The Lovely Bones
After giving three talks in three days in California, which were great fun and very stimulating, I thought I was entitled to a little down time. So I bought a novel for my four hour flight from San Francisco to Cincinnati: The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold.
But reading it wasn’t exactly “down time.” It’s got an original, and unsettling, plot: a young teenage girl is brutally murdered, and watches over her family–and her killer–from “her heaven.” It’s just been made into a movie.
I liked the book –but found the voice of the protagonist not really to be the voice of a fourteen year old girl, but of an adult woman. It was set in 1973, so clearly the young girl grew up–and grew up, it seems, in “her heaven.”–apart from a brief jaunt back on earth. What she needed to deal with, in part, was the way in which she was wrenched from earth–and her entirely just anger at it. She needed, somehow, to let go, to move into the “wide, wide heaven.”
The book has been criticized by some for not having God in it. I don’t know if there’s a God or not in the novel-the protagonist could be in some sort of antechamber, even in the wide, wide, heaven. Very few books, it seem to me, deal with the shape of the afterlife–I give the author credit for that. She raises, without fully grappling with, the interesting questions of embodiment after death and the possibility of growth and maturation even in the next life.
Anyone else read it?
I read the book and enjoyed it, although I don’t think I asked any big questions about it, e.g., about the nature of the afterlife or about God’s presence or absence. But the sense of pain at great injustice suffused the narrative, giving a different tone and atmosphere from those of a typical mystery novel.
I loved the book. I read it when it first came out, and I don’t remember it enough to come up with any deep thoughts on it, but I absolutely loved it. I would say the same thing about The Time Traveler’s Wife. Another book I loved is Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy. I think A Fairly Honorable Defeat by Iris Murdoch qualifies as well. That’s four women authors, so I will throw in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. (That’s not tokenism. It really belongs on the list.)
I read the book and enjoyed it. I assumed that the after-life depicted in the book was Purgatory, although I would like to think that once we are reunited with God in Heaven, we still, occassionally, can check on our Loved ones back on Earth.
I thought it was a great book that also completely unsettled me. I couldn’t even keep it in the house and gave it away immediately. I have no intention of seeing the movie.
I read the book some years back and found that reading Alice Sebold’s book on her life at Syracus was very telling. ‘Lucky’ is actually Sebold’s first publication – the story of her rape on campus and years of therapy.
Thn, she writes her novel.
In my MFA program at Columbia, we read “The Lovely Bones” in conjunction with “Lucky,” Sebold’s memoir about a sexual assault she suffered while in college and the experience of trying to put the pieces back together afterwards–while I think its certainly easy to overdo the supposed connections between a writer’s personal life and a writer’s fiction, “The Lovely Bones” is certainly one novel that I felt gained its unsettling tone from the author’s own experiences of violence as a young woman. Much of the novel–including the protagonist’s attempts from beyond the grave to let people know who the killer was–is reflected in elements of Sebold’s own story.
I read it a few months ago and liked it very much. I’d read that the author had been sexually assaulted herself and I was intrigued that at the point of the story (after her death) where she could have either chosen to chase down the bad guy or have a short time together with the person she loved, she chose the latter. Also liked the dog :)
Another book that was very different but which also dealt with relationships, suffering, and death in a profound way – The Road.