The Almost Moon
by Alice Sebold
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alice SeboldEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-08
ISBN: 0316067369
Number of pages: 291
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of The Almost Moon
Book Review: Our Daughters, Ourselves....?
Summary: 4 Stars
Author: Bread of Shame
The idea of the "almost moon" is explained by Mr. Knightly to Helen, the teen daughter of a mentally ill woman whose incomprehensible behavior has both disturbed and confused the girl ever since she can remember. An only child, she seeks consolation in her father's words, who assures her that her mother, Clair, is indeed beautiful but that the woman's beauty is only partially apparent to the child, as all truths are, because one sees only a glimpse of what a person truly is, the rest is shading like the invisible parts of the moon as it waxes and wanes, depending upon the light from the sun. The symbol is apt; the moon is associated with what is mysterious and inexplicable in women: the menstrual cycle and thus the passionate outbursts and compensatory withdrawal, all the various undercurrents of female emotion. Like the issue of truth itself, the human being is complex, the viewer of any given personality beholding only the incomplete truth of a person's character. Similarly, the kindly Mr. Forrest, who is himself incompletely known due to his own efforts, attempts to explain to the confused teen that although Helen's mother was a neighborhood pariah, he saw her as endowed with grace and intelligence, a muse of sorts to her embattled husband. Much later, ruminating on his words, Helen finally realizes what her father and Mr. Forest tried to explain all those years ago. This epiphany occurs just when Helen regards her own fate as being as hopeless and unspeakable as that of her doomed parents. "The Almost Moon" is a powerful novel of comprehensive psychological insight and literary artistry. Sebold's use of internal monologue, poetic language and multiple literary devices to express the redemptive rewards of the examined life identifies her as a master of literary fiction.
Similar to Sebold's "The Lovely Bones," "The Almost Moon" concerns the dark truths of human nature - those incomprehensible acts of malice and neglect that are often the lot of the innocent. Like the victim in "The Lovely Bones," Helen does nothing to deserve her fate. She is merely born into a family of two misfits: a mentally disturbed mother and her co-dependent husband. Although the husband accepts the burden of his wife's condition, he sees in her a rare physical beauty as well as a deep emotional neediness reflective of her narcissism. From time to time, he escapes the hold she has on him and retreats to his childhood home, now a derelict structure on the cliff of a flooded incline, the repository of the plywood images of his shadowy families, a mattress upon which he sleeps, craven photos, and a few of the carved rocking horses he's made for years. At one time he disappeared from the family for three months, the story being told that he visited relatives, when in fact, he was in a mental institution recovering from the stress of caring for his wife. These are some of the secrets surrounding Helen as she grows up. Thanks to Mr. Forest, who is the first to reveal Helen's mother is "mentally ill," and to her father for his one vacation with her where he takes her to his childhood home, Helen is at last able to piece together what her parents' legacy actually was. That her father did not accidentally fall down the stairs, but instead shot himself in the head and then fell, is the last terrible truth she discovers before she herself compounds the crimes of her family by murdering her mother, Clair.
Helen is 49 and a seemingly devoted daughter when she smothers her mother with towels, breaking her nose in the process. She is divorced and geographically separated from her grown daughters. She is alone, pursuing her career as an artists' model at Westmore College. For twenty years, she has dutifully assumed all the responsibility for her querulous mother, whom she labels a "totemic presence," and whose favorite epithet for her daughter is "the b-word." Helen clips her mother's toenails, feeds her, watches endless television with her, takes her to the doctors and hair stylists, and generally does more than most daughters in an endless attempt to "assume the burden of her mother," as she refers to the task. Her mother claims there are "People living in my walls." And so there are: the faceless demons that have always been an integral part of Clair's personality. Helen alludes to her visits to her mother as "unusually unpleasant encounters." Yet she persists, as codependent on her mother as her deceased father was when he was still alive. The mother has a reputation for cruelty, calls Mrs. Castle, who tries to take care of her a vicious name, and is basically intolerant of all her neighbors. At one time in the past she watched a child hit by a car die in her presence without trying to help him. For that negligence she has been ostracized by the neighborhood, yet she has refused to move elsewhere, still residing in her shabby house of unpleasant associations among people who have long ago rejected her. At 88, she is pathetic in her dementia and her spite, a reflection of what her true character always was, claims Helen in her reveries.
The book is elliptical, circling from past to present, drawing Faulknerian analogies of association and metaphor until the reader catches on that most of the truths of this family are buried and gradually reveal their significance as Helen looks back into the darkly confused past, one whose atmosphere during her father's life "had a weight and a force that crushed me." She recalls how she and her father have "always shared the burden of her mother" and she resents the fact that her father shot himself, thereby shifting the burden of her mother's care to her. At the time she murders her mother, she recognizes that the woman's condition of colon cancer will require that she leave her house and that her agoraphobia will make that situation grossly uncomfortable and frightening. Nevertheless, Helen wants her mother to make that transition with the least possible embarrassment. Thus, when her mother soils herself while sitting in a chair, Helen is overcome with the final indignity she herself must endure in the guardianship of her mother. "Helen comments on the deplorable insubstantiality of her mother's "truth," suggesting that it was apparent in this final act, this woman whom Helen considers to have always been "a woman of appearances," even if now she stands in her own defilement, at last revealed for what she truly was. She intends to clean her mother one last time before she calls the ambulance to take her to the hospital and then presumably to the Home. However, inexplicably she smothers her with the towels with which she intended to clean off the excrement. She drags her mother downstairs to the basement and cuts off her signature braid as a souvenir. After that Helen leaves the home of her childhood and seeks out her best friend's son and sleeps with him. She is apparently in need of human connection, some kind of weird affirmation of her body and personhood, but which action is baffling and unbelievable to the reader -- that is, until it all makes sense, which it does by the end of the novel. She heaves her mother into the basement, comparing her, wrapped in blankets, to "a giant mother burrito." There is hostility in her treatment of her mother -- malice as well, one might claim.
It is then that the history of the family unfolds in its complexity. Helen recalls throwing water in her mother's face when she was sixteen. She relates how her own daughter Emily refused to visit Clair after she dropped Emily's son Leo and injured him. How her father disappeared for ninety days and no one heard from him and how he allegedly years later fell down the stairs to his death. How her mother rubbed the skin on her chest raw from anxiety. Her mother always criticized Helen's looks, competing with her physically, and repeatedly referring to her as fat. Helen's mother had been a lingerie model, and ironically and similarly, Helen poses for painters. Helen surreptitiously wears her mother's rose petaled slip and obsessively recalls all the old pictures of her mother modeling various pieces of lingerie. Helen's ex-husband Jake reminds her that "Your mother ruined so much." Always supportive of Helen, he nevertheless divorces her so that Helen sees the reason for the divorce being Jake "stopped painting her." This is the kind of neglect she could not endure since so much of her identity was wrapped up with her association to her mother, a model of lingerie.
In fact, it is the killing of her mother that leaves Helen the most bereft because without her mother and her own duties in that regard, she has no identity. Even her revealing her whole nude, unexposed self to painters attempting to render the truth of their model, she has had her essence obscured, blocked by her own diminished commitment to the job and by the fact that she no longer has a legacy to follow, no one to compete with in terms of beauty and desirability. Her ex-husband seems to recognize the fact that she is still in competition with her mother when he continually reminds her, "This is not about you." In fact, this is about the murder of her narcissistic mother. About her father, Jake further contends, "I know he loved you" whereas Helen felt his shooting himself indicated a lack of love on his part. Her mother says of her late husband, Helen's father, on the subject of his suicide, "He finally did it," suggesting how long was the ordeal of caring for Clair and how much it cost him. For Helen, too, the burden was unendurable. She laments that for the first year of her marriage she had nightmares, always of various boxes, a Freudian symbol of woman. Her mother is constantly juxtaposed with the image of the downstairs freezer, symbolizing what to Helen seemed a cold nature, a rigidly hateful one that drove those close to her away.
Much of the book's last section is an elaborate denouement of protracted explanations and amplifications of truths already revealed. Sometimes this is slightly laborious, but in the end it all fits together and further enriches the narrative. Insight continues to build as tangential facts and impressions provide further insight into the complex relationship between Helen and her mother. All of this is part of the self-examination Helen needs in order to put the subject of her mother's death into perspective. Helen says of herself after the murder, "I didn't know who I was anymore." For as her father implied on their one trip together to the moldering house of his boyhood, those memories have shaped her and made her the woman she is, however crippled and imprisoned by them she feels. So it was with her father who recalled his own family in that house as he continued to build plywood figures of their likenesses, their particular shadows, as well as those of Clair, Helen and himself in perhaps sunnier days before the burden of Clair became intolerable, before he was beaten down by her demands. It is because he told Helen these things about his own yearnings that she tries hard as a mother, guiding her own children as selflessly as she can despite the legacy of selfishness her mother epitomized. When Jake tells her, "I loved you, "Helen," he is reminding her that she was lovable because she did love her daughters and him. That is how the two women differed in the final analysis. Helen, so tormented by her insane mother, was still able to love.
In fact, it was the very love for her imperfect mother that motivated Helen to the end, perhaps even in the murder itself. Although she harbored a deep animosity for her mother, she has until the very end of the woman's life protected her from physical and emotional pain. She has nursed her lovingly, as she did her own girls. She has tended to her through all sorts of unpleasant hygienic rituals and emotional demands. She has spent time with her without complaining, even though no one else would because the woman was unappreciative and vicious. Helen's daughter Sarah says of her grandmother, "She sucked you dry." And that alone could be the explanation for the murder of her mother, but for the fact that it was Helen who insisted that her mother not be subject to the indignity of going to a Home, where no one would provide her the services her daughter had. When the time comes for her own seemingly inevitable suicide, Helen at last realizes that she has actually been a good daughter and a good wife; she has, in fact, met the conditions of extraordinary humanhood and will continue to do so. She will accept the responsibility of her crime and she will atone for it in all the possible ways she can: by teaching the prison inmates, by being honest to her girls and especially by not traumatizing them in the ways her own father did her. On the subject of killing her mother, she tells her daughter Emily in a letter, "It was the right thing to do." She adds, "I love you, Emily. Remember that over everything." With that admonition Helen realizes that she did love her family and that she did give them the ultimate gift. She then opens the outside window to the clean air and recognizes a fact about herself: "She's not here," that there's "no sign of her" in the darkness, as the police searching for her next door announce in the darkness. She is concealed by the absence of light; she is the "almost moon" her father described over thirty years ago.
This superb novel is a meditation on life - both its tribulation and unfairness. What would it be like to be raised by a mother who was hopelessly mentally ill and by a man who was unable to protect his daughter from the mother's wrath and powerless to keep its hooks from claiming his soul as well? These are dark concerns but they are powerfully rendered by this deft writer. No, the truth is not worthless or insubstantial, as Helen unwisely observes before she is enlightened. The truth does, in fact, set one free. And so does Helen Knightly belatedly achieve self-awareness and an opportunity to atone for her actions. So is she finally as redeemed as any pilgrim in a world where one sees "through a glass darkly" and only partially. Yet one can "know thyself," as Socrates implored. Who wiser than the Old Teacher to represent the obvious truth of human life? Plywood figures or Globes? Which instrument of "truth" would you pick? And so does Helen Knightly belatedly pick up the gauntlet and assume her interrupted journey beyond the shadows to the Absolutes. Mandalas, anyone?
Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author: Bread of Shame
Summary of The Almost Moon
A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this brilliant, powerful, and unforgettable new novel by the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky.For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this searing, fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate. It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the fluidity and strength of voice that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page.
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