The Lovely Bones
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
|
| Author | Alice Sebold |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Yoori Kim (design); Daniel Lee (photo-illustration) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Little, Brown |
| Released | 2002 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback and Paperback); audio book |
| Pages | 328 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-316-66634-3 |
The Lovely Bones is a 2000 novel by Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being brutally raped and murdered, watches from heaven as her family and friends go on with their lives, while she herself comes to terms with her own death.
An adaptation of the novel is currently in production and will be directed by Peter Jackson, who personally purchased the rights.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
In 1973, a 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon is raped, murdered, and dismembered by a neighbor serial killer. Over the next few years she watches from a personalized heaven as her family and friends deal with their grief.
[edit] Explanation of the novel's title
The novel's title stems from a line towards the end of the novel, in which Susie ponders her friends and family's new found strength after her death:
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 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 lifeless body had been my life.
[edit] Plot summary
On December 6, 1973 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, Susie Salmon takes a shortcut home from school. She is accosted by a neighbor, George Harvey, a man in his mid-30s who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living. A serial killer who has killed women young and old going as far back as 1959, he persuades her to enter an underground den he has recently built nearby. Once she enters, he rapes and stabs her, cutting her body into parts, and then collapses the den. An elbow, the only part of Susie ever to be found, falls out of his bag as he returns home, disposing of the remaining parts of the body by putting them in a safe and paying someone to drop it in a sinkhole. Meanwhile, Susie's spirit flees toward her personal heaven.
The Salmon family is at first reluctant to accept that Susie has been killed, but then accedes when Susie's hat and elbow are found. The police who talk to Mr. Harvey find him odd but see no reason to suspect him. Jack, Susie's father, becomes suspicious and later comes to harass the police about Harvey. Susie's sister Lindsey comes to share these suspicions. Jack, consumed with guilt over not having been able to protect his daughter, remains on extended leave from work and increasingly isolates himself at home. Buckley, the youngest child in the family at five, tries to make sense of all this as he starts school.
One day late in the summer a detective named Len Fenerman comes to tell the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night in his study, Jack looks out the window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing it to be Harvey returning to destroy evidence, he runs out to confront him with a baseball bat. It turns out to be Susie's best friend, Clarissa, and her boyfriend Brian looking for a place to make out. Brian and Jack struggle and Jack is struck with the bat. As a result he has to have knee replacement surgery. In the wake of this, his wife Abigail begins having an affair with Fenerman, who is widower. The following summer Abigail leaves her husband, going to her father's old cabin in New Hampshire and then moving to California, taking a job at a winery. As a result her mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons' home to help her son-in-law care for Buckley and Lindsey.
Still suspicious, Lindsey sneaks into Mr. Harvey's house and finds a drawing of the pit and is forced to leave when Mr. Harvey returns prematurely. Sensing threat, Mr. Harvey leaves Norristown as soon as possible. He becomes a drifter who continues to kill other young women despite all his efforts to reform. A year later the police bulldoze the cornfield and turn up a soda bottle from the night of the murder with Mr. Harvey's and Susie's fingerprints, finally making him an official suspect. However, he remains at large. That fall, a hunter in Connecticut discovers the body of another one of Harvey's victims, and one of Susie's charms nearby. In 1981, a detective in Connecticut links the charm to Susie's murder and calls Fenerman. When further evidence becomes evident, police realize they were dealing with a serial killer.
Lindsey and her boyfriend Samuel Heckler become engaged, find an old house in the woods that Ruth's father owns and decide to fix it up and live there. Sometime after the celebration, while arguing with his son, Jack suffers from a heart attack. The emergency prompts Abigail to return from California, but the reunion is tempered by Buckley's lingering bitterness at her for having abandoned him and his father.
Meanwhile, Mr. Harvey returns to Norristown, which has become more developed. Having explored his old neighborhood and seen that the school is being expanded into the cornfield where he killed Susie, he drives by the sinkhole where Susie's body is, and where Ruth Conners and Ray Singh are standing. Ruth, an old classmate of Susie's who had felt Susie's spirit go past her after her murder, senses the women Harvey has killed and is overcome, as is Susie watching from heaven, and they exchange positions. Susie, her spirit now in Ruth's body, kisses Ray, who had a crush on Susie in school, and they make love. Afterwards, Susie returns to heaven.
She moves onto the larger heaven, still watching earthbound events from time to time. She sees her sister's newborn baby girl, who is named Abigail Suzanne. One day she spies Mr. Harvey getting off a Greyhound bus at a diner in New Hampshire in early spring. Behind the diner he sees a young woman and attempts to speak to her, but she rebuffs him. Susie notices some large icicles hanging from the roof, and after the woman leaves one falls and hits Mr. Harvey on the head, knocking him into a nearby ravine and ultimately killing him.
[edit] Characters
- Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered in the first chapter, and narrates the novel from heaven.
- Jack Salmon, her father, who works for an insurance agency in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
- Abigail Salmon, her mother, whose growing family frustrated her youthful dreams.
- Lindsey Salmon, Susie's sister, a year younger than her, thought of as the smartest child in the family. She is the only Salmon child whose birth was planned.
- Buckley Salmon, Susie's brother, ten years younger than her. His unplanned birth forced Abigail to cancel her plans for a teaching career. He sometimes sees Susie while she watches him.
- Grandma Lynn, Abigail's mother, who comes to live with her son-in-law and grandchildren after her daughter leaves.
- George Harvey, the Salmons' neighbor, who kills Susie and goes unpunished even though the Salmons come to suspect him, then leaves Norristown to kill again. Throughout the novel she refers to him as Mr. Harvey, the name she had addressed him by in life.
- Ruth Connor, a classmate of Susie's whom her dead spirit touches as she leaves the earth. She becomes fascinated with Susie despite barely having known her in her life, and devotes her life to writing about the visions of the dead she sees.
- Ray Singh, the first and only boy to kiss Susie, and later, becomes Ruth's friend.
- Ruana Singh, Ray's exotic mother whom Abigail Salmon sometime smoked cigarettes with.
- Samuel Heckler, Lindsey's boyfriend and later her husband.
- Hal Heckler, Sam's older brother who runs a motorcycle repair shop.
- Len Fenerman, the police detective in charge of investigating Susie's death, who later has an affair with Abigail.
- Holly, Susie's best friend and roommate in heaven. While the text does not say so explicitly, it is implied she is Vietnamese-American. She has no accent (although she did on earth) and took her name from Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
- Franny, Susie and Holly's "intake counselor" in heaven.
- Holiday, Susie's dog.
[edit] Origins and inspiration
The novel draws from the the author's personal experiences from when she was raped during her freshman year at Syracuse University. In Lucky, Sebold's 1997 memoir of the event and its aftermath, she describes how it transformed her life, especially after learning that the rapist's previous victim had died. After later seeing the rapist on the street, she reported him to the police and eventually testified against him. He was convicted and received the maximum sentence.
She began the novel in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of those events. However, she fiercely resists suggestions that it had anything to do with the aftermath of the rape:
| “ | First of all, therapy is for therapy. Leave it there. Second, because you're a rape victim, everyone wants to turn everything you do into something "therapeutic" — oh, I understand, going to the bathroom must be so therapeutic for you![1] | ” |
In an afterward to the paperback edition, Sebold stated that "the oddness of what we often condescendingly refer to as the suburbs" was also an inspiration. She had lived outside of Philadelphia herself for a time.[2]
[edit] Themes and literary techniques
The novel is a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. Even though Susie is dead, she manages to grow up while in heaven as her tone and perspective as a narrator changes throughout.
Much of the novel concerns itself with grief and how it is, or is not, overcome by Susie's family. It is similar in many ways to Judith Guest's Ordinary People, which also concerns a suburban family in the mid-1970s trying to cope with the sudden death of its eldest teenage child.
The disintegration of the suburban nuclear family during the 1970s is also present, as Susie's death precipitates a chain of events which results in Abigail feeling trapped by her domestic responsibilities and ultimately leaving her husband. In this respect it is similar not only to Ordinary People but to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, which is also set in the seventies and begins and ends with the tragic death of a family's teenage child. In contrast to that novel, however, references and pop-culture allusions to the era are minimal (Watergate, which was unfolding in more and more grim detail in late 1973 and makes a significant part of the background of Moody's work, is never even once mentioned in The Lovely Bones). Sebold chose the earlier time period because media frenzies did not routinely surround the families of missing children then (as Susie points out); it also helps explain why the police are not able to catch Mr. Harvey since forensics were less advanced.
Another underlying theme is the increasing development of the suburban Northeast. Many locations are developed during the novel. For example, the field where she was murdered eventually becomes the site of a new wing of her school and Ray laments that every year Norristown is beginning to look more and more like everywhere else. For them, Susie's memory becomes a way of recalling the larger past. Sebold herself said of this:
{{cquote|That was when suburban developments were new - a time before media saturation, chain stores, malls, the internet, homogenised places. What it's meant is that everyone's become more detached from other human beings, sitting in their car or at their computer. [1]
[edit] Symbols and motifs
Flowers are often present in the novel and represent the dead's continued presence in the lives of the living. Susie's favorite flower is the daffodil, and they are accordingly left on the site of her death on its anniversary. Later, she and her fellow dead make Buckley's garden grow with a wild mix of geraniums.
Snow is also highly important in the novel. It serves to "cover up" what is happening everyday life and create a blanket of perfection. This can be applied to the perception of Mr. Harvey in the eyes of the other neighbours (bar Jack Salmon) and the wider blanketing of the way Susie's family respond to her loss.
The narrative frequently focuses on small household objects. Susie describes how her family members surreptitiously remove many of her personal effects from her room, and the charms from her bracelet help link Mr. Harvey to other murders. Susie prays the bracelet will be found and possibly lead investigators to Mr. Harvey, which can be read as an Althusserian "final signifier" — when its lonely hour arrives at the very end of the novel, it can no longer have any impact on its events.
Photography is important, too, particularly a picture Susie took of her mother unawares one morning with her Kodak Instamatic, which she later realizes was the only time she saw her mother as a woman and not just her mother. Some time after Abigail leaves her father finds it accidentally and it reminds him of how much he still loves her. Susie wants to be a wildlife photographer when she grows up, and one late chapter is called "Snapshots" instead of being numbered.
[edit] Omniscient narrator
The Lovely Bones was notable when it was published for its use of an omniscient narrator, a device thought by some to be dead in most contemporary American fiction. Susie, however, complicates this by also being a character in the story, albeit one who is dead.
Nevertheless, she controls the narrative flow and often speaks to the reader directly, acknowledging that it is a story being told in a book ("Don't think that every person you meet in here is a suspect," she says in the opening paragraphs). In this respect she bears a lot of similarity to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a play explicitly alluded to in the novel which also, in its last act, features a young woman reviewing her small-town life posthumously.
[edit] Commercial and critical reception
Sebold's novel was the surprise of the American publishing world in 2002. Unheralded, by a younger author known only for one other book, and not widely outside of literary circles, with a plot and narrative device that many publishers admitted they would have passed on without actually reading had it been described to them, it would have been considered a success by Little, Brown and Company had it sold 20,000 copies. It wound up selling over a million and remained on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for over a year.
Some of that could have been attributed to adroit marketing. Prior to its June publication, an excerpt was run in Seventeen. Shortly afterwards, ABC's Good Morning America chose it for its book club. Then the book became popular summer reading and a runaway success, with much of its sales subsequently attributed to word of mouth.
It has been suggested that a story of grief and recovery as it affects not only those left behind but the dead person herself struck just the right note for a nation dealing with the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Current events also benefited the book when the media became captivated by the abduction drama surrounding a Utah teen, Elizabeth Smart (later found alive), and a similar story from Oregon of a man who was found to have buried two local teen girls under a concrete plug in his backyard several years before.
Critics, too, helped by being generally kind, many noting that the story had much more promise than the idea of a brutally murdered teenage girl going to heaven and following her family and friends as they get on with their lives would have suggested. "This is a high-wire act for a first novelist," wrote Katherine Bouton in the New York Times Book Review, "and Alice Sebold maintains almost perfect balance."
Most also agreed with her, though, that the climactic scene where Susie inhabits Ruth's body didn't quite work. Some pointed out that the 1991 movie Ghost has a similar scene. Nevertheless, it turned up on many ten-best lists at the end of the year.
The novel also sold well in other English-speaking countries, but critics there were a bit more restrained. While admitting the novel "has its very fine moments," The Guardian's Ali Smith ultimately said "The Lovely Bones is so keen in the end to comfort us and make safe its world that, however well-meaning, it avoids its own ramifications." Her Observer colleague Philip Hensher was blunter, conceding that the novel was "very readable" but "ultimately it seems like a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy."
The novel has begun to be assigned in many secondary-school English classes, despite the complexity of its storyline and grimness of its subject matter, because it has a teenage protagonist. In 2003, Gary Soto published The Afterlife, a young-adult novel that bears some striking similarities — a male protagonist hangs around the world after his murder, watches himself mourned and missed, and then gradually finds his way to heaven.
It also remains popular with reading groups.
[edit] Controversies
 |
This section does not cite its references or sources. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) Any unsourced material that has been or is likely to be challenged may be removed at any time. This article has been tagged since November 2006. |
Besides the climactic scene with Susie possessing Ruth, there exist some other points of debate about the novel.
Interestingly, readers who took a Christian perspective faulted Susie's heaven for being utterly devoid of any apparent religious aspect ("It's a very God-free heaven, with no suggestion that anyone has been judged, or found wanting," Hensher groused); while others from a secular background found the very idea of heaven inherently religious.
Does Susie eventually avenge her death at Mr. Harvey's hands, as she wishes to at one point early in the story? While she doesn't say explicitly that she dislodged the icicle, she makes a point of noting them to the reader right before one falls. The reader has seen earlier that she can do minor things on earth like blow candles out, and that the dead "do things that leave humans stumped and grateful." Also, earlier in the novel, she tells us that during a contest in heaven to name the best tool for the perfect murder she had chosen a weapon made of ice (because it melts and leaves no evidence). Some readers say that killing Mr. Harvey would make Susie seem less sympathetic, even if he has escaped justice.
Another issue is the suspicion by some that Ruth is a lesbian, as there are several passages in the book that suggest this, though she also mentions having a crush on Hal.
[edit] What year does the story end?
One of the subtler ways the novel shows Susie's growing detachment from earthly life is that, as the story goes on, she gets less and less exact about what year it is when things happen. While the device is effective for this purpose, it creates some credibility problems near the end of the novel.
Susie tells us right before the novel ends that it has been not much more than ten years since her disappearance and death, which would, being generous, put those final scenes in 1985 at the latest since Lindsey's daughter Abigail Suzanne still seems to be an infant. However, there is also a reference to "clients she saw in her practice each day," and the context suggests Lindsey is a psychotherapist.
But if Lindsey was 13 when her older sister was killed, she would have been born in 1960. For her to be a psychiatrist or counselor (both professions requiring considerable amounts of graduate and post-graduate work) with a thriving private practice at the age of 25 would be rather extraordinary, even assuming she may have graduated both high school and college each a year early, and still more so if she managed to do it without taking time off for her pregnancy. It would be more realistic if that scene took place in the late 1980s.
There is also an anachronism related to Jack Salmon's heart attack and recovery. When Detective Fenerman comes to the hospital to let the Salmons know that one of the charms from Susie's bracelet has been found, it has been the first sign "after almost seven years of dwindling hope since late 1975," so that scene takes place in 1982. Later on, though, Abigail is described as reading to her husband from an issue of the Evening Bulletin, a newspaper which ceased publication on January 29 of that year. Yet it is clearly warm weather by the time of Jack's heart attack.
A possible explanation is that Susie's growing disengagement from her family and their lives on Earth resulted in her becoming less attentive to time or other small details, letting her get some things wrong.
[edit] Film adaptation
After a rocky road to the big screen, Peter Jackson, who bought the rights personally, is writing a script and hopes to have the film finished in time for a 2008 release.
[edit] Trivia
- Fairfax Junior High School was inspired by Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, which Sebold attended for a while.[citation needed] Malvern is located approximately five miles to the south of Valley Forge National Historical Park, an important setting in the book, and ten miles to the south of Susie's purported home in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
- Norristown was in the early 1970s (and remains) a largely urban municipality with few subdivisions, contrary to what is depicted in the book.
- Sebold misspells at least two Pennsylvania geographic names in the novel. Bucks County, Pennsylvania is misspelled as "Buck's County", and an apparent reference to the Kennett Consolidated School District [1] in southern Chester County, Pennsylvania is inaccurately spelled as "Kennet".
[edit] References
- ^ a b Viner, Katharine; August 24, 2002; "Above and Beyond: Interview with Alice Sebold"; The Guardian; retrieved April 4, 2007.
- ^ Sebold, Alice, "The Oddity of Suburbia"
[edit] External links
- Wiki chapter summaries of The Lovely Bones
- The Lovely Bones Reading Group Guide
- The Lovely Bones at the Internet Movie Database
- A Dark First Novel Suddenly Soars to the Top in The New York Times
Categories: Articles lacking sources from April 2007 | All articles lacking sources | Articles lacking sources from November 2006 | Articles with large trivia sections | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | 2002 novels | Fiction narrated by a dead person | Debut novels
