The Lovely Bones [spare no effort]

A friend who turned 43 on my birthday last month was just called home to God.  He leaves a wife and three young daughters to cling to the memory of a husband and father.  I want to take a moment to remind everyone of how precious and fleeting life is.  Trite maybe, but worth repeating.  Our time on earth is a flicker, do not waste it.  Whether in the pursuit of purpose or peace, live a life of meaning and quality.  Some are taken too soon.

“Life’s sun is going to set.  During these brief days that you have strength, be quick and spare no effort of your wings.”  ~Rumi

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I am nearly halfway finished with Matterhorn which is rocking my world much that I don’t want to take even a moment to pause and reflect on this novel about a murdered teenage girl.  However, if I don’t develop some thoughts and memorialize The Lovely Bones in my mind, then I might as well have not wasted the few days it took to read.

So here we are.  I jotted down some notes as I was reading, like any terrible blogger/slacker writer, I have misplaced them.  What was meant to be a thorough retrospective is now reduced to a mere summary of impressions.

The book was okay.  The first 50 pages or so were fairly gripping, and Susie’s murder was just awful.  I think the author handled the telling of her murder very well, and I imagine it took quite a few edits to make it convincing without being vulgar.  I appreciated the lack of graphic description.  As the tale unfolded and more characters were wheeled into the plotline, I simply didn’t attach to any of them.  In my opinion, if one has read 1/3 through a novel, one should deeply care about at least some of the characters.  Whether that relationship manifests as adoration or antipathy, the reader must feel emotion and interact with the characters.  Despite have plenty of characters that were meant to summon the reader’s sympathies, I never really engaged.

The premise of the story was excellent.  The execution was mediocre. 

There are, of course, many overarching themes at play in The Lovely Bones.  The first, most obvious theme was that of immortality.  Ironically, Susie gains immortal youth via premature death.  To those on Earth, Susie will always remain frozen as a child of the 70’s.  She will never grow up, grow old, and take on all the roles that her own mother struggled with.  Susie is never changed by the forces of life because she is permanently altered by death. 

On the other hand, Susie’s mother Abigail, struggles under the weight of life’s forces.  Abigail loathes the life she has chosen – husband, family, duty.  She remains in perpetual daydream about the life that could have been – teaching, adventure, freedom.  The life not realized can always be more romantic than the life already lived, and I doubt any mother doesn’t have moments of longing.  Most of us don’t abandon our grieving families to frolic on the opposite end of the continent.  I had no sympathy for this weak woman, and felt a small satisfaction at the end when she admits that Jack (Susie’s father) had always been stronger than she.   

I appreciated the moments when Susie notices that Abigail is a woman beyond her mother.  Susie tells us, "What I remember most is watching things hit my mother while I looked at her, how the life she had wanted and the loss of it reached her in waves."  I wonder when the day will come that my children will make that same discovery.

The best irony of the novel was the contrast of Susie’s truncated life and her mother’s torturously survived one.

I was struck throughout reading at how lonely all the characters were.  I felt as though I were strolling a long corridor and peeking through windows, a momentary glimpse into each character’s solitude though they all dwelled in the same novel.  Maybe that is why I didn’t connect with the characters – because they failed to connect with each other.  At the same time, there was a strange tension between the characters that never quite felt genuine.

Maybe because it was told through the perspective of an immortally dead 14 year old that I couldn’t relate to the narrative.  I really wanted to.  I understood the strands that Alice Sebold attempts to weave together, but for me they just don’t hold.  So much of the story seemed contrived that very little actually resonated.  The Guardian’s Ali Smith wrote “The Lovely Bones is so keen in the end to comfort us and make safe its world that, however well-meaning, it avoids its own ramifications.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself.