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:
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.
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Comments (17)
Sounds like a good idea. Not too sure about Jay McInerney, however. How about Ian Rankin? Either as a reviewer or as an author under review?
On my own "nightstand," "Westward To Laughter" by Colin MacInnes, a black power inversion of adventure books like "Treasure Island" and those of Captain Marryat; I'm using it as a "text" in a kind of essay-writing course for someone else. And two novels by Nicholas Mosley, something of a chore at times but seriously concerned with faith and morality (unlike, say, Jay McInerney). Rereading Isabel Colegate's "The Deceits of Time" because I went to one of those Lindbergh trial recreations and it reminded me just how much I find the whole Lindbergh family wheezing fascists and/or lame apologists for them. I just finished two books on the brothers Bulger, which serve as a valuable corrective to the Jersey-centric fallacy that we have the market cornered on either organized crime or political corruption.
Good luck with this one.
I've read both Lovely Bones and Lucky (Sebold's own story of being raped). Her prose really gets under your skin.
I too read her first two books, and now after reading the synopsis of the third, wonder if Ms Sebold is deeply disturbed. Rape, murder and estrangement prevail. I hope she has found therapy in writing, but I can't help but think her mind hovers in a very dark place. Not too healthy.
All right, free access to current fiction bestsellers! (Or at least to the first chapter thereof.) It's just too bad that Mr. McInerny cautions us that the book is slow to catch fire. And I look forward to a book group with little or no discussion about the participants' children's teachers. I hope this online book group works out. (Now, how do I access that book...?)
Feel free to comment online and also to come to Watchung Booksellers on Thursday, Nov. 8, where I'll be leading a discussion on the book. So it will be virtual and real.
I started reading it last night, and it's like rubbernecking a serious accident. Lurid, but fascinating.
I find that Mr. McInerny's books are also slow to catch fire. Tried the fireplace, no good. We have an industrial-size furnace here at work, maybe that'll do the trick. Lighter fluid, anyone?
A ragged old fraternity cheer for Miss Martta's apt dismissal of Jay McInerney!
Also, whatever happened to those book reviews the Baristas used to run by Neil Baldwin?
The "home-grown talents" reference does bother me. Try as I do with them, I have yet to read a local Baristaville author with even one-tenth the grabbing power of, say, Mickey Spillane. It's as if they all just write for a very narrow concept of "each other." (And do you really want someone like Christopher Hitchens eviscerating this crowd?)
LOL. I am not saying he can't write, Cathar. His work is amusing, at best, but I don't think he's in the same league as George Plimpton, J.D. Salinger, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, etc. In the 1980s, he--along with a bunch of other fly-by-night authors from that period--was touted as the next great American author, a la Fitzgerald. No. Way.
I am saying he can't write, Miss Martta (and I thought I was agreeing with you). He is a loathsome pecksniffian night creature, a creation more of the gossip columns than from the halls of literature. I see him as what Dorian Gray would be like if he'd written novels. If he is what passes for a "serious" writer these days, then it's back to "Angry Beavers" reruns on Nicktoons for me.
"...a creation more of the gossip columns than from the halls of literature."
Yes! He was New York's It Boy back then. I wonder if he would have been as successful if he was not as good-looking, outgoing, etc.
He's good looking?
He was when he was younger. He dated Marla Hanson for awhile, too.
This seems like a worthy project, and I wish you the best of luck with it, but it sounds a bit highbrow for Baristanet. Somehow I can't see literary soirees with the likes of Goober and lasermike (or me for that matter--I haven't read a book in years). On the other hand, perhaps if you create the medium new readers will come.
Now we're bashing McInerny?
How trite.
Let's beat up on SUV drivers instead.
I love the idea of the book club, but, after reading at least three reviews of Ms. Sebold's book (not counting Mr. McInerny's), have absolutely NO desire to read this one.
I am having a hard time finishing the book. I have to agree with the reviews I have read.
For all of you bookclub lovers, there is a social networking site called goodreads.com - I highly recommend it. There is even a Montclair area club (small) on it! The site is neat because it allows you to not only catalog your books online but export them to an xls file!