It's not every day that you see a critic get as patently angry at the work he is reviewing as Lee Siegel gets at Alice Sebold's new novel. After a comparatively temperate wind-up, during which you just wonder a lot whether Siegel is making fun of Sebold, or whether he is making fun of readers who like Sebold, he lets her have it:

If you welcome the unreal disjunction between killing your mother and reflecting afterward how lucky you are compared with the children of the dead, "uncared for" mothers in Rwanda and Afghanistan, then this book will make you clap your hands with joy. If you find the idea that mothers shape their children's "whole" lives original rather than simultaneously banal and puerilely overstated, then Barnes & Noble, here you come! This novel is so morally, emotionally and intellectually incoherent that it's bound to become a best seller.

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. Whether it's because the American novel is becoming Hollywoodized, or because the disjunctive tone and disassociated content of the news have numbed us to disjunctive and disassociated fiction, or because we're losing the capacity to imagine other people's pain, writing callously and sunnily and profitably about tragedy is now an established American genre.

Sebold sashays blithely from ludicrous descriptions of sex (I bit my lip. I writhed ... and hoped that no one's God was watching") to ridiculous shifts in tone ("Her voice hit the still house with its usual force factor") to "we're sorry but we cannot offer you any M.F.A. funding for next year"-type sentences ("I felt the tears in my eyes and knew they would fall"). There's no plot in this novel. It's all free disassociation.

"The Almost Moon" is really like one very long MySpace page. Sebold isn't imagining people and events; she's just making stuff up as she goes along. After Helen murders her mother, she asks her ex-husband, a sexy artist, to come all the way from Southern California to suburban Philadelphia to help her. ("He had aged in a good way. The way wiry men who seem unconcerned with their appearance but who have deep habitual hygiene and exercise habits age.") She tells him what happened, and they have the following exchange: "'What did you think putting her in the freezer would achieve?' 'I don't know,' I said. I could feel the shelf I kept the laundry supplies on gouging into my back. 'I don’t know.'"

You find yourself struggling simultaneously with the juvenile contrivance of Mom in the freezer, the icy cynicism of such a conceit and the utter unreality of the conversation. It's like having the Marx brothers chase Margaret Dumont around your cerebellum.

There's no light at the end of Sebold’s bouncy tunnel vision. After the freezer moment with her former hubby, Jake, the two share a comic moment over Helen's memory of her psychotherapist and why he had been so bad: "'His shelves were full of I. B. Singer, and the statues on his tables were that lost-wax Holocaust style. Lots of dismembered trunks of tortured people wrapped in barbed wire and mounted on poles. I would be talking about my mother, only to look up and see a legless, armless torso reaching out for me.' Jake laughed."

Even the schlockiest popular novels of yore -- "By Love Possessed," "Marjorie Morningstar," "The Chosen" -- had accurate, if mundane, social and psychological perceptions. Danielle Steel has that. You and I have that! It's beyond comprehension that Sebold can publish a novel pretending to reflect reality that's so severed from reality.

The source of her vacuum-packed perceptions is perhaps an impenetrable moral narcissism--not for nothing does Helen the art-school model compare herself to Virginia Woolf and Maria Tsvetaeva, two legendary literary suicides. So it will come as no surprise that Helen's murder of her mother turns out to be more mercy killing than outright homicide. But Helen also extinguishes her mother's life because she can't bear the burden of caring for her any longer: "I was determined now to explain what I could to my children and to carry the shame of my mistakes." For heaven's sake.

Well, don't worry, Helen. To paraphrase the old joke, "Oedipus, shmedipus, as long as they love their mother." The real shame is that "Reading Alice Sebold" isn't listed in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." After you've finished this insult to the lumber industry, your health care provider won't cover your search for a cure

I have not read Sebold's new book, but I did read The Lovely Bones, and it did strike me as a type of moral porn (murdered girl's ambient spirit is the narrator; plot consists of her watching her family cope after she's died). But, as Siegel notes, this sort of thing is bound for bestseller lists these days. And to the extent that it's readers who make Sebold into the minor industry that she is, that forked tone early on in the review--in which it's unclear whether Seigel is having problems with Sebold or with Sebold's prospective readers--resolves itself. As angry as Seigel is with Sebold's book, he's fully aware that the book is a symptom of a much broader problem -- and that, as the author of a review so hilariously appalled that it is bound to drive readers to the book, he's a part of that problem, too.