Sebold”s ”Moon” takes readers to dark, ugly side

“The Almost Moon”

by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown, 291 pages, $24.99)

“The Lovely Bones” occupies a place of privilege in my living-room bookcase, not for its beauty, but for its power.

Alice Sebold’s first novel took the iconic, mute child on the milk carton and gave her a voice. The story gave readers a provocative, original way to recast the tale we tell ourselves compulsively: the kidnapped youngster, the raped girl, the murdered child.

Five years later, Sebold returns with “The Almost Moon,” a story of matricide in contemporary Philadelphia. This is a writer who likes to mingle sex and death, but here, alas, the mixture is rancid.

In the first sentence, Helen Knightly kills her 88-year-old mother, Clair, snuffing her out with a towel to the face, “until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died.’

Sebold is good at the jolt of adrenaline. Her prose has a roaring quality, bald, unsubtle: “I knelt down in front of her and looked up into her face. I hated her more than I’d ever hated anyone.’

And Clair Knightly deserves contempt. Sebold writes her as an undifferentiated monster, a woman who intentionally drops her great-grandchild and likes the smell of bleach.

The problem here is Helen, a divorced college dropout so attractive that, at age 49, she makes an improbable living as a nude model.

After the kill, she initiates sex with the son of her lifelong best friend.

Beside them in the car is Helen’s purse. Inside is Clair’s snipped-off silver braid, which Helen collected, postmortem, as a totem.

In deep contrast to Susie Salmon, the 14-year-old narrator of “The Lovely Bones,” Helen Knightly is unsympathetic in the extreme. And this book is littered with false notes, lurid dialogue and aggressive ugliness. I found myself writing “oh, please” and “trite” and “ugh” across passages in my copy.

While Sebold is capable of astute observation and some intriguing sentences, reading “The Almost Moon” is akin to swallowing bile.

That comes up, too, when an unpleasant student at the art school discovers the nude model is old enough to be his mother. He spits out, “Vomit City” – a phrase Helen repeats to her mother as she laughingly shares the encounter.

Given the deserved success of “The Lovely Bones,” hundreds of thousands of readers will pick up “The Almost Moon.”

When you are tempted, at the bookstore or the library, please remember two words:

“Vomit City.”