kchowell's Full Review: Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones
This summer hasn’t been the best for me in terms of summer reading. I kicked things off with the interesting and slightly stomach turning (but not sufficiently disturbing to convince me to shun beef) Fast Food Nation, then moved on to Melanie Rae Thon’s lovely but somewhat dissatisfying Sweet Hearts. I had to wade through several other less than inspiring titles before I finally set aside the craptacular The Nanny Diaries and picked up the best book that I’ve read this summer, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.
In her debut novel, Ms Sebold gives fourteen year-old Susie Salmon a chance to tell the story of her life. In the first chapter, using a simple language and a voice that mingles straightforward honesty, the optimism of youth, and just the right amount of flippant humor, Susie describes many aspects of her life… the poetry quote that she chose for her junior high yearbook primarily on the basis that it would mark her as both rebellious and literary; her extreme inability to succeed in home ec class; her father’s endearing but annoying habit of telling embarrassing childhood stories; and her budding interest in a fellow classmate named Ray, who possesses soulful brown eyes and a seductive British accent. But for the most part, Susie spends the first chapter of The Lovely Bones describing her death, which happened on December sixth, 1973, when her neighbor, Mr. Harvey, raped and murdered her in an underground cellar in a cornfield near her home.
When I ran across an early review of The Lovely Bones a few weeks ago, I couldn’t get my mind past the fact that it simply had to be depressing, because how could a story of a murdered girl perched in heaven, watching her family fall to pieces in the aftermath of her death not be a colossal downer, and thus completely not enjoyable summer reading? However, I changed my mind after I heard Maureen Corrigan’s review of the novel on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross on the Fourth of July. She admitted to having the same reservations that I had prior to reading the novel, but ended up having nothing but praise for the story. So I picked up a copy shortly thereafter.
It may be difficult to believe that The Lovely Bones isn’t an emotion-wringing tear-jerker, but truly, it isn’t. Although Susie’s description of her untimely end is truly disturbing, and it is the catalyst for the rest of the story, it’s only a part of the tale that Susie wants to tell. And the story that she tells is well-crafted, comforting and intriguing… I read it in one sitting, and then immediately re-read it in shorter bursts. As Susie describes in the first chapter, her murder doesn’t disturb her nearly as much as her family’s reaction to it does:
But by the time the Gilberts' dog found my elbow three days later and brought it home with a telling corn husk attached to it, Mr. Harvey had closed it [the bunker he’d built] up. I was in transit during this. I didn't get to see him sweat it out, remove the wood reinforcement, bag any evidence along with my body parts, except that elbow. By the time I popped up with enough wherewithal to look down at the goings-on on Earth, I was more concerned with my family than anything else.
My mother sat on a hard chair by the front door with her mouth open. Her pale face paler than I had ever seen it. Her blue eyes staring. My father was driven into motion. He wanted to know details and to comb the cornfield along with the cops. I still thank God for a small detective named Len Fenerman. He assigned two uniforms to take my dad into town and have him point out all the places I'd hung out with my friends. The uniforms kept my dad busy in one mall for the whole first day. No one had told Lindsey, who was thirteen and would have been old enough, or Buckley, who was four and would, to be honest, never fully understand.
In Susie, Ms Sebold has created one of the most realistic teen narrators that I’ve encountered in years. It’s all the more impressive that Sebold has managed to mold such a complex character whose conflicting responses to what she sees from heaven consistently ring true. Even as she’s describing the scene in which Mr. Harvey lures her into his secret bunker, she cringes in full teen embarrassment at her use of the inadequate word “neato” to describe the lair that he created expressly for rape and murder. Some of the best passages in the novel involve Susie as she watches her younger sister Lindsey from heaven; at first she’s protective of Lindsey and the scrutiny that she is subjected to as the sister of the dead girl, but gradually, Susie begins to feel conflicting tugs of sisterly admiration and twinges of jealousy as Lindsey experiences life and develops into a strong and lovely young woman. While she’s proud of her sister and the path that Lindsey chooses, Susie can’t help but be irked that Lindsey gets the one thing that Susie wanted most of all right before she died… the chance to grow up.
Susie’s unfulfilled desires on earth are reflected in the heaven she finds herself living in, the descriptions of which are one of my favorite things about the novel. In The Lovely Bones, heaven is custom-built for each person, with each person’s heaven overlapping with someone else’s when the two people’s desires are aligned. Susie spends most of her days in heaven in a world that looks like a suburban northeast high school, not unlike the one that she was looking so forward to attending while she was still on earth. It’s an idealized rendering of heaven-as-high-school (and far from the hell that most people who have lived through high school tend to view it), with no teachers, fashion magazines as textbooks, and a swingset, a childhood comfort that wouldn’t usually have a place on a high school property. But her high school heaven is not the only heaven. As Susie describes it:
After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine --- didn’t duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside.
As Susie observes her family deteriorating on earth, she forms a family of friends in her heaven.
A few days after her arrival, Susie befriends a girl of about her age named Holly, who died on the same day that Susie died. The pair are then taken under the wing of Franny, a murdered social worker who acts as a counselor and guide to the girls as they struggle with missing their families and wanting to grow up, which is one of the few things that they can’t have in heaven. These relationships, however, are not sufficient to satisfy her, and she finds herself spending much of her time watching Earth, and wishing that she could ease the pain of the people that were part of her life.
While Susie finds comfort in peppermint stick ice cream and her new friendships in heaven, she’s helpless as her family begins to fracture under the weight of grief. Her four year-old brother Buckley doesn’t understand the pain he causes as he repeatedly asks after Susie, and he is only able to make sense of her absence when it’s compared to a missing piece of a board game. Lindsey, who is only slightly younger than Susie, responds by closing herself off emotionally. It’s Susie’s parents whose reactions are the most heartbreaking; her mother can only survive by cutting herself off from those she should be closest to, and her father, who is the best equipped emotionally to deal with the murder, finds himself often overcome with a desire for revenge that he’s unable to act upon.
In addition to her immediate family, Susie follows the lives of several minor characters, including a classmate named Ruth, her saucy grandmother, the detective in charge of her murder investigation, her almost-boyfriend Ray Singh, and even serial killer Mr. Harvey. All of the minor characters are well-crafted and add something to the novel. Alice Sebold has created a tightly-written first novel, in which every minor character seems truly alive, and fits precisely into the narrative.
I absolutely loved this book, and found it completely captivating. It’s suspenseful, hopeful and funny – Susie has a great sense of humor, and even if she can’t grow up, she is allowed to grow, and to gradually understand and respect the methods that her family employs as they grieve.
I will caution that there are more than a few tear-jerking moments (and I generally don’t get too emotional while reading)… I actually had to set the book down for a bit after reading a chapter that ends with Susie being joined in heaven by an old companion who is so excited to see her that he knocks her down with enthusiasm. I dare you not to well up when you reach the same point in the novel. While I did find myself occasionally reaching for a handkerchief, I never felt as if I had been unfairly manipulated. Every tearful moment is exactly what it should be for the novel to be successful, just as every happy moment feels precisely right.
What? You're still sitting here? Go find a copy of this book!
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