sábado, 21 de novembro de 2009

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

From John M. Formy-Duval, for About.com

In The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold has created a memorable but wholly unlikable character. Helen Knightly is emotionally cold and distant, even from her best friend. Divorced, she is physically and emotionally estranged from her daughters. That she is mentally ill is readily apparent.

Helen is coming to grips with a parable shared by her father when she was a girl. "I like to think your mother is almost whole," he said. "So much in life is about almost, not quites." "Like the moon," Helen had responded.

The whole moon is always there in front of us, although we cannot always see it in its entirety. Except on those nights when it is full, we can do no more than almost see it. So it is with Life. Our life and the lives of those around us are always there in front of us; however, we seldom see the fullness of Life. We almost see it, then it is gone.

In this dark and unsatisfying novel, no one seems to be whole. Death permeates everything. "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily," reads the first sentence. "When I was a teenager, I thought every kid spent sweaty summer afternoons in their bedrooms, daydreaming of cutting their mother up into little pieces and mailing them to parts unknown." As the next twenty-four hours unfold, we see into the murky depths of her relationship with her mother, her father, her ex-husband, and her daughters. There is nothing there to make the reader connect and care about a single one of them, and we never fully understand what drove any of them.

Her "mother's core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers." Her mother was severely agoraphobic. Her father, who went away for 90 days "to visit family," was warm and caring, but came home one evening and put a bullet through his head. At that point, Helen assumed the burden of caring for her mother. And, we quickly learn, it was a burden.

A major theme of the novel explores in a superficial manner the choices we make as individuals and as members of a family. As the pressure to care for a contemptible mother grew, Helen had choices to make; the choice which led to the murder of her mother is never made clear. The interior monologues simply do not ring true, and the plot remains unresolved.

Never has one novel had more dysfunctional characters. No one is whole, barely "almost whole." Everyone in Helen's family has issues; her mother's neighbors have issues. Her father used to say, when Helen's mother was off to a bad start in the morning, "It's a hard day." Helen, who likes hiding in "my own darkness" is having a hard day from which there seems to be no release.

Sebold's first, highly acclaimed novel, The Lovely Bones, is a cheerful walk in the park in comparison. It provided a protagonist for whom we felt great sympathy, as did Lucky, a memoir of her rape, published in 1999. In an interview with David Weich of Powells.com in July of 2002, Sebold said, "When people say, "I enjoyed Lucky," and hesitate, my response is, 'Yes, thank you.' It's a book. It's meant to be read. Even if it's about something horrible, it should be written in such a way that you enjoy it as a reading experience." The Almost Moon does not rise to the criterion of being an enjoyable read.

In the acknowledgments to his most recent novel, John Hart writes, "I have often said that family dysfunction makes for rich literary soil, ... the perfect place to cultivate secrets and misdeeds, grow them into explosive stories." Even in fertile soil, one has to plant good seed stock and tend it appropriately. Sebold's novel simply does not succeed on this level.

Sebold lives in California with her husband, the novelist Glen David Gold. She was a waitress, the caretaker of an art colony, and a teacher of writing before becoming a writer herself.