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Magazine
Making no bones about it
DAVID DAVIDAR
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The Lovely Bones, which reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list faster than any debut novel in recent times, is one that has almost every literary quality, popularity and a touch of genius about it.
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GOOD heavens! My wife absolutely loved the novel I'm writing about this week. Indeed, she liked it so much that she rationed herself to a few pages a day to prolong the enjoyment she was obtaining from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Picador). At the other extreme, a colleague found the book so dark and disturbing that 50 pages into it, she doubted whether she'd be able to continue. My position lies somewhere in between. I think The Lonely Bones is an unusual, disturbing, original novel which is often brilliant and always above average. I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a fantastic and thought-provoking read. My attention wandered occasionally but that's a quibble given the subjectivity involved when one is reading a novel. And just to place this on record, The Lovely Bones reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list faster than any debut novel in recent times (including the first Harry Potter and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, the runner up). What we have here then is a novel that has almost every literary quality, popularity, and a touch of genius about it. Let's drill a bit deeper to see what it's about.
The Lovely Bones is essentially the story of Susie Salmon ("like the fish") who is murdered aged 14 on the first page of the novel. The rest of the book is told by Susie, who is up in heaven looking down on the rest of her family — her parents, her younger sister and brother as well as her friends. Ms Sebold has invented a nice literary device: there isn't one heaven for everyone but rather everyone inhabits their own personal little heaven that conforms exactly to their deepest longings. However, no matter how perfect each heaven, they have some basic shortcomings, the most obvious of which is the fact that the inhabitants of each heaven have left the world of mortals behind, and cannot, therefore, be in touch with their loved ones except as observers.
And so the immortal Susie Salmon peers out from her heaven at her loved ones, her murderer, her would-be boyfriend (an exotic young Indian, Ray Singh) and a host of others, yearning to be back with her family, to bring her murderer to justice, to kiss her boyfriend properly and experience the simple comforts of everyday living. She is able to experience none of these however, and it is something she finds difficult getting used to.
Meanwhile, back on earth, her family and circle are traumatised by the murder. Her mother begins drifting away from the rest, and eventually moves to California. Her father is convinced that one of the neighbours is the murderer although he has no proof. As his obsession grows, his life falls apart and he becomes an object of derision and pity. Susie's sister has her own problems to deal with, and the only one who is relatively unaffected by the tragedy is her brother, on account of being too young when it took place.
The author switches deftly between life on earth as well as heaven, never seeming less than plausible (except on one occasion!), handling all the drama (in what is a furiously dramatic novel) with a light touch, keeping us interested in her characters, and handling the big subjects, any novelist worth his or her salt cannot but take on (life, love, loss, hate, the human condition, etc.) very well. And she does all this with a prose style that is deceptively simple, but which is actually enormously accomplished, the hallmark of a very gifted writer indeed. Take this passage, which I've extracted from the very beginning of the book, in order to give nothing away about the plot: "Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little, my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, `Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world ... '" As a reader I believe that passage is pitch perfect. The scene is brilliantly rendered, it has wisdom, and poise, and it leaves you wanting more, a lot more. I doubt there will be a better American novel published this year.
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