How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (2 page)

O
n May 22, 2002, six weeks before the official publication date of Alice Sebold's debut novel, which is narrated from Heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who's been raped and murdered, the novelist and former
New York Times
columnist Anna Quindlen appeared on the
Today
show and declared that if people had one book to read during the summer, “it should be
The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold. It's destined to be a classic along the lines of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and it's one of the best books I've read in years.” Viewers did what they were told, and seemed to agree. Within days of Quindlen's appearance, Sebold's novel had reached the number-one position on Amazon.com, and her publisher, Little, Brown, decided to increase the size of the first printing from 35,000—already healthily optimistic for a “literary” first novel by an author whose only other book, a memoir, was a critical but not commercial success—to 50,000 copies; a week before the book's official publication date, it was in its sixth printing, with nearly a quarter million copies in print.

One week after publication, after
Time
magazine's book critic Lev Grossman had declared the novel “the breakout fiction debut of the year,” the book was in its eighth printing, and there were 525,000 copies
in print; two weeks and three additional printings later, the number was just under a million. By the end of September, it had become clear that the book was a phenomenon of perhaps unprecedented proportions: an eighteenth printing of a quarter million copies, itself more than seven times the number originally planned for the first printing, put the number of copies in print at over two million. Such figures suggest that this work may be more than merely the novel of the year: the Barnes & Noble fiction buyer has declared that “a book like this comes around once in a decade.” If not, indeed, longer. Little, Brown's marketing director has commented that it's “one of those books that rarely comes along, that reminds you why you chose this business.”

Reviews of
The Lovely Bones
have been almost uniformly good, ranging from very warm (Michiko Kakutani, in the
Times
, called it “deeply affecting”) to ecstatic (
The New Yorker
called it “a stunning achievement”); but the pattern of the book's remarkable rise to preeminence among novels published during the past year, if not the past few years, suggests that it owes its success to word of mouth. Indeed, it must be remembered that its spectacular rise was achieved without the help of the now-defunct Oprah's Book Club, which floated more than one small first novel onto the best-seller lists.

So there can be no question that the book's popular appeal is deep and authentic. One measure of this is the fact that while the novel has, in its fifth month after publication, finally fallen to the second spot on the
Times
best-seller list, and to the fifth on Amazon.com, it has received a remarkably high number of customer reviews—842, as of this writing—this being perhaps the real measure of reader engagement. By contrast, Ian McEwan's
Atonement
(a best-selling book, according to Amazon, that readers of
The Lovely Bones
are also buying) is number thirty-five in ranking, with less than a quarter of the number of customer reviews that Sebold's book received;
Austerlitz
, by Sebold's near namesake, the late W. G. Sebald, has a ranking of 2,073 and a mere thirty-eight customer reviews. Proust's ranking is 9,315, with fifty-seven reviews.

In an interview with
Publishers Weekly
at the end of July, when the true extent of the book's success was just coming into focus, Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, suggested that the book's appeal lies in its fearless and ultimately redemptive portrayal of “dark material”: “grief, the most horrible thing that can happen in a life.” The
author herself concurred, suggesting, in an interview on
The Charlie Rose Show
at the end of September, that her first-person approach allowed her to do some serious “truth-telling” about the terrible things that happen in her novel. “I mean, there's no bullshit in the fourteen-year-old perspective, and so I think readers are drawn to that. ‘Here's something horrible. Let's look at it.'”

Others trying to account for the novel's remarkable popularity have made special mention of Sebold's ability to “tell you the most heartbreaking things with grace and passion,” as one Barnes & Noble official put it. As various commentators have noted, one of those heartbreaking things is that dreadful violence is often done to young girls: the novel appeared soon after the national news media widely, even avidly reported a series of horrifying abductions, some of them taking place in broad daylight, of girls who were subsequently murdered. This, of course, is merely a bizarre coincidence—Sebold started work on
The Lovely Bones
in 1995—but one that has made the novel “very timely,” as the fiction buyer for the Borders bookstore chain noted in July, and as both Sebold and Rose noted during the course of their discussion.

And yet darkness, grief, and heartbreak are what
The Lovely Bones
scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of its appeal.

 

The novel begins strikingly. In the second sentence, the narrator declares that “I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” The few pages that follow, describing Susie's rape at the hands of a creepy neighbor, Mr. Harvey (he builds dollhouses in his spare time), are the best in the book. “As I shook,” the dead Susie recalls of the aftermath of the rape, which takes place in an underground chamber that Harvey has constructed in a cornfield near the high school Susie attends, “a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all.” This has the cold, flat feeling of real life, devoid of self-dramatization or false emotion. The authenticity of this brief scene surely owes something to the fact that the author herself was brutally raped as a Syracuse coed in 1981, an experience that was the subject of her memoir.

And yet the arresting quality of the writing in these few pages almost immediately disappears. Sebold's bold decision to have the dead
girl narrate her story—a device familiar from
Our Town
, a sentimental story with which this one has more than a little in common—at first suggests an admirable desire to confront murder and violence, grief and guilt in a bold, even raw new way. And yet once it's dispensed with that attention-getting preface (the narrative proper consists of Susie's recounting, from her celestial vantage point, of the aftermath of her murder—the faltering search for the killer, the effects of the crime on her family and a handful of her junior high school friends—over the course of a number of years),
The Lovely Bones
shows little real interest in examining ugly things. Indeed, even in the prefatory scene, the ultimate horror that Susie undergoes is one for which the author has no words, and chooses not to represent. In the first of what turn out to be many evasive gestures, the author tastefully avoids the murder itself (to say nothing of the dismemberment). “The end came anyway,” she writes, and there is a discreet dissolve to the next chapter.

I use the word
dissolve
advisedly: it is hard to read
The Lovely Bones
without thinking of cinema—or, perhaps better, of those TV movies of the week, with their predictable arcs of crisis, healing, and “closure,” the latter inevitably evoked by an obvious symbolism. (In Sebold's novel, Susie's traumatized little brother will, as he grows older, abandon a fort that he has built in the family's backyard for a garden that he decides to plant.) Moments clearly meant to be powerful indications of how the characters are “handling” their grief are presented by means of a mannered shorthand that nowhere feels like real dialogue between living people; the rhythms of Sebold's scenes are the pat, artificial rhythms of television. Here is the scene in which, some time after the murder, Susie's beloved sister, Lindsey, young as she is, learns that only one body part has been found, and demands to learn which part it is:

A great many of Sebold's scenes end on little “beats” like this: it's a kind of writing that coyly suggests, rather than vigorously probes, the feelings and personalities of it characters. The resultant tone, throughout the book, is not, after all, grief-stricken, or harrowingly sorrowful, as Sebold's admirers would have it, but a kind of pleasant wistfulness, a memory of pain rather than pain itself. And we just know that, somehow, the pain will make these characters stronger. It comes as no surprise that Lindsey emerges as the toughest, most resilient member of the Salmon clan.

 

Equally soft-focus are the novel's confrontations with the face of evil that Susie, and Susie alone of all these characters, has looked on directly: the killer himself. Given the glut of literature on sociopaths and serial killers that's available today, it's striking that Sebold's portrait of Mr. Harvey is so perfunctory; the author's sketchy allusions to the origins of Harvey's criminal nature, and the rather offhand details she occasionally throws in, hardly add up to a textured, much less a persuasive, portrait. You're told at one point that Harvey kills animals sometimes in order to avoid killing people; you're told somewhere that the killer's father abused and eventually chased away his wild, rebellious mother, whom the young Harvey sees for the last time, dressed in white capri pants, being pushed out of a car in a town called, none too subtly, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. But these details, if anything, only make you realize how uninterested Sebold really is in the evil perpetrators in her story, as opposed to the adorable victims.

Consequences, indeed—which is to say punishment, the moral meaning and ramifications of the crime at the heart of her book—are something that Sebold treats as weakly as she does the crime itself. At the end of the novel, in what is apparently meant to be a high irony, Harvey, who has managed for years to elude Susie's increasingly suspicious family and the police, is killed accidentally: as he stands at the edge of a ravine, plotting to attack yet another girl one winter day, he
falls when an icicle drops onto him. This is meant by the author as a grim joke: earlier on, as Susie follows the careers of her sister and some high school friends, there's an episode in which a bunch of gifted kids at a special camp is challenged by their counselor to plot the “perfect murder”; Susie, observing this from Heaven with what can only be called an admirable equanimity, suggests that an icicle would be the perfect murder weapon, because it melts away, leaving no evidence. (This is, as we know, the solution to an old middle-school brain teaser.) The connection between the camp competition and the way that Harvey ends up dying suggests, again with a typical coyness, that a perfect retribution has indeed taken place; but it's a cute, rather than morally satisfying, way to settle the murderer's fate. The real irony here is, if anything, unintended. Without the arch setup of the “perfect murder” competition, Harvey's accidental end would have been interesting, and perhaps suggestive of the operations of a larger cosmic order (or not); with Sebold's laboriously constructed joke, however, the murderer's death becomes one more piece of a narrative puzzle that falls, all too often, rather patly into place.

So having the murder victim be the protagonist offers no special view of evil, or of guilt. I asked myself, as I read
The Lovely Bones
, what could be the point of having the dead girl narrate the aftermath of her death—what, in other words, could this first-person voice achieve that, say, a conventionally omniscient third-person narrator couldn't—and it occurred to me that the answer is that Susie is there to provide comfort: not to those who survive her, to whom (in Sebold's cosmology) she can't really make herself known or felt, but to the audience. Instead of making you confront dreadful things, Sebold's novel, if anything, keeps assuring you that those things have no really permanent consequences—apart from the feel-good emotional redemptions experienced by all of Susie's survivors, and indeed by Susie herself. Susie, we learn, has to be weaned of her desire to linger in the world of the living and “change the lives of those I loved on Earth” in order to progress from “her” heaven to Heaven itself. The cosmology is vague—more shades of
Our Town
here—but that's the point:
The Lovely Bones
is designed not to challenge, but to soothe. The novel's real subject is this process of soothing (which is to say of healing and “closure”) as it is experienced by her family and friends.

 

The latter are a fairly predictable bunch. There is Ruth, the class misfit (“her intelligence made her a problem”), who's “touched” by Susie's spirit as it rushes across the cornfield on that fateful night, en route to Heaven, and who hence develops a special sensitivity to the ghosts of murdered females, which she tends to glimpse while wandering around New York City after she leaves her hometown. And there's Ray Singh, another misfit, a handsome Indian boy who's Susie's great junior high school crush, and who goes on to become a medical student with (again) a special intuition about the souls within the bodies on which he operates. These characters aren't particularly textured or original—it somehow comes as no surprise that buxom Ruth is a latent lesbian and ends up living in a closet-sized room in the East Village—but they are part of milieus that Sebold does have real flair for describing: the suburbs, with their submerged but powerful hierarchies and taboos (Sebold is good on the way Ray's family, to say nothing of Harvey, are quietly marginalized by their more “normal” neighbors); and the abstruse social worlds of high school kids, which the young Susie, in some of the novel's soundest passages, is just learning to navigate when she meets her death.