Writer Unboxed

Lots of industry news this week. First, the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize was announced: Anne Enright, Irish author, has come away with top honors. There are two interesting charity events taking place: All About Romance is holding an auction to benefit victims of Katrina and a bunch of renowned children’s book illustrators are auctioning off hand-painted snowflakes to benefit the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Go forth and bid.

And there’s plenty more to read about on the Google Notebook page (HERE), including who’s a new agent in town, Harlequin’s partnership with Audible (and HarperOne’s union with MTV?), new hope for Triskelion’s adrift authors, and a winner for Project Publish.

But what I’d really like to chat about today is Alice Sebold, who’s getting some serious flack over her latest book, The Almost Moon, her first novel since her mega-best-selling hit The Lovely Bones. Sebold’s Moon has become the talk of the industry, and not for the right reasons. It’s being labeled too gritty. Too gross. Too unkind. Too genre confused. With a heroine that’s too over the top, that no one will be able to identify with. And though I have yet to read Sebold’s novel, I’m feeling a little twitchy on her behalf. Because don’t all these “toos” feel like a box? Too much like the world’s critics were expecting Lovely Bones 2 and are now kvetching because they didn’t get it?

Here, a clip from USA Today:

It was never going to be easy for Sebold to follow The Lovely Bones, her nearly letter-perfect 2002 novel narrated from heaven by a girl who is murdered by a serial killer.

Now Sebold strays into Stephen King-meets-Mommie Dearest territory with every boomer’s supposed worst nightmare: A 49-year-old divorcée snaps after her elderly mother “soils” herself.

It’s not giving anything away to reveal that Helen Knightly smothers her mother, who is 88 and has dementia. Sebold’s first sentence: “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”

Sure, it’s a grabber of an opener. And Moon is so antic, so over the top that you keep turning the pages in a frenzy of disbelief. By the time Helen has had sex with her best friend’s 30-year-old son, stripped down to model for an art class and plotted with her ex-husband to pin her mother’s murder on a handyman, you’ll be choking on your popcorn.

Is there a literary prize for most cringe-worthy sentence in a single work of fiction?

Several nominations are then listed, all taken from Sebold’s work.

And here, an outtake from an interview between NPR’s Terry Gross and Sebold (*which is well worth listening to, btw).

Terry Gross: Your book is in some ways kind of like a thriller, because it starts with a murder, then Helen has to figure out what to do with the body, and then there’s all kinds of consequences and you don’t know if she’s going to be discovered, if she’s going to try to cover up the crime…you just don’t know what’s going to happen. But at the same time, a lot of the novel is what’s going on in Helen’s mind, what she’s thinking, what her memories are, the kind of mental associations she’s going through in the 24 hours that the novel takes place. And I think that’s what makes it such a kind of literary work because it’s so reflective, even though if you were to just look at the plot it’s a thriller. Do you feel like you’re combining two genres in a way?

Alice Sebold: I think so. I mean, there’s just something for me that is freaking out about how ever more split—and I know it’s for the sake of marketing and the way the world works now–ever more split we are with the way books are shelved and formatted, the way their covers look different, all of that. But I want a muscular book that keeps me reading and makes me think and is written in a way that respects my intelligence. And maybe that’s too long to put on a genre card in a book store, but that’s what I want to read and that’s what I’m trying to write. Something propulsive that’s driven by the brain as much as it’s driven by the physical actions of the characters. So it’s a combo pack that I’m trying to work with.

I think the Sebold issue raises interesting questions for all of us. Are we under obligation to produce books of the same flavor if we’ve had success with “chunky chocolate mocha mint,” for example? Are we obligated to aim for a short blurb on a genre card, even if that’s not the story we want to write? Or are we only obligated if we intend to please the critics and sell a lot of books? If we want to play it safe?

I’m looking at these issues without having read her work, so I’d like to hear from those of you who have. What did you think of the book? What do you think of these issues?

And don’t forget to check out this week’s Google Notebook offerings.

Write on, all!

Therese Walsh co-founded Writer Unboxed in 2006. Her debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, sold to Random House in a two-book deal in 2008, was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, and was a Target Breakout Book in 2010. She's never been published with a lit magazine, but LOST's Carlton Cuse liked her haiku best on Twitter, and that made her pretty happy.

Therese Walsh

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