The Lovely Bones
Tue., October 7, 10:53 AM
Last month I read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Was I the last person in the country to read it? I knew nothing about the book beyond the fact that every Diaryland writer I read liked it a lot.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, I won’t tell you a lot about the plot. It’s the story of a family – mother, father, son and daughter – told as observed by their older daughter, from her personal place in Heaven. Susie was murdered when she was in her early teens; I don’t remember seeing an exact age mentioned, but she was around the age of a freshman in high school.
It’s not a murder mystery in the classic sense, for Susie names her murderer early on. She’s watching him, but she spends more time watching her family as they eventually come to terms with her death; it’s especially hard because no body is found. I was struck by the love she has for all her family, so different from the adolescents of fiction who hate their parents or their siblings, who also hate each other. In addition, her parents actually love each other. Are you sure these are Americans? No hidden agendas?
Susie watches over anyone she wants to, including her friends and neighbors. Sometimes they can see her, although they generally assume they were dreaming or imagining. She also knows what everyone is thinking – including the man who killed her. Sometimes I read a book that jumps from character to character as if each one is the protagonist. That can be really annoying. The Lovely Bones jumps around that way too, but everything is tied together because it’s always Susie’s perception, even when you read the thoughts of the characters. I thought that was an interesting way of tightening up the story.
Susie’s Heaven is customized; she exists in a setting based on what she always would have wanted, like the gazebo in the yard. She interacts with others – formerly unknown to her – in Heaven, based a lot on whether they would want someone like her in their Heaven. She also meets people she knew, like her grandfather. This kind of speculative fiction would lend itself to some other what-ifs; I’d like to see some other efforts at it.
This book has a comforting feel to it. I became involved in the lives of the characters – the living ones, that is – and worried about them. Two or three times I was terribly afraid that Susie’s sister would be hurt or killed. At the same time, I continually felt that the book would have a good ending, even if it turned out to be a sad one. (They are not mutually exclusive.) To instill that kind of confidence in one’s readers suggests a real skill in storytelling.
It’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.
