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The Almost Moon, by Alice Sebold
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A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this brilliant, powerful, and unforgettable new novel by the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky.
For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this searing, fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate. It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the fluidity and strength of voice that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page.
- Sales Rank: #354426 in Books
- Brand: Back Bay Books
- Published on: 2008-09-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .75" w x 5.38" l, .63 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 291 pages
- Great product!
From Publishers Weekly
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Since Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (****1/2 Nov/Dec 2002) was a runaway hit, critics inevitably compared that poignant tale of a murdered teenage girl to this long-awaited, brooding account of a woman pushed to tragic extremes. Some critics praised Sebold’s evocative writing and bleak depiction of family relationships in the shadow of mental illness, but the majority of critics complained that the characters were wholly unsympathetic, their decisions and actions incomprehensible, and the plot implausible. Some of the discord may result from Moon’s ugly subject matter and the natural compassion elicited by the young murder victim in The Lovely Bones (as opposed to the cold-blooded Helen). Sebold’s fans may want to skip this one.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
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
Most helpful customer reviews
290 of 305 people found the following review helpful.
This Book is Greatly Misunderstood
By Stephen S. Mills
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.
210 of 235 people found the following review helpful.
Why does "The Almost Moon" feel like a sledgehammer to the heart?
By David Kusumoto
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.
85 of 96 people found the following review helpful.
Broken Lives
By Linda Pagliuco
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.
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