Thoughts on The Lovely Bones
I never really wanted to read The Lovely Bones. Like Liz Lemon, who had to confess to a co-op board that she'd lied to them, admitting "I didn't read The Lovely Bones," the novel always felt like an annoying phenomena to me, a book with a pulpy premise and a rabid following, something I refused to read because everyone else had. But, Peter Jackson is making the movie. And the trailer is really terrifyingly beautiful. And I cannot resist Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon in any form. And so I bought the damn thing on my Kindle late on Friday night, and by Saturday afternoon, I was sitting at my kitchen table weeping as I raced through the conclusion.
I don't think The Lovely Bones is great literature. The prose can be a little flat at times, though Alice Seabold comes up with some beautiful images: the darkness of the sinkhole in which her main character's body is disposed of after she is raped and murdered, a high school girl's dreamy surprise at discovering she's devoured an entire pie while stoned, a field in heaven where victims of the same murderer gather to comfort his latest victim, the fragments of a self that a ghost manages to return to earth. And the idea of heaven as a place for self-improvement, where you can--and in fact--have to continue to grow is compelling, I think. But essentially, Seabold achieves two of the three parts of the Holy Trinity of the Novel. First, she makes an unusual plot structure, a murder mystery in which the fact of the murder is revealed in the second sentence, and the identity of the murderer not long thereafter, work. And second, she's created a group of fully fleshed-out characters, ranging from the somewhat isolated wife of an Indian doctor who smokes, does yoga, and bakes the best apple pie in her fairly All-American neighborhood, a grieving father who builds ships in bottles, a young artist who becomes a chronicler of the murders of women, two brothers who integrate themselves into a broken family. As a result, The Lovely Bones is very, very effective, even if it's not truly great. I can understand now why everyone read it. And I'm glad I can count myself among their numbers.