Lovely Bones

The lovely bones of this book are the themes of transformation, overcoming grief and loss, forgiveness and reconciliation. Alice Sebold intertwines a heartrending tapestry of multiple subplots as a community is shattered by the brutal rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon.

Steadily and with an assured, unsentimental voice, Sebold uses the omniscient narration of the murdered teenager to move back and forth between the past and present. Readers are invited into the hearts and minds of the people who knew and loved Susie. After her murder, Susie inhabits a heaven created by her own imagination, a comfortable haven that allows her to hold vigil over the family and friends she was forced to leave behind.

Susie vicariously experiences the life that was brutally stolen from her by becoming a “watcher”. As her sister, Lindsey, matures and comes to grips both with the horrific loss and the notoriety of her sister’s death, Susie tenderly watches over her and rejoices when her sister blossoms and falls in love. We mourn for the life she lost, but the narration does not become maudlin. Susie’s voice is objective and matter-of-fact as she comes to terms with the reality that she can only watch and cannot alter the course of her loved one’s lives, even when Lindsey appears to be headed toward being the next victim of the vicious serial killer.

The novel truly comes into its own, though, as it examines the relationship between Susie’s parents, Abigail and Jack Salmon. On the surface, before the death of their daughter, they seem to have a good, if not perfect, marriage. Sebold does a masterful job of showing the disintegration of their relationship sharpened by the stark discrepancy in how they handle the loss of their daughter. By moving back and forth between the aftermath of their daughter’s disappearance and events from the past, we follow their steady route toward the isolation of unshared grief. Sebold presents these ordinary, flawed characters with gentle compassion, as intrinsically good people who are coping as best they can.

Susie’s mother has failed to fully mature, possibly as a result of her own father’s abandonment. She fancies that she has missed out on the life she imagined for herself as a free spirited intellectual. Motherhood and marriage are an uncomfortable burden. After her daughter’s death, she escapes, first into a doomed affair with the detective investigating her daughter’s death. Using spare and vivid imagery, Susie describes her mother sinking further into a world where she is not required to deal with her daughter’s loss. “Ruinous and marvelous all at once. They [her lover’s kisses] were whispers calling her away from me and from her family and from her grief. She followed with her body….granted her most temporal wish. To find a doorway of her ruined heart, in merciful adultery” (Sebold 196-197) . A compelling, imaginary split screen for this subplot is created when the author simultaneously describes Abigail’s illicit rendezvous with her lover at the same moment her daughter’s murderer slips away unnoticed. Later, Abigail becomes totally overwhelmed and abandons her family altogether. She runs away to California and a dead end job where she can be anonymous.

At the other extreme, Susie’s father, Jack is first occupied by trying to find her killer. Although he soon puts together the pieces that point to an eccentric neighbor, the police and even his wife believe that he is being carried away by his grief and acting irrationally. By the time firm evidence does point to the killer, it is too late. He retreats into his grief, forcing a role reversal with his young son who tried to support and care for him.

The beauty of this book is the healing that finally occurs between these two people who truly do love each other. When crisis propels Abigail back to Jack, Susie looks on from her heaven and is grateful to see “what I had been waiting for, for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone” (Sebold 316). Those who have suffered this type of catastrophic loss will see the beauty of Susie’s poignant question, as she sees her family finally coming to terms with what has happened. She muses, “When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living—to learn to accept (Sebold 318)? Sebold wisely includes a character specifically to show her characters the route to forgiveness. As the family learns to accept and appreciate their eccentric grandmother in her alcoholic splendor, they also learn to forgive and accept each other.

We are left with a comfortable feeling of closure that people can and do overcome even the most devastating losses. In Lovely Bones, sadness is carried forward and becomes a permanent shadow that honors what has been lost, but joy and contentment return with a recognition of and reconnection to what remains. Those are the lovely bones that provide support, bring comfort and allow us to move on.