Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
That does it. No more best sellers.
I finished Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones today. And oh, my.
Here’s the premise: 14-year-old Susie Salmon is raped, killed, and dismembered by a neighbor. She narrates the novel from “her heaven,” wherein she is perpetually 14, perpetually on her way to high school. Susie is, to put it mildly, obsessed with the living; although there are hints that others in her shoes eventually move on to a better place, she is content to haunt the living — her father, mother, siblings, the boy she had just kissed, the girl who brushed against Susie’s soul in its fevered rush from Earth, and even her murderer.
What The Lovely Bones does well is detail the way violent crime warps and devastates the lives of those close to the victim; Sebold also does a nice job showing that not all changes wrought by such a horror are bad. If Sebold had been content to leave these as her sole themes, if she had written a Susie-free novel, this would have been a fine book. Instead, we have a novel that can’t make up its mind between first person narration and omniscient POV. Because, yes, Susie is terribly omniscient, delving into her various subjects’ hearts and minds, their fears and desires, their most buried memories.
And yet we only occasionally see Susie’s reaction to what she witnesses. It’s so rare that when it happens, it stands out. To me, Susie eventually seemed less and less a character, more and more a manifestation of Sebold herself.
Spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.
As I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog, I felt a little dirty reading The Lovely Bones because Sebold does not hesitate to manipulate the reader’s feelings. I’m a sucker for these things. Even when I KNOW I’m being manipulated, I still tear up when I’m supposed to tear up. If the reaction is gained honestly, I don’t mind, but when the author has set up situations purely to make me sob? It gets old after a while.
And yet I could have forgiven her this, had the ending been different.
It’s years later, and Susie’s killer is still on the loose, still killing. She knows this. So in the climactic moment when Susie finds herself back on Earth, thrust into the body of an old acquaintance, what does she do? Does she warn her younger sister, who is most definitely at risk of becoming the next victim? Does she do anything to soothe her parents, her sister, or her brother, all of whom were so wounded by her death?
No. She fucks the boy she kissed when she was 14. And then falls asleep.
Oh, there’s a halfhearted stab at explaining all of this. She didn’t want to chase after her killer when time was so limited. (Um, she couldn’t spare a two-minute phone call?) She did indeed try to call home, but by the time she did it, her time on Earth was up and her younger brother heard no one on the other end of the phone. So what she did do was pure fantasy-fulfillment, perhaps understandable given the frustrations of being forever 14 and watching her siblings and acquaintances grow up and experience life without her, yet dramatically so unsatisfying because we know Susie has done so much more during her time in heaven than fawn on this one boy. She supposedly cares about her family. Well, not so much.
And there’s more fantasy-fulfillment, too, in the shape of Susie’s dog coming to heaven to keep her company, or Susie’s estranged mother coming home at last. And of course Susie gets to kill her killer by dislodging an icicle on his head — thus leaving her family forever in the dark on the nagging questions of whether he was ever caught, or what he did with Susie’s body.
It left me feeling sick at heart. Interestingly, the film left Roger Ebert feeling a little sick, too. He called it “deplorable.” A lot of the book reviews are laudatory, but I did like The Guardian’s review by Ali Smith, since she rightly sees this novel as a missed opportunity. She (and others) also points out something I hadn’t known (but suspected) while reading this book: that Sebold’s life had been touched by violence.
This novel, Sebold’s first, was clearly born from her own horrific rape experience as a teenager, detailed in her memoir Lucky (1999), whose first paragraph reads: “In the tunnel where I was raped… a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.”
This makes me wonder whether The Lovely Bones was written as catharsis. (Ali Smith takes it one step farther and wonders whether the novel, published in 2002, enjoyed such success because it provided catharsis for the post-9/11 America.)
And I had always been told, Never write for catharsis.
Now I need something to get the taste of this one out of my brain.
D.
Thank goodness I’m not the only one who hated this book! Everyone raves about it, they made a movie from it and I despised it enough to not consider seeing the dumb movie. I kept getting the feeling the boy was actually gay and he used his Susie thoughts to put off facing that. I couldn’t believe she came back for a brief possession to have sex and never once says “Oh, by the way, my body is in the sinkhole.” ARG!
I recall hating the ending of this book, but I still like it, and yes, my feelings were manipulated too.
I never saw it possible for this book to come across in a movie, so I didn’t see it.
Good. Other people think the ending was execrable, too!
It’s too bad . . . the actress who plays Susie in the movie looks interesting. Maybe I should check to see if she’s done anything else.
you should check out Alice Sebold “Lucky” its her story.
Hi Nikki. Yes, from what I’ve read of Lucky, it does sound good. It’s clear from The Lovely Bones that she can write well, but the ending drove me nuts.