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Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon is missing. The police scour nearby cornfields until a gruesome discovery forces the community to accept that Susie is dead, and that the case has reached a dead end. Her surviving family begins to crack under the pressure. This summary sounds typical to any fan of the crime novel, but The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is no typical crime novel. For one thing, there is Susie, who narrates the story of her own murder and its aftermath from the lofty vantage point of heaven. This is not a stereotypical Christian heaven with harps and angels nor a dry-ice intensive Hollywood heaven. Susie's heaven resembles the high school that she never got to attend. It comes complete with a best friend she never had in life, and a postmortal "intake counselor" - a former social worker, it turns out, whose hard work went unappreciated on earth. Heaven offers infinite possibilities, but Susie is much more interested in watching the progress of those she left behind: her family, her schoolmates, even her killer. Although Susie is occasionally able to "push on the In-Between" and make her presence felt on earth, she spends most of the book watching. She can observe the actions of the living and she can read their thoughts, but she cannot participate or feel anything herself. On earth, Susie's family suffers as they continue to grieve for their dead child. Meanwhile Susie's progress in heaven moves slowly as she continues to monitor her family. This creates an interesting irony, as the dead soul's longing for earth mirrors the grief that the living feel for the dead. It is not only Susie's narration that distinguishes The Lovely Bones from most crime novels. Although Susie's murder is central to the book, the plot does not follow the investigation of the crime. Sebold introduces an earnest, driven police detective of a type we all recognize. Susie's father and sister make a few haphazard attempts to find evidence and get back at the killer. However, neither mystery nor revenge keeps the book moving forward. There's nothing wrong with this per se; nobody claims that The Lovely Bones is meant to be a crime novel. However, since I'm reviewing this book for a predominantly mystery-oriented site, it is worth mentioning that readers should not expect the crime's investigation and resolution to be the "point" of the book. So if crime doesn't lie at the center of The Lovely Bones, what does? In essence, Sebold's book is an exploration of the grieving process. It is probably not an accident that The Lovely Bones has become a bestseller at a time when our nation has particular cause to ponder the meaning and manifestations of grief. Millions of readers have already found great comfort in its pages, with their promise that loss and death are not the end. Given the chord that this book has struck in so many, I wanted to like The Lovely Bones a lot more than I ultimately did. The first several chapters, which recount Susie's murder and her arrival in heaven, are riveting. The ending, which leaves all pretense of realism behind, fulfills the magical promise of the early descriptions of heaven. However, in the middle section - which takes up most of the book - Susie simply reports the words and actions that she observes. Her occasional comments on the events become more distracting than revealing. The total effect is the impression that a haunting ghost story was cracked open and a realistic novel sandwiched in the middle. The structural weakness would give me less trouble if the earthbound part of the novel were more interesting. The plot is thin to nonexistent, which wouldn't be a big deal if the characters drove the story. Sebold sketches her characters meticulously, often with beautiful detail, yet they rarely grow into anything more than sketches. Susie's sister Lindsey - a younger sister who becomes an "older sister" over the course of the book - mocks the teachers who try to comfort her, displaying all the toughness of a Western hero, "a man who, after he shot his gun, raised the pistol to his lips and blew air across the opening." This is a great moment of characterization, yet we never see the metaphor, or this aspect of her character, again. The novel is full of these sorts of false starts. Susie's mother takes several extreme actions that seem completely unmotivated, as if working her way at random through every clichÈ about grieving mothers. It isn't until page 266 that Susie casually tells us that her mother believes she is being punished for never wanting children. This seems like an extraordinary motivation, yet it is barely hinted at before this passage and never mentioned again. Meanwhile the novel's best characters - Susie's almost boyfriend Ray, Ray's wise but unhappy mother, and a ghost-obsessed schoolgirl named Ruth - drop out of the book almost entirely before resurfacing for the climax. Although I got bogged down in the middle, I was glad that I read to the end of The Lovely Bones. The book left me with a feeling, transcending character and plot, that Alice Sebold really has something to say about grief and loss. Many writers have observed the effect that the death of a child has on the surviving parents, but few have gotten at the reasons as sharply as this: "Before they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching to borrow from the stronger one's strength." Such powerful observations of emotional truth may linger in the reader's memory long after the details of character and plot have faded.
Reviewed by Caroline Pruett, September 2002
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