Talk about meaning business! Novelist Alice Sebold grabs readers by the throats the instant they glance at her first page and refuses to let go for the longest time. That's what makes The Almost Moon (2007, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 291 pages) so “gripping”.
This story, about a tragically dysfunctional family in Pennsylvania, begins with one of the best-ever opening sentences. Just 11 simple words! “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” Then the book's already fascinating.
Hardly a heroine, the middle-aged protagonist, Helen Knightly, lacks sympathy for Clair, her 88-year-old mother ensnared by dementia. “My mother's core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers.”
For Clair, who spends most of her time simply sitting, “a totemic presence”, in a favorite wing chair, apparently the feeling's mutual. “ ‘Mother,’ I said, calling the name only I, as her sole child, had the right to call her. She looked up and smiled.
‘Bitch,’ she said….
‘Mother, it's Helen,’ I said.
‘I know who you are!’ she barked at me.”
Confronted by her mother's dramatic deterioration, Helen astonishes even herself by choosing the worst possible solution. She became “the dutiful daughter who suddenly finds her hand on top of a towel on top of your face, smashing that face in, something inside her hammering over and over again with a child's vendetta finally fulfilled”.
The fast-paced book begins with Helen, herself a mother (aged 49, about the same as Sebold), committing murder. What justifies such a nasty deed? “She was dying anyway. She's been sitting up, dying, for the past year. Is it better that she should go to a hospice, babbling, and die in a pool of her own waste? At least I care.”
Then the action races ahead as unpleasant consequences unfold during the next 24 hours. Constant flashbacks to earlier times fill in missing pieces about the Knightly family.
The book's title comes from a passage suggesting that Clair “isn't quite whole”, like the moon. “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. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there's only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.”
Happiness nearly always eluded Helen, and the final episode with her mother makes the chase even more difficult. Has it become mission impossible?
Other weighty questions swirl below the surface. What constitutes happiness? What's the difference between love and hate? Should anyone suffer for the sake of family? How much devotion becomes too much? Must family ties always bind, even if they drag everyone to the edge of insanity? What limits apply to morality?
“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, like her ailing mother, suffers from confusion. Maybe most people do, and no wonder. “Poison and medicine are often the same things, given in different proportions.”
Earlier, Sebold wrote a novel, The Lovely Bones, and a memoir, Lucky. She lives in California with another novelist, her husband Glen David Gold.
Does the author continue to excel and end her story as impressively as it began? Much of the fun in reading The Almost Moon comes from anticipating and then learning the answer to that question.
Approval rating: 79 per cent.
For more information: www.barnesandnoble.com
(November 16, 2010)
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Alice Sebold begins with clout.
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