oh Mom, poor fictional Mom

… your fictional daughter killed you and thought of putting your body in the freezer but couldn’t manage it and NYTBR reviewer Lee Siegel (among others) allegedly misunderstood a plot point in your book and now he’s supposed to feel bad?

I think not.

Let me take readers back four and a half decades to see how unbearably priggish and tragically humor-challenged and literal-minded—not to mention morally correct—Americans have become [e.a.]:

Arthur Kopit wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad while he was studying European theater [in 1961] on a postgraduate travel scholarship earned at Harvard. … As its subtitle indicated, he wrote the play as a parody— ‘‘a pseudo-classical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition‘‘—in the new, avant garde French theater of Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. It was this subgenre of the theater that, in 1961, Martin Esslin labeled the Theatre of the Absurd. …

The offbeat, dysfunctional characters—especially Madame Rosepettle and her son, Jonathan— caused some critics to complain about a lack of serious purpose in the play as well as its derivative elements, but the farcical and fanciful treatment of an overly-protective, domineering mother and her neurotic son gave New York and European audiences little pause. Most commentators could not argue with success and found the play [an] engaging spoof of everything from Tennessee Williams’s Rose Tattoo to Freudian psychology.

I haven’t read Sebold’s novel, but judging from the words of her Little, Brown publicist, Heather Fain, Siegel hit Sebold’s Achilles’ heel.

Fain (quoted in GalleyCat):

The main concern that Fain voiced when we spoke about the review yesterday was that the “mom’s in the freezer” spin might be “making light of the macabre nature of the subject matter, …”

Siegel:

Helen is, you know, cool with murdering her mother. She isn’t being arch, in case you were wondering. … Sebold may not be as dreadfully earnest as Sophocles and Dostoyevsky, but she is sincere.

Very much so. After suffocating her mother, which also involves breaking her nose, Helen tells us she “thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world rushed in.” Though she has just killed her mother, Helen is a generous person. She never forgets that other people are suffering and dying too.

Surely the moral conundrum is the murder itself and not what the fictional daughter does with her fictional mother’s body after the murder. But  publicist Fain is doing what she’s supposed to do: she deflects criticism away from her trying-to-have-it-both-ways author and tries to place blame on the shoulders of that author’s righteous critics.

However, Siegel is calling bullshit precisely on Sebold’s attempt to be both deliciously transgressive and morally serious:

Sebold is mining a popular and lucrative vein in contemporary fiction: peg your book to some heartrending tragedy or act of violence and you’re almost sure to be greeted with moral seriousness, soft reviews and brisk sales.

Moral seriousness is not about your subject matter. It’s about how you handle your subject matter.