"'Mom's different, right?' I asked.
'I like to think that your mother is almost whole,' [my father] said. 'So much in life is about almosts, not quites.'
'Like the moon,' I said."
Helen Knightly is an artist's model nearing 50 years old. A mother of two, she is haunted by her own agoraphobic and cruel mother, Clair. Still, Helen's sense of duty is as inescapable as the moon itself.
When Clair slips into senile dementia in her old age, Helen is forced to care for her. To avoid being the kind of daughter who would "line her [mother's] way to the grave with gold when all she really wanted was to be allowed to die in her own home," Helen's profound sense of duty to care for her mentally ill mother culminates in smothering her after she loses control of her bowels.
In an uncensored, first-person narrative of the 24 hours following Clair's death, Sebold shows us Helen's lifetime of struggle as Clair's daughter. The novel turns from having a clear and sensible plot into a bizarre twist of reality. In her new freedom, Helen succumbs to whimsical desires that she otherwise never would have, leaving the reader unsure of which reality Helen exists in.
Sebold delivers this well constructed novel in a frighteningly surreal stream-of-consciousness, exposing the ugly way mental illness damages families, as well as passes through generations. However, the manner in which Helen goes about hiding her mother's murder is both dreamlike and unbelievable.
The other characters Helen interacts with are equally unrealistic, their actions impractical. Though interesting and obviously meaningful to each other, they don't translate well to the reader. Seeing them through Helen's delusional eyes, they remain flat and cryptic.
The only key the reader has to reality is her ex-husband, Jake, whom Helen calls for help after killing her mother. He seems to be the only one who can keep Helen lucid. At one point she even says, "Though I had entered the confused state that my mother often put me in, I sensed that if I watched his face and listened to his voice, I would come back to the new world that Jake and I had made. A world my mother didn't rule." Unfortunately, we don't see much of Jake and are left as confused as he is.
Ultimately, Sebold is an amazing writer whose every word is clearly intentional. She's not afraid to dig her hands into really messy material and pull her readers in, too. Her plot here is simple and at times boring, but that's not the point. Her point is revealing her characters and the lives they lived, both alone and with each other.
Surprisingly, The Almost Moon isn't as good as expected from a writer as good as Sebold. Unless the reader struggles with mother and/or mental-illness issues, there isn't much to connect with, and the ending doesn't redeem the book in any way. If anything, its abruptness hurts it. There is no closure with the characters, and nothing to tie together all the pieces Sebold intentionally leaves undone.
She does deserve credit, though, for choosing this subject matter and sticking with it. It's not pretty and not everyone can or will read it, but it can be really profound for those who do. What she leaves up to the reader is what any great writer can only try to do: challenge us to get in as far as she did, even if we can't get out.