The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - Literature review Example

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Short Biography Born in the early 1960s, Sebold spent her formative years in suburban Philadelphia. Her mother was a journalist for a local paper, while her father was a professor of Spanish at the Ivy-League University of Pennsylvania. She had an older sister who excelled in school, and while Sebold was also a good student, she was the self-admitted joker in her family. (Lint p29) Sebold chose to attend Syracuse University--in part to distance herself from her family--and it was there, near the end of her freshman year, that she was attacked while walking back to her dormitory on the evening of the last day of school for the year. She struggled with her assailant, but was badly beaten and bloodied. Sebold's rapist was caught, convicted, and given a maximum prison sentence, but the ordeal was far from over. Somewhat surprisingly, Sebold returned to school in Syracuse, and after graduating headed to the University of Houston for a brief attempt at graduate school. She eventually settled in New York City, where she planned to become a writer. For years, she lived in the East Village--during its rattiest period, before it was an acceptable post-college, bar-and-restaurant-filled enclave--while working as a research analyst and teaching English as an adjunct instructor at Hunter College on the side. It took her several years to emerge from her post-assault experience, she admitted, and recalled her 20s as a period in which she dated the wrong men, drank too much, snorted heroin for three years, and took part in daring stunts like climbing to the top of the Manhattan Bridge. Finally, Sebold wrote a New York Times article about her rape, which led to an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. A sentence from her article was quoted a few years later in a book called Trauma and Recovery, about post-traumatic stress disorder. As she explained in an interview with the Guardian's Katharine Viner, reading that book was a turning point in her life. "I was failing miserably in New York, I'd written two novels that weren't published," she recalled. Sebold applied to graduate school in California, but was determined to relocate no matter what. "If I didn't get in I was going to buy a dozen nude-colored panty hose and get an office job in Temecula, California," she said in the interview with Valby. (Huntley p1510) Accepted into the master of fine arts writing program at the University of California's Irvine campus, she took out a student loan, and met her future husband on the first day of school. The work earned good reviews, with Publishers Weekly describing it as a "fiercely observed memoir about how an incident of such profound violence can change the course of one's life," but failed to catch on with readers. (Conway p127) Finally, she finished The Lovely Bones manuscript, and it netted her a two-book deal with Little, Brown. As advance copies began circulating in the months prior to its June of 2002 publication date, a publishing-industry and bookseller buzz began to attach to it. The Lovely Bones, told from the viewpoint of a 14-year-old rape and murder victim looking down from heaven, struck a nerve with a society reeling from accounts of 12-year-old Ashley Pond and 13-year-old Miranda Gaddis, Danielle van Dam, 7, Samantha Runnion, 5, and 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart, all snatched and silenced since January. Summary Drawing on folkloric and religious motifs and ideas, Alice Sebold presents a remarkable, complex, and comforting vision of heaven as the platform from which Susie Salmon, raped and murdered by a neighbor at the age of fourteen, tells her story. It is a heaven that indeed has many "mansions," one of which is the "wide wide Heaven," which can provide one's every desire. The word Susie's grandfather has for the dominant quality of this heaven is "comfort," and oddly comforting, indeed, is Alice Sebold's novel because it postulates a vision of heaven that begins with an "intake" level of simplicity that matches the experience level of the fourteen-year-old victim and becomes increasingly complex as Susie watches the changes her death effects on her family and friends over a dozen or so years following her death. Sebold's conception of heaven is a complex and progressive spirit world in which the departed continue to grow and develop; thus, those individuals who die while children "mature" over the years as they would have done had they not died prematurely. (New York Times, C7) Sebold has asked the unthinkable question, yet one writ large in every day's news headlines: What if one's young daughter does not come home for dinner one evening How do parents and siblings, friends and neighbors, police and the rest of the community react to the growing conviction that the child has been murdered How do they react when a dog brings home "a body part," an elbow that, for the police at least, confirms her murder Only gradually and painfully can the family and the police conclude that the investigation is a murder investigation, that Susie Salmon had been abducted, murdered, and forever obliterated from the face of this Earth. Although other evidence is accumulated, the killer is never arrested, tried, convicted, and executed. (Lint p29) Sebold's choice to have Susie Salmon tell her story from heaven as the first-person narrator in charge of her own story works brilliantly to satisfy the reader of the truth of her vision of heaven as a complex, multidimensioned spiritual reality, a wide place, a place fashioned after the dearest wishes of departed souls. To support her conception of this story, Sebold weaves together cultural myths, Christian scripture, and deeply embedded folk ideas about revenants (souls who return, usually in corporeal form, to the scenes of their lives and their deaths), who may communicate successfully but rarely clearly with those they have left behind, and who sometimes even exact vengeance upon their murderers. Thus, this novel is a wonderful ghost story. However, because it also embodies a vision of a secular heaven to which spirits journey in stages from the moment of their death and are granted in some way the righteous desires of their hearts, the novel is also a complex meditation on those desires, including the desire for retribution. In Susie's case, the desire for knowledge is paramount. She wants to learn all that she had not been able to learn in her short time on Earth, the knowledge that living brings of love, sex, work, thought, and family, to grow fully through the whole range of life's experiences. Franny, her intake counselor, herself murdered by a wife abuser, assures her that that option is not available (an assertion that Susie will later test with startling consequences). At first, her heaven is that mansion to which female murder victims go, shaped in the familiar forms of school grounds and buildings where her heavenly growth begins. She and Holly, her best friend in heaven, discover that just about anything one can desire is available if desired enough and if one understands why one desires it. (Huntley p1510) Susie's second desire is to observe, at least, the whole lives she has left behind on Earth so that she and her companion can pretend better, a wish that is granted, thus making the omniscient possibilities of this narrative point of view credible as well as functional. The ultimate personification of Susie's wish is to return in to life, at least for a few instants, to allow her to make love with Ray Singh years after her death. That association gives Ruth her life's occupation to write the lives of female victims and implies also the authority of love to transcend mortality. Sebold's beginning of heaven is not a place of "gritty reality" but a place where one has fun. Sebold avoids the consequence of sentimentality by overseeing the tone and focusing on Susie's reports of the emotional and physical effects of her murder on her family, on her colleagues, on Detective Fenerman, and on the killer. Born in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico in 1938, Harvey's early life (seen by Susie, along with all other stage of his life, from Heaven) was awfully dysfunctional. His mother was a kleptomaniac who stole from dead body and often coupled with petty shoplift. When he was five years old, three such thieves came after her and tried to rape her while she was alone with him. During their escape, his mother ran them over with the family car. Harvey decided then that women and children were "the two nastiest things to be." Shortly after that, his father barred her from the family, which he also saw. These early distress led him to widen a deep, violent abhorrence of women. He committed his first rape in high school, and graduated to murder at 21. An ephebophile, Harvey's chosen victims were teenage girls like Susie, but he also killed adult women in age from mid-twenties to well into middle age. At first, he felt pain of regret after each victim and decided to stop murder by taking his cruel desire out on animals, but he ultimately deserted any self-control he may have once had, and came to think of each victim as "a present to himself." By his mid-thirties, he had killed perhaps a dozen women and girls.In 1981, a detective in Connecticut links the appeal to Susie's murder and calls Fenerman. A biker friend of Samuel's older brother Hal gives in sequence that links Harvey to the murder of his own mother. Police now realize they were looking for a serial killer, but cannot find him, as he has been "living wild in the surroundings of Northeast Corridor." Sebold focuses on identifying and commemorating all those women and children who were murdered or abused. Ruth is compelled to locate the places where these crimes occurred and to write the names of all such victims in her journal, doing "important work," Susie tells us, "work that most people on Earth were too frightened even to contemplate" but which her "fans in heaven" cheer on. As Susie watches the lives she left behind, she also remembers when she and Ray Singh nearly but not quite kissed and they secretly witnessed Ruth Connors being scolded for drawing nudes that were too realistic for her art teacher's comfort and that revealed her talent to be much greater than that of her art teacher. (Publishers Weekly, 15) Susie's family members remember her in various ways as they deal with the intense pain, implacable and pervasive, that her murder generates. Susie's mother Abigail in her pain withdraws from her husband, has a brief affair with Fenerman, and flees to the West Coast, working in a winery for several years and returning only when she learns of her husband's stress- induced heart attack, thus reuniting with him eight years later. Jack is overcome by the loss of his daughter and obsessed with finding proof that Mr. Harvey is a viable suspect. Each day, when his consciousness wakes him, Jack's guilt seeps in, poisoning his relationship with his wife and his other children, Lindsey and Buckley. (Allardice p39) The visions, sightings, and intuitions that Jack, Buckley, Ruth, Ray, and Lindsey experience are the results of Susie's efforts to communicate with them. Susie also watches as Lindsey works hard to develop her identity as a young woman in her own right, not merely a living version of her dead sister. Helping her along this path are the attentions of Samuel Heckler, who gives Lindsay a present on the first Christmas after Susie's death and receives a kiss from Lindsey in return. Susie in her heaven feels the electricity of the kiss and is "almost alive again." As Sam and Lindsey exchange presents, kiss, and begin their healing and life-long connection, Susie's father finds a way to tell Buckley that his sister is dead. Taken during the first Christmas after Susie's death (Christmas being the commemoration of the birth of Christ and thus a subtle promise of immortality), each of these moves begins the healing for Susie's siblings and her father, but it will be a lengthy process and different for each person. (Burns p182) Learning that Mr. Harvey is her father's prime suspect, Lindsey conspires with Jack to enter Harvey's house and find evidence to support their suspicions. Although Harvey immediately leaves town, Lindsey's daring effort causes Harvey's life to spin out of control and enables her to reunite with her father so that they can get on with their own lives after a fashion. Buckley, for instance, will, when he is in the seventh grade, develop a garden near the house, not exactly a "secret garden" but one that allows Susie to signal him by making the entire garden bloom. Sebold's vision of how the healing process progresses in different ways for each life relies upon a body of traditional belief, customs, and images, including newborns being given the names of the dead and the seasonal resurrections of gardens. Works Cited Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones: A Novel, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2002. New York Times, June 18, 2002, p. E1; July 14, 2002, p. 14; October 21, 2002, p. C7. Publishers Weekly, June 21, 1999, p. 44; June 17, 2002, p. 41; July 29, 2002, p. 22; December 23, 2002, p. 15. De Lint, Charles. The Lovely Bones (Book). Fantasy & Science Fiction, Feb2003, Vol. 104 Issue 2, p29, Huntley, Kristine. The Lovely Bones (Book). Booklist, 5/1/2002, Vol. 98 Issue 17, p1510, Conway,, Cheryl L.. The Lovely Bones (Book). Library Journal, 5/15/2002, Vol. 127 Issue 9, p127 Allardice, Lisa. The Lovely Bones (Book). New Statesman, 8/19/2002, Vol. 131 Issue 4601, p39, Burns, Ann; Glover, Sandy. The Lovely Bones (Book). Library Journal, 1/1/2003, Vol. 128 Issue 1, p182 Read More