How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (3 page)

More important, inevitably, is the healing process that Susie's family must undergo. The novel follows the Salmons over the course of the ten years after Susie's murder, ten years during which her mother, Abigail, has affairs and breaks free of the family, only to return at the end; her father implacably pursues Harvey, whom he knows instinctively to be the killer, and has a heart attack (but doesn't die); her sister, Lindsey, grows up, marries her high school sweetheart, and has a baby; and her younger brother, Buckley, a toddler at the time of the murder, gets to have a climactic, but not devastating, expression of his resentment at their mother for abandoning her family. (He's the one who ends up gardening.) Abigail has returned, by this point, to care for her husband after his heart attack, so that the novel ends with a family reunion.

Even this very brief description should suggest the extent to which this writer likes to stitch improbably neat sutures for some very untidy wounds. And indeed, from that initial evasion of the details of the actual murder and dismemberment to its infantine vision of Heaven as a cross between a rehab program (Susie gets an “intake counselor” when she
arrives) and an all-you-can-eat restaurant (where “all you have to do is desire” something to get it: the dead Susie is delighted to find that peppermint-stick ice cream is available all year round, postmortem), to the final pages in which Susie's family, fragmented for a time after the murder, comes together ten years after her death in a tableau marked by a symbolic redemption and rebirth (her sister's newborn daughter is named after her), Sebold's novel again and again offers healing with no real mourning, and prefers to offer clichés, some of them quite puerile, of comfort instead of confrontations with evil, or even with genuinely harrowing grief.

The most egregious, and the most distasteful, example of the latter is the climax of the novel, a scene in the final pages in which Susie “falls out” of Heaven in order to inhabit the body of Ruth for a while. Why does this happen? The cosmology that underpins this bizarre scene may, yet again, be fuzzy, but the psychology—or perhaps it's the sociology—is not. After the startling scene in which Susie returns to earth, we learn that she has assumed corporeal dimensions once more so that she can enjoy an afternoon of lovemaking with Ray Singh, who even as he is having glorious sex with “Ruth” understands that something is amiss—that the body of his living friend is occupied by the spirit of the dead one. (This is when he starts having a sixth sense about souls—about Things That Science Cannot Know, etc.) Only after Susie gets to know what really good sex is like can she “let go” of her earthly existence.

That a novel with the pretensions to moral, emotional, and social seriousness of this one should end up seeking, and finding, the ultimate salvation and redemption in a recuperative teenage fantasy of idyllic sex suggests that cinema, or television, may in fact be the wrong thing to be comparing it to. Sebold's final narrative gesture reminds you, in the end, of nothing so much as pop love songs, with their aromatherapeutic vision of adult relationships as nothing but yearnings endlessly, blissfully fulfilled—or of breakups inevitably smoothed over and healed with a kiss. It is surely no accident that, just after Ray and Susie/Ruth make love, Susie's estranged parents are reunited on her father's hospital bed, weeping and kissing each other.

The level of Sebold's writing, it must be said, does not often rise above that of her moral seriousness. The prose wobbles between a grotesque ungainliness (“The time she'd had alone had been gravitation
ally circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back”) and a nervous tendency to oversaturation with “lyrical” effects. Horror, Susie opines, is “like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained”—the kind of nonsense that has the superficial prettiness you associate with the better class of greeting cards. Sometimes it achieves both, as in this description of the lovemaking between Susie's distraught mother and her police detective lover: “I felt the kisses as they came down my mother's neck and onto her chest, like the small, light feet of mice, and like the flower petals falling that they were.” (The placement of “falling” and “that they were” was, you suspect, something the author was very pleased with indeed.) Two lines later, Sebold is inspired to find yet a third comparandum for those kisses, likening them to “whispers calling her away from me and from her family and from her grief.” The novel's subject may be a killing, but stylistically, overkill is the name of the game.

 

That Sebold's book does so little to show us a complex or textured portrait of the evil that sets its action in motion, or to suggest that the aftermath of horrible violence within families is, ultimately, anything but feel-good redemption, suggests that its huge popularity has very little, in fact, to do with the timeliness of its publication just months after a series of abductions and murders of girls had transfixed a nation already traumatized by the events of September 11. It is, rather, the latter catastrophe that surely accounts for the novel's gigantic appeal.

For who is Sebold's public, but one that has very recently seen innocents die horribly, one to whom Sebold's fantasy of recuperation and, indeed, an endless, video-like replay has a vital subconscious appeal? (“One of the blessings of my heaven is that I can go back to these moments, live them again,” Susie comments, “and be with my mother in a way I never could have been.”) A public, moreover, that is now able to see itself as an entire nation of innocent victims? Immediately after the September 11 attacks, Susan Sontag was widely vilified for having called, in
The New Yorker
, for a thoroughgoing examination of the “self-
righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators” in the wake of the event—a “campaign to infantilize the public.” Our leaders, she went on,

Confidence and grief management are what
The Lovely Bones
offers, too: it, too, is bent on convincing us that everything is OK—whatever, indeed, its author and promoters keep telling us about how unflinchingly it examines bad things. “We're here,” Susie's ghost says, in the final pages of the novel. “All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn't have to be sad or scary.” The problem, of course, is that it does have to be sad and scary; that you need to experience the badness and fear—as Sebold's characters, none more than Susie herself, never quite manage to do—in order to get to the place that Sebold wants to take you, the locus of healing and closure: in short, to Heaven.

And what a Heaven it is. In the weeks following September 11, there was much dark jocularity at the expense of those Islamic terrorists who, it was said, had volunteered to die in order to enjoy the postmortem favors of numerous virgins in Paradise. But how much more sophisticated, or morally textured, is Sebold's climactic vision of Heaven, or indeed of death, as the place, or state, that allows you to indulge a recuperative fantasy of great sex?

That for Sebold and her readers Heaven can't, in fact, wait is symptomatic of a larger cultural dysfunction, one implicit in our ongoing handling of the September 11 disaster.
The Lovely Bones
appeared just as the first anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was looming; but by then, we'd already commemorated the terrible day. September 11, 2002—the first anniversary of the attacks, a day that ought to have marked (as is supposed to be the case with such anniversary rituals) some symbolic coming to terms with what had happened—was not a date for which the American people and its press
could patiently wait. Instead, on March 11, 2002, we rushed to celebrate, with all due pomp and gravitas, something called a “six-month anniversary.” In its proleptic yearning for relief, and indeed in its emphasis on the bathetic appeal of victimhood, its pseudotherapeutic lingo of healing and its insistence that everything is really OK, that we needn't really be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary, Sebold's book is indeed timely—is indeed “the novel of the year”—although in ways that none of those now caught up in the glamour of its unprecedentedly high approval ratings might be prepared to imagine.

—The New York Review of Books,
January 16, 2003

A
t the beginning of the novel in question, it is a fine June day in a great city, and a fifty-two-year-old woman named Clarissa goes shopping for flowers. She is giving a party that evening, and as she walks to the flower shop, a host of thoughts tumble through her mind. Not all of them are about her party. (Her party!) She worries, for instance, that her beautiful teenaged daughter is in thrall to a humorless middle-aged woman who is, somehow, her, Clarissa's, mortal enemy. (The woman's fierce ideological views make Clarissa feel slightly shabby in comparison; and indeed Clarissa supposes that she is, when all is said and done, quite “ordinary.”) She is embarrassed to run into someone whom she hasn't invited; she has reveries about a long-ago summer in a house in the country when she and some friends indulged in illicit love affairs. (As she thinks these thoughts she is glimpsed by a neighbor who sternly, but not unkindly, judges her looks: she has aged.) She thinks, often, about death. As she stands in the shop buying the flowers, there is commotion outside—a loud noise—and when Clarissa and the florist go to the window to see what it might be, they get a glimpse of a famous head emerging from a vehicle, someone everyone knows from the papers, from pictures.

The famous head, glimpsed from afar by curious, even prurient crowds, has been placed there by the author of this novel for the purpose of contrast. This head reminds us of the great world out there, and the values by which it measures things: fame, importance, power, rank, distinction—and hence stands in stark contrast to Clarissa's head, filled as it is with a quotidian, haphazard jumble of thoughts that are of no particular importance to anyone except Clarissa herself. Clarissa's life is meant, indeed, to be one of those existences, neither brilliant nor tragic, that moved Virginia Woolf, in
A Room of One's Own
, to ponder what the proper subject and style of an authentic women's literature might possibly be. The values of novels, she argued, reflect the values of life, which novels must mirror; and it was, furthermore, “obvious” that

Part of the proper work of women's writing, Woolf suggested, was to recuperate for literature “these infinitely obscure lives [that] remain to be recorded.” Let men preoccupy themselves with “the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian's view of the past.” As Woolf grew as an artist, she experimented with ways to record and “bring…to life” another kind of experience altogether, one hitherto buried in the interstices of those great movements.

One way to do so was, indeed, to focus on the concrete minutiae of women's everyday existences—everything that men's literature, by its very nature, overlooked, an omission that led to yet larger gaps and inaccuracies. “So much has been left out unattempted,” Woolf complained. “Almost without exception [women] are shown in their relation to men…not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation
to the other sex.” And so, she told the audiences of the lectures that would become
A Room of One's Own
,

That which men's literature dismissed as trivia must be taken up and forged into a new kind of literature that would suggest how great were the hidden worlds and movements in women's lives; such a literature was long overdue. “There is the girl behind the counter,” she wrote toward the end of
A Room of One's Own
. “I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion which old Professor Z and his like are now inditing.”

Hence Clarissa, with her random thoughts of flowers and parties and sewing and old love affairs: she is (for all the differences in social status) that girl, just as the famous head is a reminder of the other world, the world of great movements, of Napoleons and Miltons. And indeed Clarissa is the heroine of the first great example of the literary project that Woolf advocates in
A Room of One's Own
:
Mrs. Dalloway
, first published in 1925, a few years before the essay in which she explicated that project.

And yet the novel I began this essay by describing is not, in fact,
Mrs. Dalloway
. Or, I should say, is not only
Mrs. Dalloway
. It is, rather, Michael Cunningham's
The Hours
, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner which is at once an homage to and an impersonation of the earlier work of fiction. (Woolf had long planned to call her novel “The Hours,” but decided on
Mrs. Dalloway
in the end.) In it, three narratives about three women, each connected in some way to
Mrs. Dalloway
, are intertwined; in each of the three, numerous elements from Woolf's novel—characters, names, relationships, tiny details of phrasing, individual sentences, whole scenes (not least, the world-famous head poking momentarily
from the big vehicle)—are reincarnated with almost obsessional devotion. But perhaps the most remarkable achievement of
The Hours
is to preserve Woolf's project—to avoid the banal ways in which male novelists often see women, either dramatizing them or trivializing them, and thereby making them more comfortable for consumption by men.

 

“The design is so queer & so masterful,” Woolf wrote in her journal, in June 1923, of the book she was struggling to write; the same words, with additional overtones, could well be used of Cunningham's reinterpretation of it. Cunningham takes his Woolfian donnée and splits it into three narratives, each a kind of riff on some aspect of
Mrs. Dalloway
. Each takes place, as does
Mrs. Dalloway
, in the course of a single day: each focuses on the inner life of one woman. The sections called “Mrs. Dalloway,” set in the 1990s, are about a lesbian book editor in New York City named Clarissa Vaughan (whom her best friend and onetime lover, a poet now dying of AIDS, enjoys calling “Mrs. Dalloway”; she's giving a party to celebrate the prestigious literary award he's won). The sections called “Mrs. Brown,” set in 1949, recount one fraught day in the life of an L.A. housewife, Laura Brown, who's torn between reading
Mrs. Dalloway
for the first time and planning a birthday party for her husband. And the “Mrs. Woolf” sections envision Virginia Woolf herself on a day in 1923 when she conceives how she might write
Mrs. Dalloway
. In each section, Cunningham ingeniously uses Woolf's novel as a template: like Woolf's Clarissa, each of his three heroines plans a party, has an unexpected visitor, escapes, in some sense, from the house, and tries to create something (a party, a cake, a book).

The central story is the story of Clarissa Vaughan, the woman whose preparations for a grand party, like those of Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, are the vehicle for a stream-of-consciousness narrative that suggests a contemporary, wryly self-aware Everywoman: “an ordinary person (at this age, why bother trying to deny it?).” While this Clarissa prepares for her party, the dying poet, whose name is Richard (the given name of Mr. Dalloway in Woolf's story) worsens: just as the Great War and the Spanish flu gave poignancy and weight to Clarissa Dalloway's musings about the essential goodness and beauty of everyday existence (“life; London; this moment in June”), AIDS gives substance to the similar
thoughts of Cunningham's Clarissa (“What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June….”).

Both Clarissas, for all that they are haunted by thoughts of death, are strong. In Cunningham's novel, as in Woolf's, it is the men surrounding the women who keep falling apart. In
Mrs. Dalloway
, Clarissa's old flame, Peter Walsh, disintegrates in tears when he shows up for an unexpected visit. (He's having an affair with a much younger married woman; sensible Clarissa knows she was right to refuse his offer of marriage, long ago.) In a different part of town, meanwhile, the mad poet Septimus Smith disintegrates and flings himself from a window. Cunningham's novel reproduces these elements while updating them. His Clarissa lives in Greenwich Village with another woman, Sally (the name Woolf gave to the girl her Clarissa once kissed, long ago, in a country house); in his novel, it's an old flame of Richard's—his onetime lover, Louis—who shows up for an unexpected visit and, while Clarissa is preparing for the party, dissolves into tears. Like Woolf's Peter Walsh, Cunningham's Louis is foolish in love: he's having an affair with a male theater student who “does the most remarkable performance pieces about growing up white and gay in South Africa.”

And in Cunningham's novel, too, it's a mad poet, Richard (to whom the author gives some of Septimus's lines: both characters believe they hear animals speaking ancient Greek), who spectacularly kills himself toward the end of the book—the kind of theatrical self-immolation that Western literature has typically reserved for women, whose staged disintegrations have long served as the climaxes of so many dramas and novels. In
A Room of One's Own
, Woolf hinted that behind the empire-building noise that men made, women were strong, too; that because of the patriarchal economy, their creations were more often than not children, households, families; but they did create, and could of course create art, too, if they had the means. It was just that no one had written of this strength, this creativity. In
Mrs. Dalloway
, she wrote of it—and of men's weakness; and in
The Hours
, Cunningham does too.

 

The other two strands of Cunningham's tripartite narrative recapitulate this important if subtle motif of Woolf's story in various ways. His “Mrs. Woolf” section is a fantasy of what might have gone through
Woolf's mind on the day that Mrs. Dalloway took shape. On that summer's day, she wakes up in Richmond (the suburb to which she and her husband, Leonard, had retreated for the sake of her fragile mental health), thinks about her book, entertains her sister, Vanessa Bell, and “Nessa”'s children to tea (they come unexpectedly early), and tries, unsuccessfully, to run off to London, whose noise and bustle she misses. (A frantic Leonard catches up with her outside the train station and fetches her home.) It is no easy or safe thing for a contemporary novelist to ventriloquize a great author who was a novelist herself, but Cunningham approaches his task with great delicacy—and no little erudition: much of the “Mrs. Woolf” section of his book is based on careful reading of Woolf's journals. The “escape” scene, for instance, is based on an episode that Woolf records in an October 15, 1923, diary entry:

Cunningham delicately transforms this, in his novel, into a parable about Woolf's artistry, and her bravery—her yearning to have a full life out of which to create her art, whatever the risks.

But the real delight of the “Mrs. Woolf” portion of Cunningham's
The Hours
is its delicate, detailed, and sometimes witty suggestions about how Woolf might have come up with some of the material that appears in
Mrs. Dalloway
. In
The Hours
, Vanessa Bell's children find a dying bird in the garden, and the youngest, her daughter, Angelica Bell, makes an elaborate bier for it out of grass and roses. Peering at the tiny dead thing in its improbable nest, Virginia thinks to herself that “it could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death.” Readers of
Mrs. Dalloway
will remember that the wife of Septimus Smith is an Italian girl who makes hats; she is, indeed, making one just before her shell-shocked husband flings himself out the window. The hat-like bier gives Cunningham's Virginia an even more important idea: that it
is not Clarissa who must die (she loves life, the world, too much), but the mad poet. “Clarissa,” Virginia thinks, “is the bed in which the bride is laid.” Clarissa's life, that is to say—and her love of life, the quotidian thoughts and feelings that suggest how good she finds life, and how strong she is—must be the surround, the context, in which the death of the poet, the young man, will stand out as anomalous, impossible to integrate, “other.” Another way of putting this is that Virginia will do to her male characters what so many male authors have done to their female characters.

 

It is the third of Cunningham's three women who has no clear referent in either
Mrs. Dalloway
or the life of its author. But this is not to say that Laura Brown, the housewife whose reading of Woolf's novel, one summer's day in 1949, transforms her life, has no basis in Woolf's work. In
A Room of One's Own
, Woolf wryly comments on the ironic way in which (as was the case in ancient Athens, she thinks; one recalls that she worked on her Greek every day) woman is “imaginatively”—i.e., in the works of male writers—“of the greatest importance,” while being “completely insignificant” in real life. Hence what one must do to create a fully real woman is