I'm sure that some have, and will, argue that Ms. Sebold's most famous work is too graphic and exploitative for comfort. Given the vividness of its heroine's ordeal, I can understand why. But though The Lovely Bones has its moment of appalling horror, and though that moment has the power to turn even a strong stomach, the moment is the axle around which the wheel of Ms. Sebold's story spins. Without that moment, her characters are pale shadows of their powerful, grieving selves.
Ms. Sebold is not the first author to have her narrator play almost no role in her own story, but she must surely be on a short list of authors who have their narrators conduct their stories from the afterlife. Susie Salmon, our young, innocent protagonist, has no sooner introduced herself to us when she is gruesomely attacked and murdered after taking a shortcut home from school. The perpetrator's identity is quite clear from the beginning of the book, but then Ms. Sebold has no reason to hide his identity. Susie is the only character who knows the truth and she has already begun her journey to her own personal heaven which is quiet, peaceful and safe. It is from this near nirvana that Susie looks down on her hometown and her grieving family, narrating their struggles to overcome first her disappearance and then her loss. She shows us the policeman who burns out trying to solve her case, her best friend whose life is changed forever by her loss, her sister who grows up in a home haunted by her, and her parents who simply cannot cope with her bodiless departure. As the years roll on and her memory slowly fades, everyone who knew her struggles to return to normalcy, but susie cannot relinquish the world until her case is solved, an act of justice that is a long time in coming to her.
The Lovely Bones is a wonderful and clever novel which overturns the traditional idea of a mystery. It reveals murdered and murderer to the reader in the first 20 pages, but holds back the means of the resolution until the last 20, a technique which proved devilishly effective in keeping me glued to the narrative. It's ironic then that susie is the story's least compelling character. I found nothing about her journey interesting or revelatory, but this may have been a consequence of the poignancy of the rest of the novel's characters who were, to a one, affecting and intense. I agree with those who believe that the murder was too graphic. It was, in all its grotesqueness, voyeuristic. Nonetheless, the extent to which that single event drives the novel and shapes its players is its greatest virtue. I doubt that this is the same novel without that moment of stomach-churning horror.Heartfelt work. (3/5 Stars)
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