By Alice Sebold
Little Brown, 328 pages
One of the surprise literary sensations this year was a novel told from the point of view of a murdered teenage girl from somewhere up in heaven. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones represents possibly a new publishing genre – a kind of holistic spiritual literature that also serves as a best-selling page-turner. If Oprah still had a book club, this would be on it.
We follow the story through the eyes, memories and experiences of Susie Salmon, a 13-year-old girl who is abducted, raped and murdered by Mr. Harvey, a strange neighbor who builds doll houses. She tells us this from heaven, or her form of heaven – a kind of transitory zone where recent arrivals dwell among their favorite locales, hear their favorite music, eat their favorite foods. It’s not the final version of heaven, but it helps newcomers like Susie Salmon sneak a peek at life back on Earth. But their thoughts in heaven are decidedly Earthbound:
I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven isn’t perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.
While things go awfully bad for Susie on Earth – lured into a creepy neighbor’s basement with promises of Coca-Cola, only to be killed, dismembered, her remains buried inside a steel safe submerged in a sinkhole – we learn that things are never the same for Susie’s family, either. Brokenness and disconnection, anger and frustration, whether to bury Susie’s memory or leave it lying around the house like a curse – these are the forces that slowly gnaw apart the Salmon family, including husband Jack, younger sister Lindsey, kid brother Buckley and wandering wife Abigail.
Standing off in the wings of heaven like a Frank Capra character, Susie observes her family’s pain, the movements of her killer (a disturbingly effective portrait of modern evil), and the way the lives of friends and strangers are touched and intertwined by her sudden death.
Susie goes even further. She tries to communicate with her family, clues them in to her killer’s identity, makes the pain in their lives go away. Whether appearing as a whispery presence in the cornfield where she was murdered, or as a thousand fleeting images in the pieces of broken glass on a kitchen floor, Susie strives to remain present in the lives of the Salmon family. Her tenacious hold on her father, in particular, puts a strain on wife Abigail, who finds she must leave her life behind in order to find it again.
As you might imagine, the threads of these lives come to unravel, but they’re eventually brought together by book’s end. Is it too neat? Who’s to say. In this kind of book, spiritual comfort is more important than plausibility. Even the desire for revenge in The Lovely Bones simply drifts away, replaced by a sad sort of pity for Mr. Harvey.
The thing that makes The Lovely Bones maybe a little suspect and creepy is the way it wraps a life-affirming message about family and eternal bonds inside a skillful meditation on a serial killer’s habits. Thus, as readers, we get to be voyeurs of the horrific, while at the same time finding ourselves tenderly swaddled in the book’s uplifting message: That it’s just as important for those in heaven to relinquish Earth as it is for those on Earth to let go of the departed.
By setting her story in 1973, Sebold wisely avoids questions of why Susie would go anywhere near a pervy neighbor offering her a Coke: People just didn’t know any better back then. This device also serves to encase Susie in a time capsule – much like the ships-in-a-bottle she used to make with her father while she was alive – lending her thoughts on mortality and eternity added poignance.
Sebold’s prose is spare, almost translucent and often poetic as it traces the migration of Susie’s soul from her own personal heaven to something even grander. There is the questionable inclusion of Abigail’s forbidden fling with the town’s investigating detective (so many women writers do this), as well as Susie’s walk-in tryst with the first boy she ever kissed before her untimely death (she has sex with the guy by "borrowing" the body of a mystical girl named Ruth). That was kind of weird.
And the metaphor of the title – "the lovely bones" – turns out to be, not the discovery of Susie’s remains which would bring her family closure as you might expect, but Susie’s own discovery:
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 that 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 body had been my life.
But at a time when writers and artists are trying to reconnect with sincerity, a post-9/11 world where cynicism just doesn’t cut it anymore, The Lovely Bones is an okay tonic for the soul. Like Pay It Forward, another spiritual-minded novel with a lovely idea at its heart (it even shares that book’s baby-blue cover scheme), Sebold’s story connects rather than divides readers. It dares to believe in a world where perspective is all people need in order to understand the complex mysteries and tragedies that make up our lives. This perspective might also be called wisdom.