Book Review: Almost Moon: Alice Sebold

First let me introduce myself. I currently teach American Literature, Ethics, World Religions and Social & Political Philosophy at a prep school. In the past, I have taught courses at the university level. I write poetry now and then when the spirit moves me. When a friend asked me to do this “book talk” on The Almost Moon I felt flattered, said yes and ran out to buy the book, but after reading it, I suffered many qualms about playing critic. It is a new role for me. As a teacher of “great literature”, I am accustomed to pointing out its virtues not poring over literary faults.

I confess, I have not read Sebold’s runaway hit Lovely Bones as I am sure many of you have. I considered reading it when word began to filter out and the whole world seemed to be trampling a path to her door, but when a student told me about the plot that included a dead narrator commenting on the present, I demurred. It just sounded too much like a bad movie. I have been assured it is a good book by many people, but I think I will be a bit cautious about jumping on the bandwagon, particularly after reading The Almost Moon.

As I said, I am habituated to interpreting texts in the best possible light. So I sat down to read The Almost Moon with relish and the intention of close reading to highlight its many virtues. Certainly the first sentence that has received so much attention is a sharp hook. It is hard to imagine a first line that is better suited to help sell a million copies. It brings to mind Kafka’s story Metamorphosis where the narrator in the first line announces that he awoke to find himself transformed into a bug. Wow! Here we go. Hemingway once said he thought his best short story was a one sentence story he wrote: “For sale: One pair of unused baby shoes.” Sebold could have stopped with the first line and allowed the reader to fill in the blanks. Indeed the first paragraph and the first chapter set several hooks. As I finished the first chapter, I found Sebold had done her job well. I was ready to run with her. I liked her spare prose(reminiscent of Raymond Carver), her ability to simultaneously shock and amuse for example when she has the mother call the daughter a “bitch” after the daughter had sweetly called her “mother”, the promise of her subject matter, the hints of dark psychological depths and the energy with which she opens her story. I liked the gritty realism of a daughter dealing with a demented mother’s loose bowels, which raised the question of what will Americans do when they are confronted with demented, aging parents screwing up their pleasant lifestyles? This was also the issue that Jonathan Franzen dealt with in his critically acclaimed book Corrections. Franzen’s book has many similarities to The Almost Moon in thematic content but is a stark contrast in style. Franzen’s beautiful description of slipping into dementia at the beginning of his book is truly a masterpiece. By comparison, Sebold’s spare, hit-you-over- the-head- quickly, seems a bit under-cooked.

At any rate, Sebold’s book opens in a dramatic, Sartreian underworld and indeed it continues with a sense of inevitable tragedy as the narrator struggles with the consequences of her impulsive murder of her mother. She simply doesn’t know which way to turn. Should she go to the authorities? Call her ex-husband? Go to work as usual? Confess to her best friend? Put her mother in the freezer? F..k her best friend’s son? All of the above, in no particular order? Clearly we have a grim tale and we know there is always a bottom below. This story begins to cross Silence of the Lambs with The Stepford Wives. The narrator reveals her longstanding deep desire to murder her mother as she is moved by lust while she washes her mother’s dead body. As if that passion weren’t sick enough, the reader is further rewarded along the way with learning what agoraphobia is really like and how it feels to watch your beloved father blow his brains out.

Clearly the narrator’s sorry behavior needs explanation and in the course of the story we are given a rationale much of which traces to her unhappy parents. Some of the narrator’s adult life is woven into the story and the character of her own children and her ex-husband. The narrative technique includes many flashbacks to painful moments in the narrator’s life. Unfortunately, Sebold offers the reader, as Hawthorne does in The Scarlet Letter, little by way of “sweet moral blossoms that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.” And I thought Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road was grim.

Finally, the primary difficulty I find with The Almost Moon is that after the first impulse to follow Sebold as she unravels the puzzle in the first sentence and in the first few chapters, I am never given much reason to like the narrator, or to sympathize with the narrator, her mother or her father. My impulse was to consign them much more quickly to hell and be done with it. And the ending, which I won’t reveal, seemed to rob me of this my final impatient desire.