When I took this book off the shelves at the bookstore and read the first line - "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily" - I was intrigued.
I have always wondered what is it that makes people do the things they would never ever dream of doing, be it something good or something totally horrendous, like killing their mothers.
There must be something in each of us that triggers this almost impulsive reaction and response when placed in a certain situation.
Is it nature or nurture?
That is a study that fascinates me all the time. I personally believe it is a bit of both.
But how one can win over the other or how we can balance the two, we can never tell. There is no exact science or formula.
So, back to the story.
It is a story about Helen Knightly, the narrator, age 49, who reacted, made choices and decisions within 24 hours after killing her mother, Clair, age 88.
At the start of the story, Clair, who suffers from dementia, had soiled herself and Helen, being the daughter and reluctant caretaker, tried to clean her up which she has done many a times visiting her mother in the house she grew up in.
But it was in that day, that time, that very instance of having to face her mother in that particular situation, she snapped, suffocating her mother with some towels she had with her.
Helen ultimately stripped her mother, clean her up as she intended and - gasp! - stored her in the freezer in the basement for fear of decay while she took the time to take in what she had done and decide on what she needs to do from this point on.
Helen called her ex-husband who she has divorced for more than 20 years and told him what she has done. Instead of waiting for him at her mother's house, what she did, in a nutshell, were to first, sleep with the son of her best friend, then drive herself home, clean herself, made it to work the next morning, picked her daughter at the train station and told her what she has done before finally running off to commit suicide. However, it is inconclusive whether she did pull the trigger in the end or just waited to be arrested.
Disturbing...
Oh, and her father whom I thought was a saint with the way he cared and treated her mother who was mentally ill, turned out to be a loony himself too. I suppose living with a person like her mother would turn anyone crazy. See, her mother's disturbed mind was all to see and everyone tip-toed around her, making sure she is cared for, but her father suffered just as well and just as badly. And so, one day her father took a gun that belonged to her maternal grandfather which was in display in their home and blast his head off.
Dang! Helen had a really slim chance of winning the battle with her mental health.
Why was the book called The Almost Moon?
Well, you see, as explained by Helen's father, we are always just almost. What people see in us is not the full us - it is always just almost us. Just like the moon - it is there, you know facts about it and you see it every day but what you see is not the moon but just the almost moon.
So we think we understand a person by observing and knowing facts and figures about the person's genetic make up and his upbringing but in actual fact, we only just almost know. We will never fully know.
Here's a review I found of this book from http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/09/arts/11book.php). I somewhat agree with this review.
It's hard to write persuasive, complex novels or movies or television episodes about mentally ill killers. Too often the explanation for their crimes is simply that they're crazy: they didn't know what they were doing, they couldn't control themselves, they couldn't grasp a sane alternative to their violent actions or they simply went off their meds. Rarely do their plights shed light on the day-to-day choices made by ordinary people; rarely do their stories open out into something larger or more resonant. Instead we are all too often given merely voyeuristic glimpses of troubled souls running amok and leaving lots of bloody splatter and pain in their wakes.
This is the problem with Alice Sebold's new novel, "The Almost Moon." The book starts with the narrator, Helen, killing her elderly mother, Mrs. Knightly — she suffocates the old woman with some bath towels — and while the remainder of the novel presumably aims to explain why Helen committed this horrific act, it instead leaves the reader thinking that Helen and her mother are both insane. And not insane in any particularly interesting or novel way: just plain old generic nuts.
The resulting novel is annoying, unconvincing and deeply perplexing. Although it shares some themes with Sebold's acclaimed best seller, "The Lovely Bones" — both are concerned with families and the connection (or lack of connection) characters feel toward the real world — this volume demonstrates none of the psychological acuity or emotional chiaroscuro of that earlier book.
The heroine of "Bones" — a 14-year-old rape and murder victim looking back on her life and family from a vantage point in heaven — proved to be a perceptive and highly sympathetic narrator; Helen, in contrast, comes off as a talkative monster, whom the reader never comes to understand. We never understand why she daydreamed, since she was a girl, of cutting up her mother "into little pieces and mailing them to parts unknown." We never understand why she snips off her dead mother's hair as a kind of trophy and puts it in her purse. And we never understand why she has sex with her best friend's son right after killing her mother.
Helen's mother is clearly a disturbed woman, capable of provoking hurt feelings, anger and contempt, but her behavior hardly seems the sort that would produce murderous rage. Helen tells us that her mother was relentlessly negative (when Helen revealed that she was pregnant, her mother said, "There are no awards given out") and hypercritical about Helen's appearance (when a teenage Helen peered into the refrigerator, her mother talked of the "near matronly" thighs she will develop).
Helen tells us that her mother suffered from terrible agoraphobia and refused to leave the house. And she tells us that the entire neighborhood blamed her agoraphobic mother for failing to run to the rescue of a boy who was hit by a car in front of their house. In Helen's opinion her mother also helped drive her troubled father (who himself spent a stint in a mental facility) to suicide.
Helen suggests that she has committed herself to the care of her mother as a kind of tribute to her father: "My father had exited stage right, and in I had walked, seeing it not only as my duty but as perhaps the greatest gift I might give him posthumously, to take forever the burden of my mother."
Though it becomes clear that Mrs. Knightly, a former lingerie model, exerted some sort of powerful sexual hold over her husband, it's harder to understand why Helen decides to martyr herself to her mother, why she allows her mother to embitter her, sabotage her marriage and jeopardize the happiness of her own children.
Because Sebold never makes Helen's emotional damage or twisted psychology remotely tangible, it's hard to understand why Helen never did the sensible thing: why she never sent her mother (or father, for that matter) to see a psychiatrist, or continued to see one herself; why she moved back home to be near to the woman she says she hates; why she refused to hire a nurse or home aide to help care for her mother.
In terms of sheer suspense, Sebold does a decent enough job of getting the reader to wonder what will happen to Helen after she murders her mother. Will she succeed in enlisting her ex-husband's help in covering up the crime? Will the police's attention turn to Manny, a boy who occasionally repaired things for her mother? Will Helen follow in the footsteps of her father, and kill herself before she is arrested?
Though such questions are enough to keep us turning pages, they aren't enough to make us care one scintilla about Helen. Throughout the novel Sebold has Helen say things like she was "a shadow girl," trying to be what she thought her mother and her husband wanted her to be. She says she was "raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child." And she says she thinks mental illness has "the unique ability to metastasize across the generations."
Unfortunately, neither these musings nor Helen's stilted descriptions of her unhappy childhood make the crime she has committed any more comprehensible. And neither turn Helen from a generic, high-concept madwoman into a recognizable human being.
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