The Lovely Bones

Today's Special: Ruana's apple pie and your choice of drinks from a bar stocked by Grandma Lynn.


Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones was at once what I expected and very much not what I expected.

I expected the novel to be a story about a murder in the suburbs, a tale in which a murder happens in a town where the citizens have always been sure that such a thing could never happen. I expected the plot to revolve around how the murder affects the town and how the murderer is eventually brought to justice.

I wasn't disappointed. The story was about those things. And yet, it was also about so much more.

The Lovely Bones is about grief. It's about how loss can bring people together and tear them apart. It's about how people can eventually, in different ways, come to terms with their grief.

Through Susie, we get to see into the minds of the many people who are affected by her life and death: her father, who becomes obsessed with catching her murderer and ignores other aspects of his life; her mother, who is shaken from the suburban life she settled for; her sister, Lindsey, who finds herself marked both by her status as sister to a murdered girl and her physical resemblance to Susie; Ray Singh, the boy loved Susie and gave her her first kiss; Ruth Conner, a girl who bumped into Susie as her soul left the Earth; and even Mr. George Harvey, serial murderer and rapist who killed Susie.

As we follow these interconnected characters and see their stories unfold, Sebold's greatest achievement lies in getting the little things right. Her characters don't respond in the ways we've been taught to expect in TV shows like Law and Order or CSI. In those shows, the families are usually little more than tools to express the magnitude of the crime; the larger story is the killer who took their family member's life. In Sebold's book, the family and friends ARE the story, and she allows each of these people to be as contradictory and unpredictable as real human beings. We don't always agree with them, but Sebold's deft storytelling allows us to see where they're coming from. Even Mr. Harvey, who is clearly a despicable excuse for a human being, is given a backstory that makes him more complex and believable than your standard black hat.

Sebold does delve into the over-dramatic at times. And there is one sequence near the end that just seemed too fantastic to me. But for most of the novel, Sebold tells the tale in a calm, clear, and patient tone, allowing the characters and story to unfold on their own time. In the process, I think she succeeds in shining a light onto what grief and tragedy really does to people - not what Hollywood would have us believe it does.