For Your Reading Pleasure: How About Some Momicide?

Alice Sebold's 2002 novel, "The Lovely Bones," the breathtaking story of a young girl's murder told from the afterlife, was a runaway bestseller and book club favorite. That's why we're starting with her just-released "The Almost Moon" to inaugurate the Baristanet Book Club, a new feature in which top-name authors review important current books. "Bright Lights, Big City" author Jay McInerney reviewed Sebold's new book for us. In the jump, read how this came about.

The Almost Moon (Little Brown and Company) by Alice Sebold. Reviewed by Jay McInerney.

Like her first novel, the spectacularly successful "The Lovely Bones," "The Almost Moon" begins with a murder. This time, Sebold really hits the ground running. "When all is said and done," the new book begins, "killing my mother was easy." The hard part comes afterward. Those who loved the "Lovely Bones" will find much here that is familiar, including the suburban Pennsylvania setting, a gentle, tormented father and a beautiful, distant mother. But the earlier book's sweetness and lightness of touch are in short supply.

The miracle of "The Lovely Bones was the way it wrung a message of hope and redemption from a gruesome crime. Susie Salmon watches her bereft and befuddled family from heaven and eventually finds solace and acceptance in the way they have coped with her loss. The celestial point of view, as implausible as it first seemed, softened the focus of the gothic domestic story. The "Almost Moon," by contrast, is relentlessly and mercilessly earthbound. Within the first few pages, the narrator's senile mother, who is about to be strangled by her daughter, soils herself and that fecal stench pervades the book like a metaphor for the toxic atmosphere of the Knightley household.

Helen Knightley is a fiftyish life-drawing model and mother of two who has never escaped the centripetal force of her mother, a bitter, beautiful woman who enjoyed a brief career as a lingerie model before settling into a dysfunctional marriage in a small suburban house in Phoenexville, PA. Helen is a teenager before one of her neighbors uses the phrase "mentally ill" to describe her mother. The phrase is a revelation to Helen, who has never been able to understand her mother's coldness and her inability to leave the house. And yet, somehow, she remains enthralled and enslaved by the bitter, unpleasant woman from whose loins she sprung, all the more so when her father finally commits suicide.

Although Helen escapes briefly to college in Wisconsin, marries and bears children of her own, her mother remains the defining figure of her life. The first few chapters of "The Almost Moon" are claustrophobic, and foul-smelling; indeed there's something almost sadistic in the way Sebold depicts the nasty and decrepit old woman, the stultifying atmosphere of the house, and the murder. That atmosphere, coupled with constantly backtracking narrative--every few lines of present action are followed by several paragraphs of flashback -- can make entry to the novel difficult. Yet I eventually felt trapped in this world, like Helen, and morbidly compelled to follow the story to its conclusion, a fact which says much about narrative Sebold's gifts. Even when she give the big secret away in the first few pages she has an uncanny ability to create emotional suspense.

The novel intermittently explodes into life in several incandescent scenes, like the one in which we watch Helen's agoraphobic mother stand by heartlessly --or is it helplessly?--as a neighbor boy who has been hit by a car dies in front of her house. Likewise, the scene in which a lynch mob of neighbors comes to the house to confront her is a masterfully taut and frightening setpiece.

In "The Almost Moon," Sebold give us a harrowing and powerful portrait of mother and daughter bound together by a primal force which is compounded in equal parts of love and hate. "My mother was eternal like the moon," Helen proposes. "Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one's whole life. Had I thought it would be simple? That her substance, demolished, would equal myself avenged?" Killing her mother is Helen's belated attempt to escape her, but sadly for Helen, and for the reader, there is no escape, and no transcendence in that realization.

So, why is Jay McInerney writing for Baristanet?

It starts with the precipitous decline in book reviewing by mainstream media, a trend documented here and much fretted about by authors, reviewers, and publishers.

As an author, I knew about this. But who thought I could be part of the solution? Well, Paul Bogaards, a Glen Ridge resident, avid Baristanet reader and executive at Knopf, did. In mid-September, he invited me to a lunch with representatives from the Association of American Publishers and the National Book Critics Circle, and by the end of the meal, The Baristanet Book Club was born.

The idea was that the publishing industry would bring us marquee authors to review books; we would bring a strong community of readers. Watchung Booksellers, already advertising on our site, agreed to be a sponsor. And as unlikely as it seems that the publishing industry would pin its hopes on a little placeblog in Essex County NJ, at least they got the geography right. Montclair might just be the 21st century Bloomsbury. As Margot Sage-El of Watchung Books says, "When I tell people we have 60 published authors on our author page, their jaws drop." This is a part of the world where what you have on your nightstand is a form of social currency. It's one of the few places that can support not only one, but two independent booksellers.

So here's a virtual book club, where you can discuss, debate and recommend. To add to the fun, we'll have an actual real life discussion of "The Almost Moon" at Watchung Booksellers on Thursday, Nov. 8, from 7 to 8:30 pm, led by yours truly.

In the future, we hope to bring some of today's important authors out to Baristaville, and let some of our own home-grown talents shine. And we hope to roll the Baristanet Book Club to many of the 6,000 known placeblogs.

Read the first chapter of "The Almost Moon" here.

Sebold read and answered questions at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square last night. We recorded her with BN's permission. Hear her:

Reading from "The Almost Moon"

Sebold Q&A

And, of course, tell us what you think of this new venture, Alice Sebold's books, your book groups or the novel on your nightstand.