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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The
Almost Moon by Alice Sebold |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Madness Alice
Sebold followed her well-written and haunting debut novel, The
Lovely Bones, with a disturbing novel titled, The
Almost Moon, about a woman who kills her 88 year old senile mother on an
ordinary day. What could have been an exploration into madness and how it
produces behavior turned into an almost comedic romp into a murder, a sloppy cover-up
and the ways in which individuals can be unlovable. Here’s an excerpt, from
the beginning of Chapter 2, pp. 15-18: My
clues to my mother's life before me were not many. It took me a while to
notice that almost all of them —the Steuben glass paperweights, the sterling
silver picture frames, the Tiffany rattles that were sent a dozen strong
before she miscarried her first, then second, child—were chipped or dented,
cracked or blackened in various ways. Almost all of them had been or would be
thrown either at a wall or at my father, who ducked with a reflexive agility
that reminded me of Gene Kelly tripping up and down the sodden curbs in Singin'
in the Rain. My
father's grace had developed in proportion to my mother's violence, and I
knew that in absorbing it and deflecting it in the way he did, he also saved
her from seeing herself as she had become. Instead she saw the same
reflections of herself that I pored over when I snuck downstairs after dark.
Her precious still photography. When my father met her, my
mother was fresh from Knoxville, Tennessee, and made her living as a showroom
model of underwear and support garments. She preferred to say, "I modeled
slips." And these were the photos that we had so many of. Framed black
and whites of my mother in better times, wearing black slips or white slips.
"That one was eggshell," she might say from the corner of the
living room, not having said anything to anyone all afternoon. I knew she was
referring to a specific slip in a specific picture, and sensing this, I would
choose the white slip I thought could be eggshell. If I got it wrong, the
moment would burst — as fragile as a blow bubble glistening in the yard— and
she would slump back into the chair. But if I chose right, and I would come
to memorize them over time— there was the bone, the ecru, the nude, and my
favorite, the rose-petal pink—I would bring the framed photograph to her.
Hanging on to the thin cord of her smile, I pulled myself into the past with
her, making myself small and still on the ottoman until she told me the
story of the photography session or the man involved or the gifts that she
had received as partial payment. The rose-petal pink was my
father. "He was not even the
photographer," she would say. "He was a junior water inspector in a
borrowed suit with a pocket square, but I didn't know that then." These were the years of my
earliest childhood, when my mother was still powerful, before she collected
what she considered the unforgivable flaws of age. Two years short of her
fiftieth birthday, she began covering all her mirrors with heavy cloths, and
when, as a teenager, I suggested we remove the mirrors completely, she
objected. They remained there as she grew infirm. Her shadowy, silent
indictments. But
in the photos of the rose-petal-pink slip, she was still worthy of her own
love, and it was this love for herself that I tried to take warmth from. What
I knew, I think, without wanting to admit it, was that the photos were like
the historical documents of our town. They proved that long ago, there had
been a more hopeful time. Her smile was easy then, not forced, and the fear
that could turn to bitterness had not tainted her eyes. "He was the photographer's
friend," she said. "He was having a big day in the city, and the
suit was part of his friend's lie." I knew not to ask, "What lie,
Mom?" Because that took her to a bad place where her marriage was just
the long, arduous playing out of an afternoon con between schoolboy friends.
Instead I asked, "Who was the shoot for?" "The original John
Wanamaker's," she said. Her face glowed like an old-fashioned streetlamp
lit from the inside. Everything else in the room disappeared as if into a
dark fog. I did not realize then that there was no place in these memories
for the company of a child. As my mother drifted into the
past, where she was happiest, I appointed myself the past's faithful
guardian. If her feet looked cold, I covered them. If the light left the room
too dark, I quietly crept over and turned on a bookshelf lamp that would
cast only a small circle of light—not too big—just enough to keep her voice
from becoming a scary shapeless echo in the dark. Outside, in the street in
front of our house, the workmen who had been hired to install the
stained-glass windows in the new Greek Orthodox church—green because for some
reason this color of glass was cheaper than most —might walk by and make a
noise too loud to ignore. When this happened, I would meet the drowsy blank
stare that came over my mother with ushering words meant to slip her back to
the dream-past. "Five girls showed up, not
eight," I'd say. Or "His last name,
Knightly, was irresistible." When
I look back, I think how silly I must have sounded, parroting the phrases of
my mother's lovesick girlhood, but what s most precious about our house back
then was that no matter how wrongheaded everything might be, inside it, we
could distill ourselves to being a normal man, woman, and child. No one had
to see my father put on an apron and do overtime work after he got home, or
watch me cajole my mother, trying to get her to eat. "I didn't know he wasn't
in the fashion industry until after he'd kissed me," she'd say. "But what about the
kiss?" It was always here that she
teetered. The kiss and the weeks immediately following it must have been
wonderful, but she could not forgive my father once he'd brought her to
Phoenixville. "New York City,"
she'd say, looking down dejectedly between her splayed feet on the floor.
"I never even got there." It
was my mother's disappointments that were enumerated in our household and
that I saw before me every day as if they were posted on our fridge— a static
list that my presence could not assuage. The exploration
of mother-daughter relationships consumes many pages of novels, and The
Almost Moon makes a contribution to that effort. For some readers, the
way Sebold presents that relationship in this book will make reading The
Almost Moon worthwhile. The redeeming quality in this book, for me, was
the ability of Sebold to present mental illness and irrationality in a way
that readers who have not come close to this experience may appreciate the
ways in which illness can spread. For most readers, the unattractive characters
and plot will be too much of a diversion to provide any reading pleasure or
insight. Steve
Hopkins, January 22, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Almost Moon.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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