Book review: The Almost Moon

As if to remind readers that gruesome subjects are her schtik, Alice Sebold opens her long-anticipated second novel, The Almost Moon, with the sure-hook sentence, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

Starting a novel like this is a bold move it casually offers a key piece of the story's drama which might otherwise be worked up to, and it challenges the author to land their story perfectly. Sebold doesn't quite meet the challenge she sets herself, but she does for better or worse sustain the spectacle of that first sentence.

After years of caring for her spiteful, dementia-afflicted mother, narrator Helen Knightly snaps one day and suffocates her. Over the following day we're shown Helen's flight from the familial claustrophobia that has affected every aspect of her life.

The day's many events are interspersed with memory episodes of Helen's childhood and early adult life her relationship with her depressed father, her early marriage to artist Jake and the cruel lessons that are her mother's currency of communication.

The finds Helen makes while picking through her midden of misery seem placed to give meaning to the opening sentence. Some readers may accept the finds do that, but it's unlikely anyone would see Helen's Sybil-like childhood as providing a moral excuse for her action.

The Shakespearean-accented theme of matricide works best with a moral underpinning and the lack of this loosens Sebold's story, making it appear a series of dramatic flashpoints. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this would likely spell failure for the novel, but Sebold knows and genuflects to most of the rules of fiction writing.

Suburban America and its attendant neuroses seem to fall out of Sebold fully formed her construction of Phoenixville is seamless. It may be that we're all familiar with the social possibilities offered by American Beauty and Dawson's Creek, but when you drive around the streets with Helen you never think that the buildings might be only facades. The atmosphere of Sebold's setting manages to absorb most of the story's more flashy moments. It provides the ideal habitat for the cast of emo-blasted characters.

If mental illness and mother issues aren't enough, you could read The Almost Moon for metaphor and word play. Sebold knows when it's necessary to use these in place of action to build character and location. The name Phoenixville is a deliberate choice, as is Helen's occupation as a life drawing model "I made my living striking poses at the instruction of others." Decoding these and watching them do their work was the winch that pulled me through the story.

Helen's mother, Clair, was agoraphobic whenever forced to leave her house she would drape herself in blankets and moan like a wounded animal. Her terror of open spaces and unpredictable society is, for most of the novel, matched by Helen's hatred of the sealed and prescribed life she's forced to live.

It's not giving away too much to say that at the close of the book Helen chooses to replace her claustrophobia with something that resembles her mother's agoraphobia. This transfusion is the novel's chief concern it displays the author's worry about the heredity of self and the inescapability of fate.

Fans of The Lovely Bones and admirers of Lucky can open The Almost Moon with the certainty there is no Sebold-lite.