The Lovely Bones

This article is about the novel. For the 2009 film, see The Lovely Bones (film).

The Lovely Bones

Author	Alice Sebold
Cover artist	Yoori Kim (design); Daniel Lee (photo-illustration)
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Little, Brown
Publication date	2002
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback and Paperback); audio book
Pages	328 pp
ISBN	0-316-66634-3
OCLC	48495099
Dewey Decimal	813/.6 21
LC Class	PS3619.E26 L68 2002

The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being murdered, watches from heaven as her family and friends go on with their lives, while she herself comes to terms with her own death. The novel received a great deal of critical praise and became an instant bestseller. A film adaptation of the novel, directed by Peter Jackson who personally purchased the rights, was released in American theatres on January 15, 2010.

Title

The novel's title stems from a line towards the end of the novel, in which Susie ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death:

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.

Synopsis

On December 6, 1973 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, Susie Salmon takes a shortcut home from her school. She is approached by a neighbor, George Harvey, a man in his mid-40s who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has recently built nearby. He claims that he built it for the kids in the neighborhood. Once she enters, he rapes and then murders her, dismembering her body and putting it in a safe. Susie's spirit flees toward her personal heaven.

The Salmon family is at first reluctant to accept that Susie has been killed, but then accepts this when Susie's hat was found. The police talk to Harvey, find him odd but see no other reason to suspect him. Jack, Susie's father, becomes suspicious and later begins to obsess about Harvey. Susie's sister Lindsey comes to share these suspicions. Jack, consumed with guilt over not having been able to protect his daughter, remains on extended leave from work and increasingly isolates himself at home. Meanwhile Buckley, the youngest child, tries to make sense of all this as he starts school.

One day late in the summer a detective named Len Fenerman comes to tell the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night in his study, Jack looks out the window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing it to be Harvey returning to destroy evidence, he runs out to confront him with a baseball bat. It turns out to be Susie's best friend, Clarissa, and her boyfriend Brian looking for Susie. Brian and Jack struggle, and Brian hits Jack with the bat. As a result he has to have knee replacement surgery. In the wake of this, his wife Abigail begins having an affair with Fenerman, who is a widower.

Still suspicious, Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a drawing of the pit, but is forced to leave when Harvey returns prematurely. Sensing danger, Harvey leaves Lansdale as soon as possible and becomes a drifter. A year later the police bulldoze the cornfield and turn up a Coke bottle from the night of the murder with Harvey's and Susie's fingerprints, finally making him an official suspect. However, he remains at large. That fall, a hunter in Connecticut discovers the body of another one of Harvey's victims, and one of Susie's charms nearby. In 1981, a detective in Connecticut links the charm to Susie's murder and calls Fenerman. As they uncover further evidence, the police realize that Harvey is a serial killer who preys on young girls. At about the same time, Susie sees into his traumatic childhood, and develops a grudging pity for her killer.

The following winter Abigail leaves her husband, going to her father's old cabin in New Hampshire and then moving to California, taking a job at a winery. As a result, her alcoholic mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons' home to help her son-in-law care for Buckley and Lindsey.

Lindsey and her boyfriend Samuel Heckler become engaged, find an old house in the woods owned by a classmate's father, and decide to fix it up and live there. Sometime after the celebration, while arguing with Buckley, Jack suffers from a heart attack. The emergency prompts Abigail to return from California, but the reunion is tempered by Buckley's lingering bitterness at her for having abandoned him and his father.

Meanwhile, Harvey returns to Norristown, which has become more developed. He explores his old neighborhood and notices the school is being expanded into the cornfield where he murdered Susie. He drives by the sinkhole where Susie's body rests, and where Ruth Connors and Ray Singh are standing. Ruth, an old classmate of Susie's who had felt Susie's spirit go past her after her murder, senses the women Harvey has killed and is overcome. Susie, looking down from heaven, is also overwhelmed with emotion and the two girls exchange positions. Susie, her spirit now in Ruth's body, connects with Ray, who had a crush on Susie in school, and had made plans to go out with her a few days after the murder. Ray senses Susie's presence, and takes advantage of the fact he has Susie back with him for the time being. The two go to the back room in Hal Heckler's (the older brother of Lindsey's boyfriend Samuel) bike shop and have sex. Afterward, Susie returns to heaven.

She moves on into the larger heaven, still watching earthbound events from time to time. She sees her sister's newborn baby girl, who is named Abigail Suzanne. One day she spies Harvey getting off a Greyhound bus at a diner in New Hampshire in early spring. Behind the diner he sees a young woman and attempts to speak to her, but she rebuffs him. Susie notices some large icicles hanging from the roof, and after the woman leaves, one falls and hits Harvey on the head, knocking him into a nearby ravine and ultimately killing him.

The novel ends with Susie showing us Lindsey's newborn daughter, then tracking away to a newer house where a man has finally found Susie's old charm bracelet. "This little girl's grown up by now," his wife says. "Almost. Not quite," Susie's narrative voice rejoins. "I wish you all a long and happy life."

Characters

• Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is murdered in the first chapter, and narrates the novel from heaven. In the film adaption the character is portrayed by Saoirse Ronan
• Jack Salmon, her father, who works for an insurance agency in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In the film adaption he is portrayed by Mark Wahlberg.
• Abigail Salmon, her mother, whose growing family frustrates her youthful dreams and later has an affair with Detective Len Fenerman.In the film adaption the character is portrayed by Rachel Weisz
• Lindsey Salmon, Susie's sister, a year younger than she is, thought of as the smartest. In the film adaption the character is portrayed by Rose McIver
• Buckley Salmon, Susie's brother, ten years younger than she is. His unplanned birth forced Abigail to cancel her plans for a teaching career. He sometimes sees Susie while she watches him in her heaven.In the film adaption the character is portrayed by Christian Thomas Ashdale
• Grandma Lynn, Abigail's mother, an eccentric alcoholic who comes to live with her son-in-law and grandchildren after her daughter leaves. In the film adaption the character is portrayed by Susan Sarandon
• George Harvey, the Salmons' neighbor, who kills Susie and goes unpunished, even though the Salmons come to suspect him, then leaves Lansdale to kill again. He is also a serial killer. Throughout the novel she refers to him as Mr. Harvey, the name she had addressed him by in life.In the film adaption he is portrayed by Stanley Tucci.
• Ruth Connors, a girl Susie went to school with, whom her dead spirit touches as she leaves the earth. She becomes fascinated with Susie, despite barely having known her in her life, and devotes her life to writing about the visions of the dead she sees. In the film adaption she is portrayed by Carolyn Dando.
• Ray Singh, a boy from India, (via England), the first and only boy to kiss Susie, and later, becomes Ruth's friend. Was first suspected by the police of murdering Susie, but later proves his alibi. In the film adaption the character is portrayed by Reece Ritchie
• Ruana Singh, Ray's mother, with whom Abigail Salmon sometimes smokes cigarettes.
• Samuel Heckler, Lindsey's boyfriend and later her husband.
• Hal Heckler, Sam's older brother who runs a motorcycle repair shop.
• Len Fenerman, the police detective in charge of investigating Susie's death and finds her elbow. His wife commits suicide and he later has an affair with Abigail.
• Clarissa, Susie's best friend on Earth. Susie explains that she admired Clarissa because she was always allowed to do things Susie was not, like wear platform shoes and smoke. She has a boyfriend named Brian. In film adaption Clarissa is portrayed by pop due singer Amanda Michalka.
• Holly, Susie's best friend in heaven. While the text does not say so explicitly, it is implied she is Vietnamese American. She has no accent, although she did on earth, and took her name from Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Her own life and death are never expanded upon. In the film adaption she is portrayed by Nikki SooHoo .
• Mr. DeWitt, the boy's soccer coach at school the coach said to him that Susie came to see him last night. Mr. DeWitt encourages Lindsey, a successful athlete, to try out for his team.
• Mrs. DeWitt, Mr. DeWitt's wife, an English teacher at Susie's school. She teaches both Lindsey and Susie
• Holiday, Susie's dog.

Alice Sebold

Origins and inspiration

The novel draws from the author's personal experiences from when she was raped during her freshman year at Syracuse University. In Lucky, Sebold's 1999 memoir of the event and its aftermath, she describes how it transformed her life, especially after learning that the rapist's previous victim had died. After later seeing the rapist on the street, she reported him to the police and eventually testified against him. He was convicted and received the maximum sentence.

She began the novel in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of those events. However, she fiercely resists suggestions that it had anything to do with the aftermath of the rape:

First of all, therapy is for therapy. Leave it there. Second, because you're a rape victim, everyone wants to turn everything you do into something "therapeutic" — oh, I understand, going to the bathroom must be so therapeutic for you!

Location

In an afterword to the paperback edition, Sebold stated that "the oddness of what we often condescendingly refer to as the suburbs" was also an inspiration. She had lived outside of Philadelphia herself for a time.

Themes and literary techniques

The novel is a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. Even though Susie is dead, she manages to grow up while in heaven, as her tone and perspective as a narrator changes throughout the novel.

Much of the novel concerns itself with grief and how it is, or is not, overcome by Susie's family.

The disintegration of the suburban nuclear family during the 1970s is also present, as Susie's death precipitates a chain of events which results in Abigail feeling trapped by her domestic responsibilities and ultimately leaving her husband.

Commercial and critical reception

Sebold's novel was a surprise success when it was first published, mainly because it was written by a young author known only for one other book. In addition, the plot and narrative device are unusual and unconventional. It would have been considered a success by Little, Brown and Company had it sold 20,000 copies, but it ultimately sold over a million and remained on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for over a year. Some of that could have been attributed to adroit marketing. Prior to its June publication, an excerpt was run in Seventeen. Shortly afterwards, ABC's Good Morning America chose it for its book club. The book became a popular summer read and a runaway success, with much of its sales subsequently attributed to word of mouth.

Critics also helped the novel's success by being generally positive, many noting that the story had more promise than the idea of a brutally murdered teenage girl going to heaven and following her family and friends as they get on with their lives would have suggested. "This is a high-wire act for a first novelist, and Alice Sebold maintains almost perfect balance," wrote Katherine Bouton in the New York Times Book Review.

The novel also sold well in other English-speaking countries, though reviews were not as glowing. While admitting the novel "has its very fine moments," The Guardian's Ali Smith ultimately said "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." Her Observer colleague Philip Hensher was more blunt, conceding that the novel was "very readable" but "ultimately it seems like a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy."

Controversies

Because Susie's character is narrating the story from her own personal heaven, there is some controversy over the depiction of the afterlife. Readers who took a Christian perspective faulted Susie's heaven for being utterly devoid of any apparent religious aspect. "It's a very God-free heaven, with no suggestion that anyone has been judged, or found wanting," Hensher stated. Sebold, who was raised Episcopalian, is not religious and therefore intended the heaven to be simplistic in design:

To me, the idea of heaven would give you certain pleasures, certain joys - but it's very important to have an intellectual understanding of why you want those things. It's also about discovery, and being able to come to the conclusions that elude you in life. So it's from the most simplistic things - Susie wants a duplex - to larger things, like being able to understand why her mother was always slightly distant from her.

Furthermore, Sebold has stated that the book is not intended to be religious, "but if people want to take things and interpret them, then I can't do anything about that. It is a book that has faith and hope and giant universal themes in it, but it's not meant to be, 'This is the way you should look at the afterlife'."

Film adaptation

Main article: The Lovely Bones (film)

Director Peter Jackson secured the book's film rights. In a 2005 interview, he stated the reader has "an experience when you read the book that is unlike any other. I don't want the tone or the mood to be different or lost in the film." In the same interview, regarding Susie's heaven, he said the movie version will endeavor to make it appear "somehow ethereal and emotional, but it can't be hokey."The film stars Mark Wahlberg as Jack Salmon, Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, Rachel Weisz as Abigail Salmon, Saoirse Ronan as Susie and Susan Sarandon as Susie's grandmother, Lynn.

The film opened to a limited release in 3 theaters on December 11, 2009 in the United States. It will see international and wide release on January 15, 2010.

External links

• The Lovely Bones Reading Group Guide
• A Dark First Novel Suddenly Soars to the Top in The New York Times
• Full summary of The Lovely Bones