The Almost Moon
Little, Brown & Co., 2007

The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold,

Little, Brown & Co., 2007

Alice Sebold’s unhappy family saga begins with a violent act and continues through the motivations for and the repercussions of that act. The violent act is – and I’m giving nothing away here because Sebold reveals it in the novel’s first sentence – that Helen, the story’s protagonist, kills her mother. It all begins matter-of-factly – the act is committed in a momentary relaxation of restraint on Helen’s part – but as the full import of what she has done begins to dawn, and as we learn the details of Helen’s history, the killing becomes anything but casual, its causes and consequences not at all easy to sort out. More significantly, Sebold dances around the idea of moral responsibility, and in the end readers will be hard-pressed to accurately place blame for any of the story’s events. 

As we are introduced to her, Helen’s mother, Claire, is a difficult woman in the final stage of her life. Suffering from cancer and dementia, she is, at age 88, on the verge of death. Still, she manages to make life difficult for Helen, who has assumed responsibility for her mother’s care, Helen’s father having died decades earlier. Claire still has the strength, however, to be irrationally demanding and effectively cruel to Helen. As she realizes that her mother’s decline has reached a tipping point, as she contemplates calling the hospice, Helen acts out of instinct, smothering her mother with a towel. It is an act that we – and Helen – can’t immediately categorize. Is it an act of mercy or of long-denied hatred? 

The judgments don’t come any easier any time soon, either. The family that Sebold constructs seems, at first, familiar: the unreasonable and hurtful mother; the kind but emotionally absent father; the sensitive child who, torn between these opposite poles, struggles for, simultaneously, the love of her parents and escape from the household hell they create. It is easy, at first, to hate Claire right along with Helen, to see how she destroyed her husband and her daughter. Helen’s killing of her mother seems justified, if immeasurably sad. 

But Sebold doesn’t let us get away with such effortless conclusions. We begin to see Claire’s cruelty as a result of her mental illness. She is a profoundly affected agoraphobic who cannot leave the house without a blanket or towel covering her head (that such a towel is the instrument of her death is Sebold’s jab at irony), and her instability, rather than pure sadism is what has caused her to treat her family so shabbily. Here again Claire regains the status of victim. We’ve already been asked to see Helen as victim, however, and now we’re faced with a crime with two victims and no perpetrators. A moral dilemma indeed. 

With this novel Sebold continues to work through her demons (although she might argue that she is not, in fact, doing so). Her first book, Lucky, was a memoir of her early adulthood, when she was the victim of a brutal rape. Her first novel, the bestselling The Lovely Bones, was the story of a young girl who, having been raped and murdered, watches from heaven as the world goes on without her. The Almost Moon’s grappling with a daughter’s relationship with her mentally ill mother, while not strictly autobiographical, was certainly informed by the mental illness of Sebold’s own mother. This deeply personal origin gives all of Sebold’s writing both a sharply evocative voice and an unsettling dimension of truth. 

The Almost Moon is not an unqualified success. The book’s peripheral characters are held at bay by Helen’s internal dialogue, making it hard for us to get an accurate picture of her world. Her ex-husband and her life-long best friend, although ostensibly immensely important figures in Helen’s life, are shadowy. Worse, Helen’s own daughters remain outside events; we long to see how Helen’s troubled relationship with her own mother has shaped her relationship with her children, but such a revelation never fully develops. 

Ultimately, Helen’s problem turns out to be the same problem as in most literary mother-daughter relationships (and, one suspects, most real-life ones as well): that is, Helen is afraid she has become her mother. Both women are unstable (Helen’s transgression of the bounds of sanity is more heinous than anything her mother ever did, or is it?) and both women are cruel and difficult. Both long to be artistic/sexual muses to the people around them – Claire is a former lingerie model, while Helen currently works as a nude model for drawing classes. Both have been pushed to the brink of normal behavior not only by the faulty connections in their heads but by the harshness of their real lives. 

If Helen’s murder of her mother was a symbolic act we might think that it would in some way set her free. But Sebold isn’t constructing here some post-modern fantasy in which transgressions go unpunished and violence is therapeutic. Helen’s act is real, and it becomes clear early on that there will be consequences. What we, as readers, hope those consequences will be and our ever-changing perception of Helen’s circumstance, is the tension that keeps The Almost Moon chugging along as well as it does.

Copyright 2007 Ad Media Inc.