I finished Alice Sebold’s book, The Lovely Bones, last night. It was 4:14am when I finally turned the last page, and then another ten minutes of grabbing Kleenex before I could even think about sleep. I could tell Greg that the reason he slept so poorly was because of the dog farting, but it was more likely my tossing and turning, trying to manage the paperback and the unwieldy book light, unwilling to just put them both down and get some rest.
Susie Salmon (“like the fish”) is the narrator of this odd and captivating story. In the second sentence we find out she’s dead and narrating from heaven, and in the first chapter we are witness to her rape and murder at the hands of a neighbor in the winter of 1973. It’s a scene brutal in its elements and almost familiar if you watch the news, but told with such a soft clarity, details planted like signposts, not beaten over your head.
…and, as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth surrounding us smelled like what it was, moist dirt, where worms and animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.
Of course, she didn’t live. I hated that scene because it was done so well, and the violence clung to everything afterward, like a stench the story couldn’t put out. But that’s exactly what makes the book so powerful. What happens to a family after a daughter is lost to murder?
Susie’s experience of heaven was a new one for me, a way of explaining the afterlife that I hadn’t seen before. I like it when writers work on what life is like after death, I think my favorite is still Connie Willis’s book, Passage. Alice Sebold’s heaven is a place where there’s still room for personal growth. Susie finds that it’s built personally for her, a heaven made up of familiar places and objects, but with a power that slowly unfolds. She discovers she can control her environment by what she chooses to think about, elements and even people changing as she processes her own grief. She can also watch scenes from her past, and she can see everything that’s happening on earth.
She watches her family and friends deal with the aftermath of her death, and we spend a lot of time tracing everyone’s turmoil at the lack of evidence. We know who the murderer is, Susie’s dad is suspicious at first and sure of it later, but there is no proof. The heart of the story centers on how this tension affects Susie’s experiences in heaven, and the lives and feelings of everyone connected to her over the course of several years.
I kept waiting for this to turn into a murder mystery, I thought the point must be about how Mr. Harvey is taken down for this crime, and I realized later that I got this impression from watching the trailers for the movie based on the book. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that if you’re anything like me and your fixed preconceptions can make or break a story, don’t read this as a murder mystery, because it isn’t. It’s the story of the family, and it’s a little bit about the man who kills Susie, but most of all it’s about Susie’s transition from living to dead.
Saying it’s about “letting go” is accurate but not nearly interesting enough to describe what happens and how everyone ends up in the end. It’s more than letting go, it’s very much about how entangled we all are, and how the people that love us are a part of us, just as we’re a part of them. How does that change when we die?
I got some email today, for a local theater’s customer club members. The Lovely Bones is playing at a cheap-seats theater close by, so I roped Jason into taking me. We leave in a few minutes. The movie is directed by Peter Jackson, and I’m so curious to see what he did. I can’t imagine making this into a movie, but then I couldn’t imagine trying to get Lord of the Rings into a movie either, and Jackson did that excellently. We’ll see!
I could not get past the first few pages of this. I have bad enough nightmares from hearing about things like the Polly Klaas case… why add more child-death imagery to what’s already running around in my head? I could handle it before I had kids… but now I know better. Movies are even worse. Maybe I’m just hypersensitive or something, but it just seems that I can better spend my already-tiny number of reading hours on things that will feel uplifting instead of gut-wrenching. I have to wonder… how does child-endangerment and -loss issues like this affect your anxiety? How are you able to box this kind of thing off into your “entertainment” brain-compartment, and not paste your daughter’s face onto the main character? I’d really like to know… sometimes this level of empathy can feel paralyzing, because it certainly locks me out of a goodly amount of popular culture today.
I can do it because I can separate a novel and the ideas, metaphors and symbolism within it from something like FOX news. The first few pages of The Love Bones is, yes, hard to read because of her death scene. However, to fixate on that is to miss the much larger picture of what the story is about. I don’t watch Dateline NBC or 60 Minutes because of exactly the crap you’re talking about. You wind up an hour later with no real information, just a manipulative, salacious and fearful story about child abuse or neglect, that didn’t help you understand the world or the issue any better, and makes you afraid to walk out your own front door.
Sebold’s novel isn’t Dateline NBC, and her intent isn’t to have the reader wallowing in the gritty reality of murder, but instead to explore the interconnectedness of a child to her community, to her family, to peoples she’s never known, and for us to ponder that working in our own lives, as well as to, yes, explore the process of grief. It is uplifting, not gut-wrenching. If you can’t get past the first few pages to appreciate the rest of it, and see the larger story and intent, well yeah, that’s empathy that’s hardly useful for more than crippling you with fear. Turning away from something isn’t empathy, anyway. Which isn’t to imply you have to read everything that goes past (I certainly don’t), but all things considered this is the least sensationalistic fiction about a crime that I’ve ever read. If I’d tossed it after the first few pages, I would have missed some pretty important insights into myself. Read the Amazon reviews, especially the one about the mom who lost her son – I have a whole lot more empathy for her after reading this book.
You ask me how child endangerment and loss issues affect my anxiety – that’s a pretty broad question. I specifically don’t watch or read sensationalistic accounts of any crime (adult or child) because I get nothing out of it but anxiety. If a crime happens that I want to know the details of, I’ll try to find the most straightforward and unembellished account of it I can find, but I don’t spend days reading things over and over, and I avoid television news like the plague.
But again – a novel is not the news, and to say this book is just about the murder of a child is a sadly narrow summary. How can you read Greek myths, or even just history? At what point do you avoid growth or knowledge out of anxiety?