with Alzheimer's in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain". Lurid action is easier to come up with than the subtleties of everyday family chafing you find in works such as Death of a Salesman or A Long Day's Journey Into Night, not that those don't have their drug addiction and adultery. Maybe publishers now would reject such honesty as tame.The excess of craziness means we don't have, paradoxically, an intimate sense of what Helen is like: she's sardonic, practical, controlled - but then none of those things, just her crazy parents' daughter.At one point, she thinks of a book her daughter had recommended, nonfiction about a serial killer. She reads it in one night but demands the next day: "How can you read such things?" Sebold's second novel will give you more than most true crime books - an evoked world especially (she is very good on suburbs) - but not the inside information it promises. It's both a strength and a weakness that it's a one-night read.
- AL'z wittren!
Suggestive insights are dropped in, but the need to continually amp up the action constricts truthful investigation. I wondered if her publishers pushed her toward the sensational - or if her chosen subject was just too hard to portray.The Almost Moon builds on The Lovely Bones the way that the earlier novel (narrated from heaven by a 14-year-old rape and murder victim) built on Lucky, Sebold's rape memoir. It's an inversion: in The Lovely Bones the victim is young and innocent and the killer serial; in The Almost Moon the victim is old and hurtful, the killer barely a murderer at all. There's a similar alertness to the ways in which everyone's a victim and everyone has murderous feelings, and outlandish acts again come out of a need to love and feel loved.In The Almost Moon, what initially seems so grounded in relatable-to feelings turns out to be a kind of fantasy in its extremes: instead of mere dissatisfaction and divorce, the father's madness and suicide; instead of resentment and placing the mother in a hospice, murder - an acting out of improbable what-ifs that is less and less realistic, but disguised so. Almost every family does, in real life, have something crazy to it, but not this crazy - not craziness this various and psychotic. The Almost Moon is unrealistic, but it's leavened with realistic description, much as the previous novel's hard-to-swallow heaven is made semi-palatable by the ordinary community and family scrutinized from it.So I'm still waiting for the book that fully engages with a daughter psychically married to her emotionally with olding mother; or a novel about an adult child's identification with and fear of an aged, demented parent that comes close to Alice Munro's portrayal of living with a spouse with Alzheimer's in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain". Lurid action is easier to come up with than the subtleties of everyday family chafing you find in works such as Death of a Salesman or A Long Day's Journey Into Night, not that those don't have their drug addiction and adultery. Maybe publishers now would reject such honesty as tame.The excess of craziness means we don't have, paradoxically, an intimate sense of what Helen is like: she's sardonic, practical, controlled - but then none of those things, just her crazy parents' daughter.At one point, she thinks of a book her daughter had recommended, nonfiction about a serial killer. She reads it in one night but demands the next day: "How can you read such things?" Sebold's second novel will give you more than most true crime books - an evoked world especially (she is very good on suburbs) - but not the inside information it promises. It's both a strength and a weakness that it's a one-night read.
- AL'z wittren!
