A friend of mine whose brother was later killed in a car accident once lamented an aspect of newspaper coverage: People who are thrust into the spotlight by the tragedies that befall them -- by the glare of ambulance lights and journalists' flashbulbs -- seem to be forgotten too soon after the "news" elements peter out. Sometimes, you'll see an update, maybe a few paragraphs, but it's rare.
The Lovely Bones is one of those great works of fiction to grow into the space beyond where so many front-page murder stories leave off.
The narrator -- a 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon who is raped and killed -- is already in heaven by the time she starts telling the stories of the people she left behind. But "her" heaven, as she calls it, is not a place of unqualified joy.
With enough wishing, she can wrap herself in a comfortable world there, but some things she can't change. Her mind and heart are still too tethered to earthly things, and she has to place her hope on the living to bring her resolution.
For all the violence of its opening event, Alice Sebold's novel is a very sensitive book, content to meander through day-to-day details in the lives of the remaining Salmon family members and their friends.
About a third of the way in, the pace slowed a bit too much for my liking, and I closed the book and wondered if I should continue. But I read on and found myself rewarded.
Perhaps, this too was by design: One of the central characters decides she can't go on living with the pervasive specter of Susie's death, and decides for a time to close the book on that part of her life.
Sebold, who was born in Philadelphia, sets her novel during the 1970s in the western suburbs of the city. (In an online interview, she recently wrote: "As I grew up and left home ... I began to realize more and more that within the suburban world of my upbringing, there were as many strange stories as there were in the more romanticized parts of the world.")
The neighborhood of her novel is close-knit, and it makes the nearby presence of her shy but wily murderer -- who's done it several times before -- all the more heartrending. Very early on in the book, we learn through Susie the identity of that man, but this knowledge doesn't eliminate all the suspense.
For Sebold, such violence is not a new topic. Her 1999 memoir, Lucky, which was released in paperback last fall, begins with a visceral recounting of how she herself was attacked and raped in a tunnel as a freshman at Syracuse University. The title comes from a police officer's comment. Another woman had died there once, and he said she was "lucky" to be alive.
It has taken Sebold many years of false starts -- and a detour through New York's East Village -- to conquer her experience in bold true-crime prose and then bring it to the level of fiction with The Lovely Bones. But the patience she has shown in her own life comes through in her characters. Sebold is honest about the different ways the people who knew Susie mourn and heal, move on or don't.
As readers of fiction, we get used to seeing into people's homes and heads, so the premise that Susie is narrating from the afterlife doesn't seem too jarring. That said, the climax feels at first slightly sci-fi, without many other magical devices surrounding it (although it may actually take place in Susie's imagination).
Still, the overall effect is sensual and appealing. It serves as a metaphorical cleansing and the consummation of one of Susie's dreams, and I couldn't help but cheer.
The real story, however, is about how lives trail away or twist or shrivel or blossom after one has ended. And this story is one that lingered long after I reached its end.
