The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alice SeboldEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-09-01
ISBN: 0316166685
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of The Lovely Bones
Book Review: Why did the "The Lovely Bones" become a mega-bestseller?
Summary: 4 Stars
On August 14, 2002, I attended an Alice Sebold reading. As an ex-journalist, I'm a cynic. Until that day, I had only read about five novels since 1978. Most fiction involves less research and "rules" than non-fiction.
Yet Sebold spent five years writing "The Lovely Bones." She didn't intend it to be a Great American Novel (awful cliché), a handbook about managing grief. Then astoundingly, it sold more than one million copies in less than two months. Why?
On May 8, 1981, Alice Sebold was raped, an incident that nearly destroyed her. She wrote an explicit, shocking and almost neglected book in 1999 called "Lucky." It was this knowledge, as a non-fiction reader, and not hype or current events, that drew me to "The Lovely Bones." You may not have to know this about Sebold. But if you do, what she writes in "The Lovely Bones" assumes credibility, even if you're shaking your head in bewilderment, having trouble believing what's in it.
"Hype" is a fashionably pessimistic word being used with excess to leverage what in my view are elitist comments against this book. "Hype" is a product of marketing with little relevance to quality. I agree with whomever said the following: People who give into "hype" expecting a seismic shift in their lives before turning to "page one," are doomed to disappointment. Hype doesn't give a book "legs." Word-of-mouth does.
Narrating from the dead, as Susie Salmon does in "The Lovely Bones," isn't new. In the shorthand of cinema, you can quickly point to "Sunset Boulevard (1950) and "American Beauty (1999)." She may seem wiser beyond her "years," but it isn't critical to separate adolescent vs. adult narration. "Real time" exists for the living. Susie's dead.
In "The Lovely Bones," the only thing that matters is what remains in memory. We question what we can't see, yet invisible things like oxygen, love, hate, lust, sorrow and hope are undeniable. After people die, we hear their voices, we remember their touch and the way they look. They're in the next room, watching TV, reading, whatever. Sebold captures our obsession, our "presence of mind" about the dead. This obviously resonates with people, many without the time to read 10 books per year. To denigrate fans of this book smacks of unnecessary snobbery that promotes literary "class distinctions." Conversely, sophisticated readers raise valid criticisms that wouldn't be as intense if they read the "NC-17" horrors of "Lucky."
Sebold creates an atmosphere absent of shrillness or clinically described violence. A "quick read" is not synonymous with shallowness. Expressing the intangible with sentences 10-25 words in length is near impossible. But Sebold's ability to impart abstract thoughts into simple sentences can't be dismissed. This is not a murder mystery. If it was, it'd be ordinary. This is an admittedly broad-brush story about family connections that pushes the thriller into the back seat. Splitting hairs about the plausibility of character motivations misses the big picture of "The Lovely Bones." It's not literature aspiring for greatness, filled with big words, tortuous sentences and the type of false profundities that wins awards. It's a book that achieves something greater for most writers -- a chance to weave a collection of universal themes -- through an accessible narrative that sophisticated readers as well as the greater body of people who have zero desire to read can appreciate.
Perhaps this is why disappointed readers keep using words like "overrated" or phrases like, "doesn't live up to the hype." They're comfortable with authors requiring more words leading toward a revelation that feels closer to irony and "truth" than uplift. Hence what's "familiar" seems trite.
But Sebold isn't trite. We demand logical human behavior, but there's a randomness about everything that lies ahead. Wry observations bring the ordinary to the surface without, in most cases, pretentiousness. Accusations of peddling cheap sentiment ring false because she draws upon her past to conjure up spare, abstract subtext and expressions to carry her tale. She succeeds using observational symbolism without wielding a preachy sledgehammer. Looking for religious dogma in heaven? Forget it. To Susie, "heaven" is just a shorthand for where she "is." It could be anything.
Sebold's idea is that the dead do more than just "think." There are reasons why they suddenly seem near, then disappear. She told ABC News that she doesn't think too much about heaven. But she obviously thinks a lot about the dead, especially victims of violence. Some complain her characters are "caricatures." Composites of traits we've seen in friends and ourselves makes a concept less believable? Susie's "voice," regardless of age, represents her view, however subjectively precocious, illogical or formulaic. Only one chapter goes off the tracks, proffering a scene that comes too close to "Ghost."
Is this a book for the ages? Maybe not. But I'm disturbed that a "commercial" success, even unexpected (as some forget this was), can be disproportionately punished with contempt in forums, unworthy of being labeled a "literary success." If the masses like it, hype is responsible and it must be suspect, despite glowing reviews from respected critics, many with advanced degrees in English and comparative literature.
For me, a non-fiction reader, the restrained poignancy of Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" is a surprise in the aftermath of her uncensored and harrowing memoir, "Lucky." In the hands of any writer bereft of real-life misfortune, concepts about death in a fictional tale, wouldn't have worked. It's impossible for me to ignore the author's history, despite her repeated statements that a huge gulf exists between "Lucky" and "The Lovely Bones."
Yet the success of "The Lovely Bones" proves it doesn't matter. Thirty years from now, people will still be talking about it. I'm convinced no matter how hard Sebold tries -- the legacy created by her non-fiction "Lucky" and her fictional "The Lovely Bones" -- will remain preserved AND inextricably linked. This is why she succeeds in restating, however inadvertent, the universal message that if life is defined by only what we see, our dead remain in the past. But if life is defined by our intermittent recognition of their "presence," they remain eternal.
Summary of The Lovely Bones
When we first meet 14-year-old Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. This was before milk carton photos and public service announcements, she tells us; back in 1973, when Susie mysteriously disappeared, people still believed these things didn't happen. In the sweet, untroubled voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and her own adjustment to the strange new place she finds herself. It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets. With love, longing, and a growing understanding, Susie watches her family as they cope with their grief, her father embarks on a search for the killer, her sister undertakes a feat of amazing daring, her little brother builds a fort in her honor and begin the difficult process of healing. In the hands of a brilliant novelist, this story of seemingly unbearable tragedy is transformed into a suspenseful and touching story about family, memory, love, heaven, and living.On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey.
Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."
The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years like an episode of My So-Called Afterlife. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family, and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on Earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow." Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish, and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Look Inside the Motion Picture The Lovely Bones (Paramount, 2010)
(Click on each image below to see a larger view)
 Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon |  Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon |
 Mark Wahlberg as Jack Salmon |  Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon and Director Peter Jackson |
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