The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, is a book that you will not want to put down. This thoroughly enjoyable novel tells us a story in an unusual way. It is not just another mystery novel, although there is a mystery: it is not a whodunit either, even though there is a murder. We find out that a neighbour rapes and murders fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon in the second sentence of the novel. We know what happened to Susie; we know who killed her. We have all of the details that we need to solve her disappearance, but that is not the story that Sebold tells. The novel is about how Susie's family and friends live through the tragedy and how they are changed by her disappearance. Sebold could have wallowed in the gory details of the rape and murder, but she presents just enough detail for us to get the sense of tragedy that surrounds the end of Susie's life.
Susie ends up in heaven that most resembles the high school that she was to attend. It is heaven custom designed for her; it is school with fashion magazines and peppermint-stick ice cream, but no teachers. Her guide, Franny, who was a social worker in life, gets her heavenly reward by helping new arrivals adjust. Sebold uses Susie's being in heaven as a way to keep her in the story and to let us know everything that is happening and yet keep us in the dark. Susie matures in heaven as she watches her family and the changes that they go through after her death. Time becomes less important to her as the years go by. She becomes more detached from her old life and gradually accepts her death and her loss. Susie feels her loss of innocence and the loss of her life itself. She also feels a sense of loss at not being able to help her father and the police find her killer. She also realizes that she is not quite in heaven yet and will not get there until she accepts her death and leaves life to the living. Some people may object to Sebold's depiction of heaven. There is no presence of God or anything religious in Susie's heaven. It is not a religious book, and the heaven in it, is what a fourteen year old might imagine it to be.
The theme of loss is a common thread and is which occurs several times in the book. There is a sub-plot of Susie's mother, Abigail Salmon's loss; she lost her career after an unexpected pregnancy interrupted her work. She stayed home to make cookies and to be a mother, but she lost herself in the process. After Susie's death, she has an affair and loses herself again. This time her family also loses her when she leaves and finds herself a new, albeit, somewhat empty life. The theme of loss continues with Jack Salmon, who is haunted by his daughter's disappearance. He is less effective at work as he becomes obsessed by the task of finding his daughter's killer and forgets about his two living children.
Katherine Bouton who reviewed The Lovely Bones in the New York Times says that Sebold "takes the stuff of neighborhood tragedy -- the unexplained disappearance of a child, the shattered family alone with its grief -- and turns it into literature." Laura Miller in her review in Salon.com agrees that "this novel is decidedly literary. But it's also not bleak after the fashion of very "high" literary fiction." The climax of the book may be a bit hard to believe, but if you believe that someone can interact with and follow her family and friends for several years after her death, then it is possible. At some points, Sebold's literature does become fanciful, but it remains literature.
The title comes from a passage near the end of the book. Sebold was raped as a freshman several years before she wrote The Lovely Bones. This passage may reflect her loss of a part of herself after the rape. It may also have come from the rebuilding that she did. There is a parallel rebuilding of lives in The Lovely Bones.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.
The loss of a daughter, sister or friend is profound. We mourn the death of any child; however, we mourn the sexual assault and loss of innocence almost as much. When it is compounded by the sudden disappearance of a child, it is hard to fathom the depth of anguish that family and close friends can experience. Sebold opens a window that casts a ray of light on the shadows and gives us a glimpse of that suffering and of the rebuilding that is possible.
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