The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a book I picked up simply out of morbid curiousity. I was certain it was going to suck and I could then rip it to shreds. I have to admit, however, that though it was not a good book by any means, it didn't suck as badly as I expected.
I can, however, identify three major problems with this book:
1. Its overwhelming dullness.
2. The gimmicky first-person omniscient narration.
3. The ending.
Dullness: Despite the subject matter (rape, murder, grief, romance), which really should have been interesting, this book was just boring. I blame this on the distance created by the narrative voice, which I will discuss in more depth later, and Sebold's tendency to have the narrator tell us about things instead of showing us the world.
Oddly, this really significant problem highlights the book's best quality and the only thing I can give Sebold any real credit for. In the midst of the hokey plot, lack of a compelling protagonist, and the many other things I didn't like about the book, there were brief, shining moments of truth. Every now and then, Sebold's narrator would include a small detail about a character that revealed something sharp and honest about that person. This happened when the narrator stopped trying to explain the person and just showed us what was there, so it didn't happen often, but this quality is what made the book readable for me. Just when I'd start to get so bored and ready to give up (because what fun is reading a bad book that's just boringly bad?), there'd be this nugget of clarity and good writing to break through the dullness, and I'd keep on reading. Unfortunately, the rarity of these moments, no matter how good they were, just made the rest that much duller by comparison.
Narrative Voice: The one thing that every person who writes about this book must mention is the fact that it's narrated by Susie Salmon, a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl who watches her family from heaven. According to many reviewers, this is something that makes Sebold's novel unique. The watching-from-heaven bit isn't unique to Sebold, though the first person omniscient perspective is certainly unusual. But there's a reason this perspective rarely gets used.
In this case, the narrative voice, aside from being fairly dull, is completely inappropriate for a 14-year-old girl. It is exceedingly rare in the book to be able to believe that the person telling this story is really Susie Salmon and not Alice Sebold. This is exacerbated by the fact that she is constantly telling us what the people she watches think, feel, desire, and even dream. She even tells us what her rapist and murderer dreams about and reveals his memories. How does she know this? Sebold doesn't bother to explain. Heavenly magic, I guess.
Furthermore, there are distinct reasons for choosing to write from a first person perspective and Sebold forsakes them all. The first of these is to develop a strong sense of the one character from whose perspective we see the world. But throughout, I don't feel like I know Susie even as well as I do the other characters in the book and this is supposed to be her story. This is partly because of the lack of a distinct 14-year-old girl voice and partly because of the additional omniscience itself, which takes the focus off of Susie, who's dead and, quite frankly, not doing anything interesting any more, and places it on the other living characters who are still doing things. The second reason to choose first person perspective is found in its limitations, which
the omniscient narrative voice undoes. It makes the story more interesting to have information unfold as the narrator discovers it and to have limitations on what we are told, to have to put the story together on our own, just as the narrator does, and to have to evaluate the trustworthiness and reliability of the narrator. None of that applies here.
Finally, this perspective is nothing more than a gimmick. It adds nothing to the understanding of Susie's family and friends that a more traditional third person omniscient perspective would--other than a weird sense of unease about how she knows what they're thinking and feeling. If Sebold wants to tell the story of Susie's family and how they deal with her death, it might be more compelling to just do so instead of adding the filter of Susie's occasional reflections on events from her vantage point in heaven. This actually goes beyond uneasy. It's downright creepy. Susie watches her family sleep, she watches them in their most private moments (both alone and with others), she reads their minds. She knows more about them than she would ever know living and, quite likely, more than any of them would really want her to know. (No girl--living or dead--should have sexual experiences vicariously through her mother and her sister.) What's more, these people have no choice in the matter and so her desire to know about them is less a nice way for her to care about them, protect them, and try to heal herself (as Sebold seems to want us to see it) and more a violation of their privacy. This lack of consent and total disregard for boundaries makes Susie's watching less that of a guardian angel and more that of a stalker.
The Ending: There is little logic in this book. It is, after all, about a wish-fulfillment heaven and stalker ghosts. However, even novels that take the fantastic as their starting point require some internal logic in order to work. The Lovely Bones does not have that.
In the end, for no reason and with no explanation, Susie is able to fall from heaven into the body of one of her friends and have sex with her old crush. Somehow (don't ask me how) he recognizes her soul in her friend's body with having to be told. And the friend whose body was stolen is inexplicably happy about all of this. At this point, logic--even the logic of heaven and flying souls and wish-fulfillment fantasies--goes out the window.
Furthermore, this particular fantasy moment is (once again) extraordinarily creepy. Again there are issues of consent. Although Susie's friend Ruth, whose body she borrows, seems okay with it when she comes back from her visit to heaven (where she's quite famous, by the way), there was no asking of permission beforehand, no indication that either Susie or Sebold understands how wrong it is to just take and use another human being's body for sex. And even if there had been consent, this act--sex with her junior high sweetheart, whom she only kissed once before her death and who is now several years older than either of them were when she died--is what enables her healing and her moving on. Ah, the healing power of creepy sex.
A lot of people love this book. I don't really understand why. I guess, like the cultural obsession with Twilight, it's something I won't really understand. It doesn't bother me (too much) that so many people love these books when there are so many truly great books being overlooked; people will read and enjoy what they will read and enjoy and their literary tastes are really no concern of mine. It does concern me, though, that both of these books feature distinctly stalkerish behavior presented as love. What does this say about us as a culture?
I can, however, identify three major problems with this book:
1. Its overwhelming dullness.
2. The gimmicky first-person omniscient narration.
3. The ending.
Dullness: Despite the subject matter (rape, murder, grief, romance), which really should have been interesting, this book was just boring. I blame this on the distance created by the narrative voice, which I will discuss in more depth later, and Sebold's tendency to have the narrator tell us about things instead of showing us the world.
Oddly, this really significant problem highlights the book's best quality and the only thing I can give Sebold any real credit for. In the midst of the hokey plot, lack of a compelling protagonist, and the many other things I didn't like about the book, there were brief, shining moments of truth. Every now and then, Sebold's narrator would include a small detail about a character that revealed something sharp and honest about that person. This happened when the narrator stopped trying to explain the person and just showed us what was there, so it didn't happen often, but this quality is what made the book readable for me. Just when I'd start to get so bored and ready to give up (because what fun is reading a bad book that's just boringly bad?), there'd be this nugget of clarity and good writing to break through the dullness, and I'd keep on reading. Unfortunately, the rarity of these moments, no matter how good they were, just made the rest that much duller by comparison.
Narrative Voice: The one thing that every person who writes about this book must mention is the fact that it's narrated by Susie Salmon, a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl who watches her family from heaven. According to many reviewers, this is something that makes Sebold's novel unique. The watching-from-heaven bit isn't unique to Sebold, though the first person omniscient perspective is certainly unusual. But there's a reason this perspective rarely gets used.
In this case, the narrative voice, aside from being fairly dull, is completely inappropriate for a 14-year-old girl. It is exceedingly rare in the book to be able to believe that the person telling this story is really Susie Salmon and not Alice Sebold. This is exacerbated by the fact that she is constantly telling us what the people she watches think, feel, desire, and even dream. She even tells us what her rapist and murderer dreams about and reveals his memories. How does she know this? Sebold doesn't bother to explain. Heavenly magic, I guess.
Furthermore, there are distinct reasons for choosing to write from a first person perspective and Sebold forsakes them all. The first of these is to develop a strong sense of the one character from whose perspective we see the world. But throughout, I don't feel like I know Susie even as well as I do the other characters in the book and this is supposed to be her story. This is partly because of the lack of a distinct 14-year-old girl voice and partly because of the additional omniscience itself, which takes the focus off of Susie, who's dead and, quite frankly, not doing anything interesting any more, and places it on the other living characters who are still doing things. The second reason to choose first person perspective is found in its limitations, which
the omniscient narrative voice undoes. It makes the story more interesting to have information unfold as the narrator discovers it and to have limitations on what we are told, to have to put the story together on our own, just as the narrator does, and to have to evaluate the trustworthiness and reliability of the narrator. None of that applies here.
Finally, this perspective is nothing more than a gimmick. It adds nothing to the understanding of Susie's family and friends that a more traditional third person omniscient perspective would--other than a weird sense of unease about how she knows what they're thinking and feeling. If Sebold wants to tell the story of Susie's family and how they deal with her death, it might be more compelling to just do so instead of adding the filter of Susie's occasional reflections on events from her vantage point in heaven. This actually goes beyond uneasy. It's downright creepy. Susie watches her family sleep, she watches them in their most private moments (both alone and with others), she reads their minds. She knows more about them than she would ever know living and, quite likely, more than any of them would really want her to know. (No girl--living or dead--should have sexual experiences vicariously through her mother and her sister.) What's more, these people have no choice in the matter and so her desire to know about them is less a nice way for her to care about them, protect them, and try to heal herself (as Sebold seems to want us to see it) and more a violation of their privacy. This lack of consent and total disregard for boundaries makes Susie's watching less that of a guardian angel and more that of a stalker.
The Ending: There is little logic in this book. It is, after all, about a wish-fulfillment heaven and stalker ghosts. However, even novels that take the fantastic as their starting point require some internal logic in order to work. The Lovely Bones does not have that.
In the end, for no reason and with no explanation, Susie is able to fall from heaven into the body of one of her friends and have sex with her old crush. Somehow (don't ask me how) he recognizes her soul in her friend's body with having to be told. And the friend whose body was stolen is inexplicably happy about all of this. At this point, logic--even the logic of heaven and flying souls and wish-fulfillment fantasies--goes out the window.
Furthermore, this particular fantasy moment is (once again) extraordinarily creepy. Again there are issues of consent. Although Susie's friend Ruth, whose body she borrows, seems okay with it when she comes back from her visit to heaven (where she's quite famous, by the way), there was no asking of permission beforehand, no indication that either Susie or Sebold understands how wrong it is to just take and use another human being's body for sex. And even if there had been consent, this act--sex with her junior high sweetheart, whom she only kissed once before her death and who is now several years older than either of them were when she died--is what enables her healing and her moving on. Ah, the healing power of creepy sex.
A lot of people love this book. I don't really understand why. I guess, like the cultural obsession with Twilight, it's something I won't really understand. It doesn't bother me (too much) that so many people love these books when there are so many truly great books being overlooked; people will read and enjoy what they will read and enjoy and their literary tastes are really no concern of mine. It does concern me, though, that both of these books feature distinctly stalkerish behavior presented as love. What does this say about us as a culture?