Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
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Sebold, Alice
Alice Sebold 1963−
American novelist and memoirist.
The following entry presents an overview of Sebold's career through 2003.
INTRODUCTION
Sebold is the author of a memoir, Lucky (1999), and the best−selling novel The Lovely Bones (2002). Both of
the author's works share similar thematic ground and explore the detrimental effects of rape and brutality on
the lives of young women and their families. Sebold has been praised for handling such dark material in
honest, provocative, and imaginative ways. Upon its publication, Time magazine pronounced The Lovely
Bones “the breakout fiction debut of the year,” and it received enthusiastic endorsement by leading critics and
such literary giants as the New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The book's
critical acclaim, coupled with aggressive promotion on The Today Show and other national television
programs, ignited its overwhelming commercial success. The Lovely Bones became a word−of−mouth
phenomenon, reaping unprecedented sales for a debut novel. In 2002, The Lovely Bones received the Bram
Stoker Award for best first novel, the American Booksellers Association's “Book of the Year Award,” and a
nomination for best novel from the Horror Writers Association.
Biographical Information
Sebold was born in 1963, and grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, an environment which provided her
with themes, settings, and narrative inspiration for her literary work. Sebold studied at Syracuse University
from 1980 to 1984 and graduated from the University of Houston. As an eighteen−year−old freshman at
Alice Sebold 1963−
7
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
Syracuse, she was severely beaten and raped. After recognizing her assailant in public, Sebold played an
integral role in his arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment. Upon graduation, Sebold moved to New York City
for 10 years, where she unsuccessfully pursued writing, worked a series of odd jobs, and abused alcohol and
heroin. In 1998, she received her M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine's esteemed writing
program. While there she began work on Lucky and met novelist Glen David Gold. Sebold and Gold married
in 2001 and settled in Long Beach, California.
Major Works
Lucky began as a graduate−school writing assignment and evolved into Sebold's first book, an unsparingly
detailed account of the author's violent rape and its emotional aftermath. The book chronicles each episode of
Sebold's experience, from the actual attack to her recovery, highlighting the reactions of family and friends,
the courtroom drama, Sebold's descent into alcohol and drug use, and denial. Lucky illustrates the
far−reaching effects of Sebold's assault, both in her life and the lives of those around her, including the rape of
her roommate—an apparent act of revenge by friends of Sebold's assailant. The book's title, derived from a
police officer's comment that she was “lucky” compared to a young woman who was murdered and
dismembered in the same location where Sebold was raped and beaten, sets an ironic and direct tone that
continues throughout the memoir. Sebold has stated that reporting her real−life saga in Lucky was part of the
process of creating her debut novel, The Lovely Bones. The two works explore shared motifs and are often
viewed as counterparts. The Lovely Bones is narrated from heaven by protagonist Susie Salmon, a
fourteen−year−old who is raped, killed, and dismembered near her suburban Pennsylvania home. In the first
chapter, Susie describes in graphic detail her murder at the hands of Mr. Harvey, a neighbor. The subsequent
parts of the novel concern the impact of Susie's disappearance on her family and friends. From an omniscient
perspective, Susie watches as her death wreaks havoc on her parents: Susie's mother betrays her marriage and
abandons the family while her father hunts obsessively for the killer. Susie maintains a close bond with her
sister, through whom she vicariously experiences the life that her untimely death denied her. Her brother, too
young to have known Susie in life, struggles with the memory of his sister and discovers a connection with
Susie's spirit. Furthermore, Susie establishes spiritual links with those outside of her family when she inhabits
the body of a schoolmate, Ruth, to make love to a boy with whom Susie had shared a kiss before she died. In
time, Susie's family and friends are reunited and healed of the pain and alienation caused by the inexplicable
tragedy of Susie's disappearance.
Critical Reception
Sebold's memoir, Lucky, though not a runaway best−seller like The Lovely Bones, was critically acclaimed for
its raw, unsentimental treatment of the author's brutal rape. In the Times Literary Supplement, Joyce Carol
Oates lauded Lucky, describing it as “terse, ironic, controlled and graphic,” and citing it as a unique,
untraditional memoir written with “originality of insight and expression.” Other critics preferred Lucky's
direct and grounded message to the fantastical premise of The Lovely Bones. In fact, feminist critic and
scholar Andrea Dworkin called Lucky, in comparison to The Lovely Bones, “the more important book.” Still,
much of the literary world embraced The Lovely Bones as a lyrical and emotionally wrenching work.
Reviewers hailed the novel's well−placed humor, skillful narration, and redemptive conclusion. Moreover,
many critics marveled at Sebold's originality and craftsmanship despite a plot that could potentially border on
cliché. However, not all critics celebrated the novel. Some commentators found Sebold's narrative overripe,
manipulative, and mawkish. Reviewer Philip Hensher characterized it as “a slick, overpoweringly saccharine
and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy,” describing its moral as “one which any thinking person will
resent and reject.” Although commentators are divided on the literary merit of Sebold's work, her books have
garnered significant interest from critics and readers alike.
Major Works
8
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Lucky (memoir) 1999
The Lovely Bones (novel) 2002
CRITICISM
Alice Sebold and Ann Darby (interview date 17 June 2002)
SOURCE: Sebold, Alice, and Ann Darby. “PW Talks with Alice Sebold.” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 24 (17
June 2002): 41.
[In the following interview, Sebold discusses her narrative choices in The Lovely Bones and her plans for her
next novel.]
[Darby]: Your memoir [Lucky] focused on rape—your brutal rape when you were a student at Syracuse
University in 1981. Your novel, The Lovely Bones (reviewed on p. 40), is about a rape and murder. Was it a
relief, or a horror, to re−imagine a rape?
[Sebold]: Oddly, it was a delight, because I loved my main character so much and I liked being with her. It
was like having company. I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as
just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who
haven't. Though it's a horrible experience, it's not as if violence hasn't affected many of us.
The reader learns on the first page that your narrator, Susie Salmon, has been murdered. But how did you
come to place her in heaven?
Chang Rae Lee says, “Competency kills.” Well, I was working on another, perfectly competent novel, but it
didn't have any life to it. I read poetry all the time—poems free me—so I went off and read some poetry, and
when I came back to my desk, I wrote the first chapter of The Lovely Bones almost exactly as it stands, with
Susie in heaven. It was what writers pray for. You just become the channel for a voice.
So what is your idea of heaven?
For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently
evil. I think that for me heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought
again. As opposed to a place that is just blinding comfort, I gave Susie a place to investigate, a place where
she could come to understand the world and the people in her life.
The reader also learns early on who murdered Susie. Why did you make her murderer a builder of
dollhouses?
In a way, it was self−indulgent. I'm fascinated with structure and buildings. But it also fits his character, as
something that helps him give his life structure. I think people who commit these crimes often try not to. One
of the ways he tried to control himself was to work on these complex structures. He had all these tricks, like
setting alarms and timers, to help him control his universe.
Little, Brown seems to have embraced this book. What is your relationship with them like?
PRINCIPAL WORKS
9
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
My story with Little, Brown is unusual. My novel was acquired and orphaned twice within 10 months, so it
should have been a catastrophe. Yet it wasn't. The book was embraced by a variety of people within the
company by the time the complete draft was handed in, including Michael Pietsch [senior v−p/publisher].
Michael has said that things keep happening in a very nice way, and that's the way it happened in−house. It's a
little bit of a come−from−behind thing.
Is Little, Brown taking any unusual steps to publicize the book?
This is my first novel, so I don't know what's usual. My publicist Heather Fain, who's great, called up a couple
months ago to tell me that normally she'd be calling to say there'd be no tour, but instead they were sending
me on an eight−city tour. Then two other cities were added. Little, Brown had to print a thousand extra copies
of the galleys for BEA, and Anna Quindlen mentioned The Lovely Bones during her summer reading roundup
on The Today Show.
Have the movie rights been optioned?
Movie rights have been optioned by Luc Besson and Film Four, a British production company. The script is
just finished, though I haven't read it. It was written by the movie's director, Lynn Ramsay, and her writing
partner. It strikes me that they'll make their own movie out of it. I have hopes that with a small company based
in Europe, the movie will be driven by their vision rather than by a committee.
Are you working on a new novel for Little, Brown?
Yes, I'm about 200 pages into this one, and I have my characters and my story.
Does the success of The Lovely Bones set the bar too high for your next book? Does it make you nervous?
I'm only worried about having to take time off. I wanted to be a novelist for so long. My husband [Glen David
Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil] and I failed for a long time before we succeeded, so we cherish the
success.
Paula L. Woods (review date 7 July 2002)
SOURCE: Woods, Paula L. “Holding On and Letting Go.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (7 July 2002): 7.
[In the following review, Woods describes The Lovely Bones as “a strange and beautiful amalgam of
novelistic styles.”]
The mere whisper of their names is painful—Polly Klaas, Danielle van Dam, Elizabeth Smart, Shanta
Johnson—for they represent a parent's unspeakable heartache and a nation's vicarious nightmare. They are the
little girls, and girls are most at risk for such mayhem. Some eventually are found dead; others simply
disappear. We read their stories, hear the soundbites and wonder: What really happened to these lost girls?
How on Earth do their families survive the horror? How would we bear such a tragedy in our own
households? They are questions to which we seldom find answers, turning back ultimately, gratefully, to our
happier−by−comparison lives.
Alice Sebold, however, boldly steps into that unimaginable territory in her first novel, The Lovely Bones.
Sebold's guide on the journey is 14−year−old Susie Salmon—“like the fish”—who tells us she was murdered
in 1973, “before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons … back when people believed
things like that didn't happen.”
Paula L. Woods (review date 7 July 2002)
10
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
Susie narrates from her own personal heaven, an in−between place where “life is a perpetual yesterday,”
where she gets a sax−playing Vietnamese roommate and where her no−nonsense intake counselor, Franny,
eases Susie's self−doubts with a tart “Don't mull it over. It does no good. You're dead and you have to accept
it.”
Yet acceptance is exactly what Susie cannot find, and it is that tension that Sebold, a resident of Long Beach
and a graduate of UC Irvine's writing program, so marvelously weaves throughout the novel. Susie relives, in
chilling detail, her encounter with her killer and follows his movements after her murder. She longs for Ray
Singh, a boy who had a crush on her and with whom she shared an almost−kiss. She lingers at school with her
classmates, especially Ruth Connors, a girl she barely knew in life who happened to be standing in her path
when her “soul shrieked past Earth.” But most of all, Susie hovers heavily over the lives of her family,
anxiously watching her father become obsessed with finding her killer, her mother's slow withdrawal from her
family and marriage, her younger sister's desperate attempts at toughness, her baby brother's lonely confusion.
At times Susie's yearning for the living is so visceral, so acute, that she tries to reach out to them and
succeeds: casting her image into a pile of broken glass, communicating with her brother, making a
life−changing appearance to Ruth and Ray. At other times, she is a cosmic witness to their pain and anguish,
trapped in her inability to be neither on Earth nor in heaven as surely as the ships are trapped in her father's
glass bottles or her beloved penguin is imprisoned in its perfect snow globe world.
Susie's poignant observations of the living and the chronicle of her own afterlife make The Lovely Bones a
strange and beautiful amalgam of novelistic styles. At times, when Susie recounts the actions of her killer, the
novel reads like a thriller, sweeping us along as we see the killer's dreams, feel his overwhelming longings to
kill again, experience her father and sister's obsession with linking him to the crime. Yet at other times it is a
shattering family drama, the tale of four survivors broken by unspeakable horror who learn to knit their grief
and anger into new connections, “sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent.”
And, yet again, it is an oddly affecting coming−of−age novel, the story of a girl who travels from the land of
the living, through the in−between space of her personal heaven, to a “wide wide Heaven” where she can
finally let go, “hold the world without me in it.”
Indeed, letting go is a leitmotif of The Lovely Bones, one that Sebold evokes with a sly inventiveness and
lyrical power that are deeply moving and ultimately redemptive. With a well−balanced mix of heavenly
humor, Earth−bound suspense and keen observation of both sides of Susie's in−between, Sebold teaches us
much about living and dying, holding on and letting go, as messy and imperfect and beautiful as the processes
can be—and has created a novel that is painfully fine and accomplished, one which readers will have their
own difficulties relinquishing, long after the last page is turned.
Ron Charles (review date 25 July 2002)
SOURCE: Charles, Ron. “‘If I Should Die before I Wake, I Pray the Lord My Soul to Take’: In Alice Sebold's
Debut Novel, the Dead Must Learn to Let Go, Too.” Christian Science Monitor (25 July 2002): 15.
[In the following review, Charles admires The Lovely Bones for its utilization of both horror and beauty.]
Don't start Lovely Bones unless you can finish it. The book begins with more horror than you could imagine,
but closes with more beauty than you could hope for.
Still, there are reasons not to open this runaway bestseller. In the first chapter, 14−year−old Susie Salmon
describes how she was enticed into a little cave by a neighbor on a snowy day. He stuffs her hat into her
mouth. They both hear her mother calling her for dinner. He rapes her, cuts her throat, and then dismembers
Ron Charles (review date 25 July 2002)
11
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
the body. It's the most terrifying scene I've ever read.
For the next seven years, she describes how her family and friends—and even her murderer—cope with her
absence. She's in heaven, so she can see everything from up there. It sounds mawkish, like a ghastly version
of Beloved for white suburbia, but Alice Sebold has done something miraculous here.
It's no coincidence that the novel has been embraced during a period of high anxiety about child
abductions—perhaps the only dread darker than our new fear of terrorism.
With her disarming wit and adolescent candor, Susie drags us behind those stories from Salt Lake City and
Stanton, Calif., forcing us to consider the mechanics of rape and murder and grief in a way no news report
ever could.
A few days after her death, Susie realizes that all the people she's with now are experiencing their own
versions of heaven, reflecting their simplest dreams and aspirations from earth.
“There were no teachers in the school,” she tells us about her paradise. “We never had to go inside except for
art class for me and jazz for my roommate. Our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue. Our
heaven had an ice cream shop where, when you asked for peppermint stick ice cream, no one ever said, ‘It's
seasonal’; it had a newspaper where our pictures appeared a lot and made us look important.”
She also discovers that heaven isn't perfect. What she wants most is “to be allowed to grow up.” But that's out.
And so she turns back to her friends and family on earth, ordinary people “who had never understood, as they
did now, what the word horror meant.” Here, she almost enjoys the voyeurism that allows her to learn what
life could have been.
The power of Lovely Bones flows from this voice, a voice at once charmingly adolescent and tragically
mature. She cares for her parents and siblings beyond measure, but the cosmic distance between them gives
her a perspective that resolves the blur of sentimentality or vengeance even when the pain she's describing
makes you wince.
Her father spends his days squirming under the weight of guilt for not being there to save his child. Her
mother, who always felt cramped by maternal duties, finds the new burden of grief more than she can bear.
And her sister moves through school trapped in the “Walking Dead Syndrome—when other people see the
dead person and don't see you.”
Her classmates react across a full spectrum, from macabre comedy to obsessive sympathy. Most walk through
the usual itinerary of community grief—assembly, funeral, anniversary memorial. But a couple of them find
that emotional journey inadequate and follow Susie's disappearance to a deeper sense of themselves and their
responsibility in the world.
Susie also watches the bland neighbor who murdered her. She sees him offer condolences. She sees him check
on the carving knife in his bedroom. She sees him sweat. These are catch−your−breath scenes that teeter
between the possibility of justice or another murder. But the author is so careful here. Susie's vision of his
abusive childhood doesn't absolve or even, ultimately, explain the crimes he commits.
She wishes he were dead, but there's no passion in that wish, only a sharp concern for the safety of her sister
as she closes in on the truth. By the end, the retribution he receives is perfectly calibrated—ignominious and
anonymous.
Ron Charles (review date 25 July 2002)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
Susie watches her family for years, long enough, in fact, to note that “it was no longer a Susie−fest on Earth.”
They eventually reach that once−impossible−to−imagine future with moments, hours, and then somehow
whole days of happiness.
But this is as much a story about the dead as about the living. On her side, Susie must realize that she has
progress to make, too, but first she insists on returning for one rite of passage that was denied her. Indeed, if
the novel stumbles, it's on a weird scene of sexual fulfillment that runs embarrassingly close to Patrick
Swayze's finale in Ghost.
Some readers—and certainly most reviewers—are likely to treat the religious elements of the plot merely as
literary devices, sweet bits of comfort or wit in a novel about family survival and emotional recovery. But that
may be like thinking of John Edward's Crossing Over as just a talk show.
It's significant that this wildly successful novel comes with a heavy serving of spiritualism—messages from
the dead, ghostly visitations, and bodily possessions. None of the characters finds solace in anything as dusty
as prayer or a sacred text. And as pleasant as Susie's heaven is, there's no God there, and certainly no Jesus.
This is spirituality for an age that's ecumenical to a fault.
But emotionally, it's faultless. Sebold never slips as she follows this family. The risks she walks are enough to
give you vertigo. A victim of rape herself when she was in college, she includes some deadly satire of the
shallow advice people offer in the face of great loss. There is no “moving on,” and time alone won't bring
relief either. That only comes through the hard work of learning to care for the living while cradling the
memory of this loved one. As her father eventually realizes, “You live in the face of it.”
Charlotte Abbott (essay date 29 July 2002)
SOURCE: Abbott, Charlotte. “How About Them Bones?” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 30 (29 July 2002):
22−4.
[In the following essay, Abbott chronicles The Lovely Bones's path to success and describes the marketing
and publicity efforts behind the novel.]
With an impressive 925,000 copies in print after 11 printings, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones has outpaced
the sales of any other first novel in memory, reaching Oprah−level numbers in its first month on sale without
the endorsement of any TV or newspaper book club. Booksellers are already comparing it to such
long−running blockbusters as Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain,
only to dismiss those examples in the same breath, because they took off much more slowly.
The book hit #1 on Amazon.com six weeks before its publication date, immediately after Anna Quindlen
appeared on the Today Show for a summer reading roundup on May 22 and said. “If you read one book this
summer, it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill
a Mockingbird, and it's one of the best books I've read in years.” Ten days later, New York Times book critic
Janet Maslin fanned the flames by touting it on CBS Sunday Morning, while Seventeen magazine ran a first
serial in the July issue. Sealing the novel's critical success, Michiko Kakutani described it as “an elegy, much
like Alice McDermott's That Night,” and deemed it “deeply affecting” in her June 18 review on the front page
of the New York Times Arts section. By July 1, just a few days before the book's official pub date, Time
magazine's Lev Grossman was confidently declaring it “the breakout fiction debut of the year.”
Ever since the book landed at #10 on PW's bestseller list on July 10, it's been a miracle of upward motion. At
Borders, the book has remained the #1 hardcover fiction bestseller since July 14. “Often, when there's a buzz
Charlotte Abbott (essay date 29 July 2002)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
on a book, demand peaks out before it even pubs,” commented fiction buyer Bridget Mason. “But this one just
keeps building bigger and bigger. It's because of the strength of the novel, and it's also very timely,” she said,
referring to the highly publicized murders of several young girls in the last six months, which echo the book's
central drama.
The novel has also reached the pinnacle of Barnes &Noble's bestseller list, having unseated the latest
installment in the Left Behind series on July 21. “My feeling is that the planets are aligning—a book like this
comes around once in a decade,” confirmed Barnes &Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley.
Booksellers and Little, Brown execs agree that The Lovely Bones is a page−turner with an extraordinary
power to spark discussion. Ann Binkley, publicity director at Borders, had a typical reaction to the book: “I
just couldn't put the darned thing down. I was so excited about it. I asked Little, Brown to send over a few
more galleys because I wanted my staff to read it. When they did, we just couldn't stop talking about it,” she
said. “It stays with you long after you finish the book.”
Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch also attributes the book's stellar performance to its wide appeal to
“teenage girls, grandparents, women and men. It gets at grief, the most horrible thing that can happen in a life,
and shows that you can still find a way to live. People are powerfully moved by it.”
‘POWERFUL WOMEN’ TAKE THE LEAD
In describing the book's path to success, Pietsch shared the credit widely. “The Lovely Bones was embraced by
a series of powerful women,” he said with evident pleasure, “starting with editor Sara Burnes, who originally
signed it as a lead fiction title, and Sarah Crichton, who was our publisher at the time.” When agent Henry
Dunow submitted the novel's first 100 pages, Pietsch, who was then editorial director, agreed that the house
should preempt it right away, along with Sebold's second novel. After Burns and Crichton left the company,
he worked on the book with associate editor Asya Muchnik. “It was not something I saw as a huge book,
though I loved it.” Pietsch said. “I'm comfortable with dark material as a reader, but I didn't know how
broadly appealing the opening chapters would be. I think it's the light that the author brings to it that allows
people to get past that part and leaves them happy.”
Chris Barba, executive v−p of sales, was the next important woman to weigh in. Having read the book shortly
after the house began to devise its publishing strategies for the summer list, she found it haunting and told
Pietsch “it could be really big.” Her next step was to send the manuscript to every rep. “That got their
attention,” said Pietsch.
As members of Little, Brown's advertising and marketing departments also picked up the book, a consensus
spontaneously emerged. “We went to [our winter] sales conference knowing we had something special,” said
marketing director Karen Torres. “There, we met with the field force, who thought it was greatest thing, too.
There were no presentations about it: nobody begged for anything. We just had a wonderful conversation
about a wonderful book.”
By the end of the conference, the field reps had adopted The Lovely Bones as their “Reps Recommend” title
from the Little, Brown list, making it eligible for a 50? discount (rather than the usual 47?) for initial orders of
three copies or more and double the usual newsletter co−op. “It's a program the reps started on our own, and
we have total control over it. It's not pushed from the top down,” explained Texas rep Linda Jamison. Asked if
she encountered any resistance from booksellers when she asked them to read the book. Jamison replied. “No.
I just told them it had a great premise, and the freakish glint in my eye let them know it wasn't going to be an
option not to. And not a single sales rep took no for an answer or accepted a lower order than they thought the
book deserved. We got everyone to take a chance on it.”
‘POWERFUL WOMEN’ TAKE THE LEAD
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
An aggressive mailing of 3,500 ARCs to independent bookstores and the national chains prompted an
unusually warm response. Booksellers like Elaine Petrocelli at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif., Karl
Kilian at Brazos Bookstore in Houston and Rick Simonson at Seattle's Elliot Bay Books started calling Little,
Brown to ask what they could do to help. “Love for the book spread instantaneously, person by person,” said
Pietsch. “I've never seen a book received with such passion and desire to spread it to others. One of our reps
gave a copy to a Random House rep, who started talking about it to her accounts. I knew we had something
good going on.”
By April, when the house decided to tour Sebold, publicity manager Heather Fain found that booksellers were
primed. “Usually when I ask if they want to take a first−time novelist they haven't heard of for a signing in the
middle of summer, they say, ‘not really.’ But this time, they all knew about her. That came from the reps.”
Barnes &Noble's Sessalee Hensley was the next woman to wield her influence, with an initial order of 10,000
copies. “I took a very strong position on it—not just for a first novel, but for any book,” said Hensley. Others
at the chain also embraced it, selecting it for the Discover New Writers program and featuring it on a
stanchion sign at the front of stores. At a regional managers' meeting in the spring, v−p of trade book buying
Antoinette Ercolano talked it up and made sure that individual managers and booksellers received galleys.
Borders's Bridget Mason also decided to take a big risk on the book. “When my rep, Craig Young, first
presented it, we agreed it would be perfect for the Original Voices program. Sebold has such a fresh voice. It's
compelling and so refined for a first novel.” Although she admits that “nine times out of 10, when I read a
book, it's the kiss of death, because my expectations are altered,” Mason became even more excited after
reading The Lovely Bones. “You have to talk about it when you read it; you must share and compare your
insights. Craig told me it was getting a lot of buzz, so I said, ‘Let's take a stand on this,’ and everyone in the
company got behind it. We blew it out at the front of store, and put it in our Major New Authors program,
which is generally reserved for guaranteed bestsellers. Everyone wanted it there.”
The book gained more steam at the Border's general managers' meeting in March, where Little, Brown reps
handsold it. “It's always a good sign when you get a lot of store requests for copies, but I'd never seen this
level of interest before,” said Mason. For her, it was especially striking that Little, Brown didn't try to talk the
chain out of its enthusiasm. “When you say you think you can take a big risk on something, you often hear
that [a publisher doesn't] want to send you that many; they don't want the returns. Little, Brown took a big
risk, too, printing as many as they did.”
Although publishers usually focus on fall titles at BEA, the tremendous word of mouth the book was
generating convinced Little, Brown to bring Sebold herself to the trade show in early May. “She's the most
powerful woman of all,” said Pietsch. “People fall in love with her, like when you're a teenager and you can't
wait to hear from someone,” he enthused. “She manages to review every e−mail, every telephone call, and
she's so full of joy and surprise.” A week before the show, the house also announced in a full−page ad in PW
that it would bring along an unprecedented 1,500−galley reprinting, to make sure The Lovely Bones got into
the hands of every bookseller who wanted to read it. By the end of May, the book was the #3 Book Sense pick
for July/August.
FEEDING THE FIRE
Little, Brown had originally planned a first printing of 50,000 copies. But within a week of Anna Quindlen's
Today Show appearance, the house began “responding to the inventory situation with gusto, just to stay ahead
of demand,” said Karen Torres. By June 27, when books were almost fully distributed, there were 225,000
copies in print after six trips back to press.
FEEDING THE FIRE
15
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
“Many independents had pre−sold their five copies, and were coming back to order 10 more. We didn't send
easels for pre−orders, but people took them. That drove re−orders. And you had Barnes &Noble tripling their
order.” Admitting that there was some in−house dissension over how many reprints to request, she explained,
“There are always conservative voices who don't want to get caught with returns. But then there are others,
like [CEO] Larry Kirshbaum, who believe that every now and then you have to take a shot.”
On the marketing side, the house didn't try to break ground. “We used all the age−old, tried−and−true
methods,” acknowledged Torres. “The real marketing secret is that the book delivers.” But by all accounts,
Torres has left no stone unturned in her efforts to build on the book's every success. As rave reviews streamed
in, her department created easel−backed blowups, placards and café cards for stores with coffee shops,
working with Book Sense and the chains to get them out as fast as possible. “This is one of those books that
rarely comes along, that reminds you why you chose this business. And it was not for the money. It's the kind
of book that invigorates you over and over again,” Torres said.
In addition to booking new TV and radio appearances for Sebold almost daily, the house will run a full−page
ad in the daily New York Times in early August, followed by a national TV ad campaign later in the month. In
September, Little, Brown will blitz bookstores with reading group guides. “It seems like every day, a new
piece of ammunition comes in and we find a way to make use of it. It feels like the sky is the limit,” said
Pietsch, who noted that the house had set aside its marketing budget to do everything necessary to keep the
book going.
Meanwhile, as Sebold makes the rounds on her 12−city tour, the 39−year−old author has been drawing
standing−room audiences of 100 to 200 people. As she did in a recent interview with Terry Gross on NPR's
Fresh Air, Sebold often discusses her critically acclaimed but slow−selling memoir, Lucky (Scribner, 1999),
about the rape she endured as a college freshman in Syracuse, N.Y. “You instantly want to read it” after you
finish The Lovely Bones, said Sessalee Hensley, noting that Barnes &Noble is taking a strong position on
Scribner's hardcover reissue of the book. “She is such a great writer, she can tell you the most heartbreaking
things with grace and passion.” Given the rise in demand for Lucky, Little, Brown has pushed up publication
of the paperback, now due in October.
Key booksellers are convinced that The Lovely Bones will continue to sell strongly this year. “It will be a
phenomenon through Christmas, I have no doubt about it,” said Borders's Mason. On behalf of Barnes
&Noble, Hensley agrees: “I've scheduled it for a December shopping promotion, and I'm staying with it until
the paperback comes out. I'm likening the trajectory to Peace Like a River, which is still selling well for us in
hardcover. Word of mouth will carry a book forward much longer than anything else.”
For everyone at Little, Brown, it's been an incomparable delight “to get to Oprah numbers on our own,”
Pietsch said. The experience has given him a heady sense of “the bookselling, publishing and reviewing
community in this country as a single force, coming together with rare unity. And it shows you just how
powerful this community is.”
Lisa Allardice (review date 19 August 2002)
SOURCE: Allardice, Lisa. Review of The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. New Statesman 131, no. 4601 (19
August 2002): 39.
[In the following review, Allardice contends that the characters and narrative of The Lovely Bones are overly
conventional and fail to fulfill the novel's potential.]
“The dead don't die. They look on and help,” D H Lawrence once wrote. This consoling platitude lies at the
Lisa Allardice (review date 19 August 2002)
16
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
heart of The Lovely Bones, a bestseller and critical triumph in America. Narrated by the spirit of a murdered
teenager as she observes her grieving family from heaven, Sebold's at once brutally real and fanciful first
novel is often as queasily sentimental as it sounds. It is also grimly captivating. “I was 14 when I was
murdered on December 6, 1973,” Susie Salmon coolly introduces herself.
Sebold is as unsparing in the grisly details—a discarded elbow, bloodstains and saliva—as she is on the
schmaltz. And as a meditation on the afterlife, the novel is spectrally fuzzy. Replete with swing sets and
glossy magazines, Susie's heaven is an individual paradise, where the air is scented with skunk and kumquats
and all her dreams on earth come true. In true Seventies style, Susie is greeted not by a stern St Peter, but by a
female “intake counsellor”, an ex−social worker. More traditionally, her heaven is a favourite haunt of dead
pets and grandparents—and, in Susie's tragic case, a sisterly victim support group.
But within this fantastical framework exist merely conventional narratives and characters. After the agonising
account of Susie's disappearance, a domestic drama of disintegration and reconciliation unfolds, as Sebold
knits together “the lovely bones” to repair the broken family. Susie's dad, a regular nice guy, has not
unmerited suspicions as to the killer's identity, and buries his pain trying to prove his neighbour's guilt, while
her mother takes refuge in “merciful adultery” with the police officer on the case. Through Susie's new
insight, we see how cracks had already started to appear in her apparently happy childhood even before her
death, as she comes to understand her mother's loneliness and frustration. She watches her younger sister with
sympathy and envy as each unremarkable rite of passage—her first kiss, shaving her legs,
graduation—becomes a reminder of Susie's lost youth.
Subverting the traditional crime novel, the investigation and killer are overshadowed by the victim and her
family. We know whodunnit, after all. But given that her murderer is a textbook oddball whose hobbies
include building doll's houses and mutilating small animals, he shouldn't be that hard to pin down—if the
officer in charge had his mind on the job.
Only Susie is an entirely original creation. Blessed with omniscience and a naive charm, she makes the
unimaginable bearable. But after a while, we begin to wonder if it weren't time that our spirited, forgivably
egotistical, heroine were peacefully laid to rest. Giving a whole new meaning to the idea of transcendental
sex, Sebold stretches the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief too far when a very unangelic Susie returns
to earth to inhabit the body of a freaky school friend so she can get it together with her one−time sweetheart.
With its overwhelming affirmation of Christian values, the family and community, it is not hard to understand
why The Lovely Bones has been such a success in the US. There are candlelit vigils around the murder site,
and Sebold seems almost to invoke a sense of national mourning, so it is no surprise to hear a celestial
rendition of Barber's Adagio for Strings.
This is an undoubtedly moving and shocking novel; how could it not be? It is all the more chilling to know
that it is informed by very real personal experience. In her memoir, Lucky, Sebold describes how she herself
was raped at 18. Later, she learnt that her attacker dragged another girl into the same tunnel and raped and
killed her. The Lovely Bones, then, is also the story of the stranger who wasn't “lucky” enough to survive.
There can be no happy ending to this story, and Sebold's attempts to make it uplifting seem uncomfortably
manipulative. Ultimately, this tender novel fails to transcend its fey conceit, remaining uneasily poised
between horror and whimsy, nightmare and fairy tale, ugliness and loveliness.
Sarah Churchwell (review date 23 August 2002)
SOURCE: Churchwell, Sarah. “A Neato Heaven.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5186 (23 August 2002):
19.
Sarah Churchwell (review date 23 August 2002)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
[In the following review, Churchwell praises the first half of The Lovely Bones, but derides the novel's latter
half, calling it “saccharine” and “false.”]
Alice Sebold's first novel [The Lovely Bones], which has been top of the American bestseller lists for weeks,
is narrated by fourteen−year−old Susie Salmon, who has just been raped and murdered by a serial killer and is
now in heaven sadly watching the effects of her death on her family and friends. Not a murder mystery (Susie
knows perfectly well who killed her, and doesn't dissemble), The Lovely Bones concerns effects, not causes.
Susie must learn the same lessons about loss as her family: as they become reconciled to losing her, she must
become reconciled to losing them—and herself. “Heaven wasn't perfect”, Susie observes, deadpan, on being
informed that she will be denied what she most wants, the chance to grow up. But that is exactly what Susie
will do, over the course of this unusual, often touching novel: the death of a precocious, witty, but essentially
ordinary child proves in Sebold's hands a metaphor for the death of childhood itself.
Susie's death is a travesty of the fall from innocence into experience—sexual, cruel and, in her case, fatal. In
her superb first chapter, Sebold captures the wryness and regret that the remembered pain of this fall
provokes: Susie says “I guess I figured” and “I guess I was thinking”, as she describes the danger signals she
overlooked while taking a short cut home from school one dark winter's afternoon and encountering a
neighbour she slightly knew. The point is that she wasn't thinking at all, because she was unsuspecting,
innocent. When her killer invites her into an underground cave he has built, she is embarrassed to report that,
instead of feeling wary, she felt only curious, and blurted out “neato!”: “I completely reverted”, she adds
ruefully, knowing that this reversion to childhood is what killed her.
The account of the rape and murder, which closes the chapter, is ferociously sad: “I fought as hard as I could
not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard−as−I−could was not hard enough, not even close.” As Susie feels
the victim's psychic detachment from her body, Sebold offers a simile that captures all too well what it is like
to be at the mercy of someone else's act of will: “I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat.” A
few sentences later, the distance of simile has become brutal metaphor: “I was the mortar, he was the pestle.”
Sebold is the author of a memoir about her own rape at the age of eighteen, Lucky (1999); her fictional
account also bears the authority of her experience, but art, not knowledge, conveys its pain.
Susie watches the rest of the book's events unfold from a thoroughly secular heaven, in which everyone is
granted only their “simplest dreams” (which is why heaven isn't perfect); each heaven is populated by those
whose dreams have coincided. Susie lives in a duplex with a Vietnamese “roommate”, Holly (who speaks
without an accent in her idea of heaven), near a high school that duplicates the kind they hoped to attend; new
residents of heaven are put under the supervision of an “intake counselor”, who, in Susie and Holly's case, is a
motherly woman, a social worker in life. That this heaven is so entirely earthbound is, presumably, Sebold's
point: for Susie, the banal details of adolescence are a lost paradise.
The first half of The Lovely Bones proves a wonderfully observed, moving portrait of adolescence as a series
of losses and accommodations to the pains of adulthood. Susie has a younger sister, Lindsey, who becomes
her surrogate. Susie identifies with Lindsey's chance to grow up; Lindsey identifies with her lost sister; and
the grief−stricken community looks at Lindsey and sees Susie. Susie is, by believable turns, protective, proud
and envious of the little sister who will get the chances she has lost.
As the story proceeds, however, it gradually loses its seasoned blend of ambivalent feeling, becoming first
sweet, and then saccharine. If Susie's heaven looks a lot like earth, the earth she has left behind starts to look a
little too much like heaven. The bad are punished, the good but erring repent, and everyone except the killer
seems free of spite, cruelty or meanness. The worst crime anyone else commits is grief−stricken withdrawal.
No mistake is permanent, no betrayal unforgiven, and the supporting characters never falter. Lindsey's
boyfriend, in particular, is idealized beyond all hope of recognition; his older brother, although suspiciously
leather−jacketed and motorcycle−riding, spends his free time building forts for Susie's baby brother and
Sarah Churchwell (review date 23 August 2002)
18
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
baking in the kitchen with her grandmother, who has moved in to hold the family together. Reconciliation as
adjustment and acceptance are lessons we all need to learn; reconciliation as reunion is just too easy.
In the end, Sebold issues everyone a reprieve—even Susie, in a false move that violates the contract of
willingly suspended disbelief. Hope becomes not the source of human endurance, an occasional state of grace,
but a simple promissory note to be redeemed. Solace is one thing; total recompense is just a lie. Sebold's fable
collapses into fairy tale: it is not just a feel−good book, but a feel−better book. Those in the mood to believe
that suffering guarantees maturity, hard−earned wisdom and the smell of baking downstairs, will love all of
The Lovely Bones. But those feeling at all swindled by life's duplicities may find it palling in the end, as it
offers neither the gratifying fellowship of dissatisfaction, nor commiseration about the real insufficiencies in
our lives.
Virginia Quarterly Review (review date autumn 2002)
SOURCE: Review of The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Virginia Quarterly Review 78, no. 4 (autumn
2002): 126.
[In the following review, the critic praises Sebold's The Lovely Bones, citing the author's originality and
attention to detail.]
If someone were to recommend to me a book about a murdered 14−year−old girl who tells her tale from
Heaven, I would flee, fearful of drowning in sentiment and cliché. Much to my surprise, and to Sebold's
considerable skills as a novelist, this book [The Lovely Bones]—which does indeed adopt the voice of Susie
Salmon, a 14−year−old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a next−door neighbor—is fresh,
exquisitely crafted, original, and deeply moving. Sebold, author of a memoir of her own horrific rape (Lucky),
draws us powerfully into Susie's world as she watches her family—father, mother, younger sister and
brother—and friends disintegrate, then reconstitute themselves as the wound of her unsolved death slowly
heals over. Full of humor and warmth, The Lovely Bones resonates with hope, family dynamics, and life.
Sebold's eye for detail and the telling moment (a feeling, a look, a subtle gesture) is nearly perfect, and this
novel is a joy to read.
Stephen H. Webb (review date 9−22 October 2002)
SOURCE: Webb, Stephen H. “Earth from Above.” Christian Century 119, no. 21 (9−22 October 2002): 20−2.
[In the following review, Webb reflects on The Lovely Bones, highlighting the novel's unique perspective and
its depiction of heaven.]
In the most powerful opening chapter of any novel I have read, 14−year−old Susie Salmon narrates the hellish
scene of her own brutal rape and murder—from heaven [in The Lovely Bones]. There are many stories about
people witnessing their own funeral, but this bold move transcends such pedestrian plot tricks. It allows the
author to document the terrible consequences of human depravity from the heights of divine perfection, and
the tension between the two is almost unbearable. Remarkably, when the reader is done, it seems obvious that,
far from being a contrived resurrection of the old−fashioned omniscient−narrator point of view, this unique
perspective is the only way to fully comprehend such an intolerable tragedy.
The Lovely Bones is Alice Sebold's first novel, but not her first attempt to turn pain into poetry. Her first book,
ironically titled Lucky, is a memoir about her experience of being raped at the age of 18. The police told her
that she was lucky she wasn't murdered, but she is also lucky to be blessed with a literary voice that is as
precise as it is profound. This pair of books—one a careful documentation of events that are all too real, the
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other a fanciful tale full of the miraculous and the supernatural—constitutes one of the most memorable
reflections on a kind of violence that many of us would rather ignore.
Like Susie Salmon, Sebold was a virgin when she was raped, and her memoir ends, after many excruciating
revelations, with a description of a night of “almost virginal” sex with her boyfriend. In her heaven Susie also
longs for love, a love she never had the opportunity to experience. In the marvelous climax of the novel she
returns to earth and to the man she might have loved by exchanging bodies with a young woman who has
been haunted by her death. This incarnational event gives her a bliss more heavenly than anything she finds in
heaven itself. Through this otherworldly sexual encounter Susie is saved from her obsession with earthly life.
Perhaps Sebold also has found a way to put to rest her own painful memories.
If Sebold has a weakness as a novelist, it is her desire to save everyone. Her novel's ending is as happy as its
beginning is disturbing. This false promise of earthly happiness betrays the novel's premise that only heaven
provides the comfort and security needed to make sense of evil. Happy endings should happen in heaven, not
on earth.
Although the heaven of this story is not full of crosses and saints, it provides more material for somber
theological reflection than a score of Sunday sermons. The first person Susie meets in the afterlife is Franny,
her intake counselor, who tells her that, even though she can have anything in heaven, she has to understand
her desires before they will come true. Her first desire is for Mr. Harvey, her killer, to die, but she soon
realizes that she can have only what is truly good or true to her best self. She must learn to dream of desires
she has never experienced.
Sebold's imagination will disturb those who picture heaven as full of ethereal spirits floating toward the light,
or of the morally righteous waiting in line for their reward. This is a heaven that is, by and large, fun. Susie
has a roommate who keeps her company, and she keeps busy by spying on her family and friends. She
becomes a watcher, and is able to intervene on earth in small, ghostly ways.
Much of the plot of the book pivots on the question of whether Susie can help mend her broken family. As
with many families tormented by violence, strains that were hardly noticed before begin to rip the family
apart. The parents' marriage begins to break under the weight of her father's quest to prove Mr. Harvey's guilt
and her mother's withdrawal into a world of lonely regret. And Susie's younger sister must navigate a changed
world as she grows into a woman, something Susie was prevented from becoming.
Susie also needs mending. She aches with the memory of the boy with whom she shared her only kiss, and
she is jealous of the way her younger brother clings to their father. In fact, through her family's courage and
survival, they help her as much as she helps them. Susie needs their thoughts and prayers. This reverses the
traditional Roman Catholic view of saints mediating on our behalf. It also challenges the Protestant view of
the dead as so secure in their salvation that they do not need us at all. As I thought about this portrait of
heaven, I could not help wondering about my own reluctance to visit cemeteries and the feebleness of my
attempts to pray for those who have died. This novel is a powerful indictment of our neglect of the dead.
Susie's spiritual progress is linked to her ability to give up trying to control events on earth. She has to give
her family time to heal, and her recognition that she has all the time in the world is the beginning of her own
healing. She has to learn to let go of “the dark bright pity of being human.” When she meets her grandfather
for a dance that seems to last forever, she knows that there are many more levels of joy and healing awaiting
her.
Susie sees only those she loves in heaven (there is even a great scene where she is reunited with her dog). But
this makes heaven too easy. It is natural to hope that those who die prematurely, especially those who are
victims of human cruelty and greed, will have a special place in the heart of God, where their innocence will
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merge with God's holiness. But what if the ascending spiral of choirs that circle toward God include not only
the innocent but also the guilty—not only the victims but also their oppressors? What would Susie do if she
ran into Mr. Harvey in heaven? Can he too be saved?
Sebold hints at a heaven that would include reconciliation, not just bliss, when Susie, while trailing Mr.
Harvey, begins to understand his terrible past. Although this plotline is left undeveloped, it suggests that those
guilty of grievous crimes need God as much as their innocent victims do. I imagine that even those of us who
have had uneventful lives will come to understand in heaven all the ways that our smallest acts of indecision
and inattention have contributed to the chain of events that help produce evil in the world. If so, perhaps our
need for forgiveness from those guilty of serious crimes will burn through their open wounds of resentment,
defiance and delusion, setting them free to worship God.
And what if we miss the dead more than they miss us? What is the meaning of mourning? Halfway through
this novel I put it down and rushed into my son's bedroom to hold him. The novel was so good it forced me to
imagine the very worst. How would I respond if my almost four−year−old son met a violent end? Was I
crying because I was thinking about how incomplete his life would be? Yes, he would miss out on so many
joys, but he would also skip many sorrows. More important, my faith tells me that when he is united with
Christ, at whatever age, my son will have all the depths of human experience without any of the pain, because
Christ is not only fully human but also humanity at its fullest.
Was I crying because of the experiences I would lose with my son? He is such a part of me that I cannot
imagine my life without him. His death would tempt me to despair so deeply that I cannot imagine
overcoming that despair. Yet I trust God that I would find the strength to resist that deadly spiritual disease.
I finally decided that I would mourn the loss of the truth of his life, its singular beauty made manifest in such
a precarious form. I could only hope that God would preserve that truth by making him more of what he is
now, rather than letting death diminish him in any way.
Many people think it is best not to dwell on such thoughts. It is better to live in the here and now, and let
tomorrow take care of itself. One often hears the stock phrase “for heaven's sake,” but rarely do we think of
living our lives for the sake of heaven. Yet preparing yourself for the true heaven by rejecting the temptation
of false pleasures on earth used to be what faith was all about. Heaven and hell once dominated the Christian
imagination, until skeptics began caricaturing heaven as a scam. Wrestling with the problem of evil has
always been an aspect of the spiritual life, but skeptics turned it into a conceptual conundrum by insisting that
nothing can compensate for the pain of innocent victims like Susie. How could “pie in the sky when you die”
make up for rape? But this argument displays a spectacular failure of the religious imagination. When there is
more talk of heaven in novels and movies than in sermons, the church must shoulder much of the blame for
confusion and doubt about the afterlife.
Sebold's novel opens countless possibilities for reflection, but it also demonstrates just how much our
language has failed us. Heaven should be something we sing, but it instead has become something we sell.
Consumerism makes it an adjective, not a noun. We have heavenly chocolate and heavenly mattresses, but
few images of heaven that both provoke and persuade—provoke us to consider why we cling so fast to this
life and persuade us that the truth of our lives will be preserved after we die.
We can have the courage to look into the bottomless depths of evil only if we can avoid being blinded by its
darkness. That's what makes this novel so startling. We are able to look Mr. Harvey's evil in the face because
we can see it from the proper distance. Even the slightest glimmer of light that enables us to dwell in the
valley of the shadow of death should be enough to persuade us that heaven is too good not to be true.
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Rebecca Mead (review date 17 October 2002)
SOURCE: Mead, Rebecca. “Immortally Cute.” London Review of Books 24, no. 20 (17 October 2002): 18.
[In the following favorable review, Mead suggests that The Lovely Bones feeds America's appetite for
horror.]
Alice Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, was on its 11th US printing by the end of the summer and was
sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a place usually reserved for Michael Crichton or Tom
Clancy. The book's success is a categorial surprise, since literary novels hardly ever reach a mass audience in
America; but its subject−matter is so perfectly resonant with the tenor of the times that its appeal is
transparent. The book concerns a crime that could not be more horrible, the rape and murder of a 14−year−old
girl; but its tone is joyful, its message comforting, and its metaphysics unimpeachable in a culture which
prides itself on its piety while adhering to an incoherent gospel of personal growth.
The protagonist of The Lovely Bones is a girl called Susie Salmon, who, we learn in the second line of the
book, was murdered on 6 December 1973, ‘back when people believed things like that didn't happen’. The
murderer is Mr Harvey, a loner neighbour who discusses fertilisers with Susie's father and whose border
flowers draw the admiration of her mother. Mr Harvey has left a trail of dead girls behind him as he moves
from one anonymous suburb to another, and Susie's turn comes when, walking home from school through a
cornfield one day, she runs into him and accepts his invitation to have a look at a bunker which he has dug in
the ground and furnished with a battery−powered lamp and a shaving kit. Mr Harvey offers Susie a Coke, tells
her she is pretty, asks her if she is a virgin, bars her exit from the bunker, then rapes her. The assault is briefly
but graphically depicted (‘I was the mortar, he was the pestle’). Afterwards, Mr Harvey dispatches Susie with
a gentle request that she tell him she loves him.
The rape and murder happen in the first chapter; the rest of The Lovely Bones is concerned with the aftermath
of Susie's disappearance. Her body is not immediately discovered, though the police find the knitted cap that
her mother made for her and that she refused, on fashion grounds, to wear; Mr Harvey had stuffed it into her
mouth to stifle her screams. A body part, an elbow, is recovered, and while her mother persists for a while in
the hope that a girl might live on even without her elbow, the family gradually accepts that Susie is never
coming home. The police pursue the case, but as time passes and no culprit is found, their pursuit becomes
less and less committed. Susie's parents collapse into private griefs, then fall apart from one another, her
father obsessed with solving the crime and her mother having an affair with the investigating detective before
abandoning the family for a job in California, the land of forgetting. Susie's resilient younger sister surpasses
her in age and experience, falling in love with a classmate who gives her a heart−shaped pendant and treats
her parents with respect. Susie's brother, Buckley, a small child when Susie is killed, grows up in the long
shadow of a sister he doesn't remember but believes he still sometimes runs into around the house.
The fictional innovation of The Lovely Bones, the stroke that must have writing school graduates everywhere
wondering why they didn't think of it before, is that the book is told from the point of view of the dead Susie:
it is a coming of age story told by a character who isn't of age and never will be. Susie is a bright and ironical
observer, even of her own murder: ‘Escape wasn't a concept I had any real experience with. The worst I'd had
to escape was Artie, a strange−looking kid at school whose father was a mortician. He liked to pretend he was
carrying a needle full of embalming fluid around with him.’ Though she is frustrated by her inability to
console her family or to direct them towards her killer, Susie is in many ways much the same dead as she was
alive; like any teenager, her interests and appetites extend to encounters with classmates, flirtation with boys
and rivalry with siblings. It's hardly an original idea that the dead watch over the living; such watchfulness is
not, however, usually thought of as spying. ‘Lindsey had a cute boy in the kitchen!’ Susie says at one point
while watching her sister. ‘This was news, this was a bulletin—I was suddenly privy to everything. She would
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never have told me this stuff.’
Susie's vantage point is a place she refers to as ‘my heaven’, which closely resembles a suburban high school,
with playing−fields and kids shooting hoops. In Sebold's fanciful construction, heaven is the place in which
one's simplest earthly wishes are fulfilled. In Susie's case, heaven is a near replica of the environment in
which she spent her living days, with crucial modifications: ‘There were no teachers in the school. We never
had to go inside except for art class … The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our
textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue.’ She is watched over by a heavenly intake counsellor
named Franny, a social worker who arrived in heaven after being shot in the face by the husband of a client,
and whose after−life wish fulfilment consists in looking after girls like Susie. She has a roommate, Holly,
another dead teenager, with whom she shares similar tastes: ‘Our heaven had an ice−cream shop where, when
you asked for peppermint stick ice cream, no one said, “It's seasonal.”’
At its strongest, The Lovely Bones is an effective and intimate illustration of the truism that when a child is
murdered, the life of a family is shattered. The interminable grief of Susie's father is particularly tenderly
drawn: ‘Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison
seeped in.’ The gentle delineation of the growing love between Lindsey and her boyfriend, Sam, proves a
counterpoint to the lost life of Susie, who has the bittersweet experience of participating, from heaven, in her
sister's growing−up, including Lindsey's loss of virginity: ‘At 14, my sister sailed away from me into a place
I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.’
Sebold's writing is both lyrical and grounded, and her narrative moves with impressive assurance between the
spheres.
That American readers have become so enchanted by the character of Susie, who manages to be lively even
when dead, is no great surprise. The Lovely Bones renews the cliché of the triumph of the human spirit by
taking it to its logical extension, in which a particular human spirit, having been literally disembodied, is
endowed with sympathetic character traits and an enduring cuteness. Like M. Night Shyamalan's summer hit
movie Signs, The Lovely Bones dwells in the familiar American province where wanton supernaturalism
meets all−embracing sentimentality. Susie's heaven, the reader eventually notices, is curiously godless.
Transcendence means acknowledging one's deepest desires, which are guaranteed to be fulfilled, so long as
they don't involve being brought back to life. Being in heaven is like participating in a not especially
intellectually rigorous self−help encounter group. It's also oddly consumerist: when Susie tells Franny that she
doesn't really know what she wants out of heaven, Franny tells her, ‘“All you have to do is desire it, and if you
desire it enough and understand why—really know—it will come.” It seemed so simple and it was. That's how
Holly and I got our duplex.’
Susie also discovers that she has the ability to cross over into the world she has left behind to make a ghostly
appearance, if she wishes to see someone she has left behind. (‘I had never let myself yearn for Buckley,
afraid he might see my image in a mirror or a bottle cap … “Too young,” I said to Franny. “Where do you
think imaginary friends come from?” she said.’) In the book's fantastical climax, Susie actually inhabits the
body of one of her classmates, Ruth, in order to make love to another of her classmates, Ray, who, when she
was alive, had given her the only kiss she ever received. Even Sebold's most sympathetic reviewers have
expressed the opinion that this sexual encounter from beyond the grave is an unsuccessful instance of
overreaching.
But the false note that can be detected in this episode has been sounding throughout the book, albeit more
quietly. The book's conceit, that Susie lives watchfully on, is also the book's deceit. The Lovely Bones aims to
be, in the end, a feel−good book about rape, torture and murder, and while such an unlikely achievement is
remarkable, it is also unsettling in ways that Sebold does not begin to address. Sebold herself was raped as an
18−year−old college student—she told the story in her first book, a memoir entitled Lucky, and it is fair to
assume that salvaging hope and humour and humanity out of horrible violence is an important personal
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
project. But why should a vast American readership also need to be told that a girl's plucky spirit survives
murderous defilement?
In part, perhaps, because the American appetite for real−life stories of the murderous defilement of young
girls exceeds even the readership of Sebold's novel. In the summer of 2002, the news media in the United
States, as in the UK, were filled with accounts of girls abducted and assaulted; one pair of Californian
teenagers who, having been raped, managed to escape their drifter attacker, even went on national television
to describe their ordeal. For all the specific horror of the individual cases, such stories are formulaic, replaying
a narrative of innocence lost, illustrated by photographs of beaming, trusting girls. (These stories represent a
highly concentrated version of the omnipresent anxiety about the loss of childhood innocence that can be
found in contemporary American culture; and one of the ways in which American parents worry that their
children are being robbed of innocence is through their exposure to stories of real−life violence on television.)
The repetition of such stories induced the President to announce a White House Conference on Missing,
Exploited and Runaway Children, and to compare the fear that parents feel for their children's safety to the
threat of terrorism. The notion of a crime wave against little girls proved so compelling that the statistics,
which show that the number of children abducted by strangers has actually decreased, were forgotten, and the
crucial difference between a runaway child and an abducted one, elided by the President's announcement, was
ignored. The idea of an epidemic of children being snatched by their neighbours amounts to a fantasy that
itself borders on the supernatural: it's chilling, thrilling and completely unbuttressed by fact, and The Lovely
Bones endows that fantasy with a happy ending. Cuteness, it turns out, is immortal.
This is not only untrue; it's distasteful. For all Sebold's deftness, her novel plays into US culture's saccharine
sensibility about girls and violence, a sensibility that attends the appetite for horror and is inseparable from it.
When the President made his announcement he reported that Brenda Van Dam, the mother of Danielle Van
Dam, who was abducted and murdered early this year, and Erin Runnion, the mother of Samantha Runnion,
who this summer was snatched from outside her home then raped and murdered, had recently spoken with one
another, and he gave their account of that exchange: ‘We had a conversation, mother to mother, about our
daughters, our pain, and also our hope that Danielle and Samantha are dancing together in heaven.’ A grieving
mother should be granted any comfort she can find; a culture might do well to be on guard against bland
sentimentality. There is a scene in The Lovely Bones in which Susie meets another girl who has been killed by
Mr Harvey and whose own version of heaven includes twirling so that her skirt flies out and dances around
her. Sebold has written the perfect novel for this American moment.
Gordon Phinn (review date November 2002)
SOURCE: Phinn, Gordon. “Adolescent Afterlife.” Books in Canada 31, no. 8 (November 2002): 10−11.
[In the following review, Phinn offers a negative assessment of The Lovely Bones, characterizing it as
sentimental and predictable.]
In the fall of 1999, when the film The Sixth Sense was so suddenly and hugely successful, National Post
columnist Len Blum, in one of his weekly columns, sought to grasp the movie's remarkable word of mouth
reputation. While thinking that it obviously connected with our innate sense of unworthiness and fear of
failure, he felt its major magic was to “tap into our desire to commune with loved ones who have died, to tell
them we love them, to resolve things left unresolved.” One suspects the wild success of Alice Sebold's The
Lovely Bones mines the same cavern of unrequited longing in our oh−so−secular and cynical culture. In the
midst of our high tech savvy and soft core luxuries we still seem to crave a design, a somewhat less divine sort
of plan than the one advanced by fanatics but somewhat more spiritual than the usual, devoid−of−mystery
allowed for by the debunking sciences.
Gordon Phinn (review date November 2002)
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The latest reports claim a million copies in print: the three library systems I checked each listed well over a
hundred holds. Copies of Alice Sebold's first book, 1999's memoir Lucky cannot be had for love nor money.
As one narrative has a heroine mauled and raped and the other one mauled, raped, murdered and
dismembered, I sensed a connection, if not, indeed, an angle, and finally tracked down an excerpt on the web.
Despite having read several “rape and recovery” memoirs when the genre first blossomed some years back, I
was quite unprepared for the brutal frankness of the author's trauma recreated. Its raw and unapologetic
victim−centred account reminded me uncomfortably of the kind of grim violence fetishised by certain male
novelists who seem to know their market all too well, and it contrasted remarkably with the soft focus
storytelling of Lovely Bones. As Sebold tells it, in an interview on that same web site, she wrote chunks of
both works almost simultaneously: it's almost as if in reenacting the angry drama of virgin sacrifice along with
the sanctified ascent of the soon−to−be beatified she was trying to have her cake and eat it.
Save for her pleasant, but regularly interrupted, residence at some entry level purgatory set aside for those
victims of violent crime disinclined to bend themselves to vengeance but still besotted with the unrequited
desires of youth, some of which power her many seemingly instantaneous trips back to family, school and
neighbourhood, little Susie Salmon is merely the latest in a long line of ghostly protagonists, going back
farther than Henry James' Quint in Turn of the Screw and proceeding down through the decades through
Julian Barnes's sublimely enigmatic A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, to Will Self's darkly
sardonic How the Dead Live and Rebecca Goldstein's recent Properties of Light, where romantic obsession is
leavened with the yeast of quantum physics and the water of tantric practice to persuade the reader that
poeticising the flow of consciousness is the stuff of life itself.
A more conventional vision of afterlife seems to motivate Ms. Sebold in her delineation of a teenager's
eternity, a type that could much more easily be translated into film, which I strongly suspect is the destiny of
The Lovely Bones: an honourable fate for a novel which leaves much to be desired in the opinion of this
reviewer. For despite its current reputation as some kind of afterlife revelation, the work shoulders its tragic
burdens with a descriptive style more satisfying than challenging, and indulges all too often in soap opera
sentimentalising, and creakily predictable plot mechanisms dragged into play by an author one suspects is
attempting to save the postmodern novel from the pointless pirouettes of its own cleverness by grafting on
snatches of spiritualistic truisms. And yet I must say, after decades of hapless authors skulking about the
detritus of post modernism, believing all they have inherited about the death of god and the resultant absence
of omniscience, it is quite refreshing to read one who glides about her plot with the defiant glee of a minor
deity unapologetically imposing a grand design.
Through the filtered lens of the dead girl's perceptions, we watch as her family gradually disinters itself from
the shallow womb of its innocence, although whether its particular devastation is ultimately any worse than
the average traverse through the dark valleys of divorce, abuse and terminal illness is debatable. As the action
takes place in small town USA in the early seventies, apt comparisons might have been drawn with families
losing sons in Vietnam and the narrative thus invigorated, but Sebold generally opts for the more comforting
icons of nostalgia.
What is relatively unique in her treatment of societal dysfunction is perspective: for although Susie Salmon
worries about her family more like a fretful and fastidious auntie than an adolescent immersed in the
turbulence of self−obsession, Sebold does permit us glimpses of how the dead can moulder in purgatories of
their own choosing, ignore the advice of wise guides, and sweep earthward in the blink of a thought, to
observe but rarely interact, buzzing multiple locations with the immaculate dexterity of a photon.
And like every wronged ghost in the annals of psychical research she craves the righting of the historical
record, and whether it takes two or two hundred years seems not to matter. Her neighbour−assailant,
assiduously carved from the usual deprived childhood cliches, moves untroubled through a myth of America,
managing his homicidal tendencies with the kind of sociopathic efficiency with which we have already been
Gordon Phinn (review date November 2002)
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numbed, and when he meets his just desserts, Sebold, like the smug omniscient narrators of old, manages his
dispatch with a shaft of poetic justice others might shrivel at, and in place of the selfless poise that the pursuit
of empathy might provide, we are handed the done deed—a bad boy gets his comeuppance.
In 1641, Henry Fielding, as part of his sharp satire A Journey from This World to the Next, much in the
manner of his day, has one of his characters, riding in the post−mortem coach to Elysium, ask another why
“he was not diverting himself by walking up and down and playing some merry tricks” with his murderer.
Alice Sebold, despite an earnestness which dulls the potential for a more sustained burst of illumination, has
an intriguing answer.
Daniel Mendelsohn (essay date 16 January 2003)
SOURCE: Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Novel of the Year.” New York Review of Books 50, no. 1 (16 January 2003):
4−8.
[In the following essay, Mendelsohn complains that The Lovely Bones suffers from poor−quality writing and
has the moral, social, and emotional seriousness of sugary pop songs and TV movies of the week.]
1.
On May 22 of this year, six weeks before the official publication date of Alice Sebold's debut novel [The
Lovely Bones], which is narrated from Heaven by a fourteen−year−old girl who's been raped and murdered,
the novelist and former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen appeared on the Today show and declared
that if people had one book to read during the summer, “it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's
destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's one of the best books I've read in
years.” Viewers did what they were told and seemed to agree. Within days of Quindlen's appearance, Sebold's
novel had reached the number−one position on Amazon.com, and her publisher, Little, Brown, decided to
increase the size of the first printing from 35,000—already healthily optimistic for a “literary” first novel by
an author whose only other book, a memoir of her rape, was a critical but not commercial success—to 50,000
copies; a week before the book's official publication date, it was in its sixth printing, with nearly a
quarter−million copies in print.
One week after publication, after Time magazine's book critic Lev Grossman had declared the novel “the
breakout fiction debut of the year,” the book was in its eighth printing, and there were 525,000 copies in print;
two weeks and three additional printings later, the number was just under a million. By the end of September,
it had become clear that the book was a phenomenon of perhaps unprecedented proportions: an eighteenth
printing of a quarter−million copies, itself more than seven times the number originally planned for the first
printing, put the number of copies in print at over two million. Such figures suggest that this may be more
than merely the novel of the year: the Barnes &Noble fiction buyer has declared that “a book like this comes
around once in a decade.” If not, indeed, longer. Little, Brown's marketing director has commented that it's
“one of those books that rarely comes along, that reminds you why you chose this business.”
Reviews of The Lovely Bones have been almost uniformly good, ranging from very warm (Michiko Kakutani,
in the Times, called it “deeply affecting”) to ecstatic (The New Yorker called it “a stunning achievement”), but
the pattern of the book's remarkable rise to preeminence among novels published during the past year, if not
the past few years, suggests that it owes its success to word of mouth. Indeed, it must be remembered that its
spectacular rise was achieved without the help of the now−defunct Oprah's Book Club, which floated more
than one small first novel onto the best−seller lists.
So there can be no question that the book's popular appeal is deep and authentic. One measure of this is the
Daniel Mendelsohn (essay date 16 January 2003)
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fact that while the novel has, in its fifth month after publication, finally fallen to the second spot on the Times
best−seller list, and to the fifth on Amazon.com, it has received a remarkably high number of customer
reviews—842, as of this writing—this being perhaps the real measure of reader engagement. By contrast, Ian
McEwan's Atonement (a best−selling book, according to Amazon, that readers of The Lovely Bones are also
buying) is number thirty−five in ranking, with less than a quarter of the number of customer reviews that
Sebold's book received; Austerlitz, by Sebold's near namesake, the late W. G. Sebald, has a ranking of 2,073
and a mere thirty−eight customer reviews. Proust's ranking is 9,315, with fifty−seven reviews.
In an interview with Publishers Weekly at the end of July, when the true extent of the book's success was just
coming into focus, Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, suggested that the book's appeal lies in its
fearless and ultimately redemptive portrayal of “dark material”: “grief, the most horrible thing that can happen
in a life.” The author concurred, suggesting, in an interview on The Charlie Rose Show at the end of
September, that her first−person approach allowed her to do some serious “truth−telling” about the terrible
things that happen in her novel. “I mean, there's no bullshit in the fourteen−year−old perspective, and so I
think readers are drawn to that. ‘Here's something horrible. Let's look at it.’” And others trying to account for
the novel's remarkable popularity have made special mention of Sebold's ability to “tell you the most
heartbreaking things with grace and passion,” as one Barnes &Noble official put it. As various commentators
have noted, certainly one of those heartbreaking things is that terrible violence is often done to young girls:
the novel appeared soon after a highly publicized series of horrifying abductions, some in broad daylight, of
girls who were subsequently murdered. This, of course, is merely a bizarre coincidence—Sebold started work
on The Lovely Bones in 1995—but one that has made the novel “very timely,” as the fiction buyer for the
Borders bookstore chain noted in July, and as both Sebold and Rose noted during the course of their
discussion.
2.
And yet darkness, grief, and heartbreak is what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of
its appeal.
The novel begins strikingly. In the second sentence, the narrator declares that “I was fourteen when I was
murdered on December 6, 1973.” The few pages that follow, describing Susie's rape at the hands of a creepy
neighbor, Mr. Harvey (he builds dollhouses in his spare time), are the best in the book. “As I shook,” the dead
Susie recalls of the aftermath of the rape, which takes place in an underground chamber that Harvey has
constructed in a cornfield near the high school Susie attends, “a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done
this thing to me and I had lived. That was all.” This has the cold, flat feeling of real life, devoid of
self−dramatization or false emotion. The authenticity of this brief scene, it must be said, surely owes
something to the fact that the author herself was brutally raped as a Syracuse coed in 1981, an experience that
was the subject of her first book, a memoir.
And yet the arresting quality of the writing in these few pages almost immediately disappears. Sebold's
decision to have the dead girl narrate her story—a device familiar from Our Town, a sentimental story with
which this one has more than a little in common—suggests an admirable desire to confront murder and
violence, grief and guilt in a bold, even raw new way. And yet after its attention−getting opening, The Lovely
Bones shows little real interest in examining ugly things. Indeed, the ultimate horror that Susie undergoes is
one for which the author has no words, and chooses not to represent. In the first of what turns out to be many
evasive gestures, the author tastefully avoids the murder itself, to say nothing of the dismemberment. “The
end came anyway,” she writes, and there is a discreet dissolve to the next chapter.
I use the word “dissolve” advisedly: it is hard to read what follows in The Lovely Bones without thinking of
cinema—or, perhaps better, of those TV “movies of the week,” with their predictable arcs of crisis, healing,
and “closure,” the latter inevitably evoked by an obvious symbolism. (In Sebold's novel, Susie's traumatized
2.
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
little brother will abandon a fort that he has built in the family's backyard for a garden that he decides to
plant.) Moments clearly meant to be powerful indications of how the characters are handling their grief are
presented by means of a mannered shorthand that nowhere feels like real dialogue between living people; the
rhythms of Sebold's scenes are the pat, artificial rhythms of television. Here is the scene in which Susie's
beloved sister, Lindsey, young as she is, learns that only one body part has been found, and demands to learn
which part it is:
Lindsey sat down at the kitchen table. “I'm going to be sick,” she said.
“Honey?”
“Dad, I want you to tell me what it was. Which body part, and then I'm going to need to throw
up.”
My father got down a large metal mixing bowl. He brought it to the table and placed it near
Lindsey before sitting down.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me.”
“It was an elbow. The Gilberts' dog found it.”
He held her hand and then she threw up, as she had promised, into the shiny silver bowl.
A great many of Sebold's scenes end on little “beats” like this: it's a kind of writing that coyly suggests, rather
than vigorously probes, the feelings and personalities of its characters. The resultant tone, throughout the
book, is not, after all, grief−stricken, or harrowingly sorrowful, as Sebold's boosters would have it, but a kind
of pleasant wistfulness, a memory of pain rather than pain itself. And we know, somehow, that the pain will
make these characters stronger. It comes as no surprise that Lindsey emerges as the toughest, most resilient
member of the Salmon clan.
Equally soft−focus are the novel's sketchy attempts to confront the face of evil that Susie, and Susie alone of
all these characters, has looked on directly: the killer himself, Mr. Harvey. Sebold perfunctorily provides
some sketchy information that never quite adds up to a persuasive portrait of a sociopath. Harvey's father
abused and eventually chased away his wild, rebellious mother, whom the boy sees for the last time, dressed
in white capri pants, being pushed out of a car in a town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He
sometimes kills animals as a means of avoiding homicide. And Sebold grapples with punishment—with, that
is, the moral meaning and consequences of the crime at the heart of her book—as weakly as she does with the
crime itself. At the end of the novel, in what is apparently meant to be a high irony, Harvey, who has managed
for years to elude Susie's increasingly suspicious family and the police, is killed accidentally: as he stands at
the edge of a ravine, plotting to attack yet another girl one winter day, he falls when an icicle drops onto him.
This is meant by the author as a grim joke: earlier on, as Susie follows the careers of her sister and some high
school friends, there's an episode in which a bunch of gifted kids at a special camp is challenged by their
counselor to plot the “perfect murder”; Susie, observing this from Heaven with what can only be called an
admirable equanimity, suggests that an icicle would be the perfect murder weapon, because it melts away,
leaving no evidence. The connection between the camp competition and the way that Harvey ends up dying
suggests, again with a typical coyness, that a perfect retribution has indeed taken place; but it's a cute, rather
than morally satisfying, way to settle the murderer's fate. The real irony here is unintended; without the set−up
of the “perfect murder” competition, Harvey's accidental end would have been interesting, and perhaps
suggestive of the operations of a larger cosmic order; with Sebold's laboriously constructed joke, however, the
murderer's death becomes one more piece of a narrative puzzle that falls, all too often, rather patly into place.
2.
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
So having the murder victim be the protagonist offers no special view of evil, or guilt. I asked myself, as I
read The Lovely Bones, what could be the point of having the dead girl narrate the aftermath of her
death—what, in other words, this voice could achieve that a standard omniscient narrator couldn't—and it
occurred to me that the answer is that Susie is there to provide comfort: not to those who survive her, to whom
she can't really make herself known or felt, but to the audience. The real point of Sebold's novel isn't to make
you confront dreadful things, but, if anything, to assure you that they have no really permanent consequences.
This is most evident in the author's vision of the “healing process” that takes place after the murder, a process
that furnishes the book with the bulk of its matter. Susie herself must undergo it, we learn: she has to be
weaned of her desire to linger in the world and “change the lives of those I loved on Earth” in order to
progress from “her” heaven to Heaven itself. (The cosmology is vague—more shades of Our Town here—but
that's the gist of it.) But The Lovely Bones is devoted even more to the aftermath (which is to say healing and
closure) of her death as it is experienced by her friends and family.
These are a fairly predictable bunch. There is Ruth, the class misfit (“her intelligence made her a problem”),
who's “touched” by Susie's spirit as it rushes across the cornfield on that fateful night, en route to Heaven, and
who hence develops a special sensitivity to the ghosts of murdered females, which she tends to see while
wandering around New York City after she leaves her hometown. And there's Ray Singh, another misfit, a
handsome Indian boy who's Susie's great junior high school crush, and who goes on to become a medical
student with (again) a special intuition about the souls within the bodies on which he operates.
These characters aren't particularly textured or original—it comes as no surprise that buxom Ruth is a latent
lesbian and ends up living in a closet−sized room in the East Village—but they are part of the milieus that
Sebold does have real flair for describing: the suburbs, with their submerged but powerful hierarchies and
taboos (Sebold is good on the way Ray's family, to say nothing of Harvey, are quietly marginalized by their
more “normal” neighbors); and the abstruse social worlds of high school kids, which the young Susie, in some
of the novel's soundest passages, is just learning to navigate when she meets her death.
More importantly—for this, of course, is the meat of the novel—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.
This very brief description of the overall shape of Sebold's narrative should suggest the extent to which this
writer likes to stitch improbably neat closures for some very untidy wounds. And indeed, from that initial
evasion of the details of the actual murder and dismemberment to its childish 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, post−mortem), 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
consistently 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? If the cosmology for the workings of this bizarre scene is, yet again, vague, the psychology—or
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
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, is the wrong thing to be comparing it to. Sebold's final narrative gesture
reminds you, indeed, 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. 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 gravitationally
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”—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.” Two lines later, the author 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 may be about a killing; stylistically, overkill is the name of the game.
3.
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, the writer 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,
are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is
unbroken. … Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a
manipulative one: confidence−building and grief management. Politics … has been replaced
by psychotherapy.
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
3.
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
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, Heaven. And yet 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 post−mortem 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
we rushed to celebrate, with all due pomp and gravitas, on March 11, something called a six−month
“anniversary.” In its proleptic yearning for relief, and indeed in its emphasis on the bathetic appeal of
victimhood, its pseudo−therapeutic lingo of healing and 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.
Joyce Carol Oates (review date 20 June 2003)
SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “Trauma, Coping, Recovery.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5229 (20 June
2003): 15.
[In the following review, Oates calls Lucky an “exemplary memoir,” asserting that the memoir is original
and direct.]
Alice Sebold is the author of the first novel The Lovely Bones (2002), one of those bestsellers described as
“runaway” to distinguish them from more lethargic bestsellers that merely slog along selling copies in the
six−figure range. Though deftly marketed as an adult novel with a special appeal to women, The Lovely Bones
is in fact a young−adult novel of unusual charm, ambition and originality. Its most obvious literary
predecessor is Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which the deceased Emily is granted omniscient knowledge of
family, friends and community after her death; a subtly orchestrated wish−fulfilment fantasy that allows
audiences to weep, and at the same time feel good about weeping. Not the deep counterminings of tragic adult
literature here, which suggests that death is not only painful but permanent, and that we are not likely to hover
above our families as they mourn us, but a fantasy in which an event of surpassing horror (a
fourteen−year−old girl raped, murdered, dismembered by a neighbour who is never apprehended for the
crime) is very sketchily narrated in the first chapter, to provide background for a story of mourning, healing
and redemption: “Heaven wasn't perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might
change the lives of those I loved on Earth”.
The Lovely Bones might be called “inspirational” fiction in its simulation of tragedy in the service of survival,
since its goal is to confirm what we wish we could believe and not to un−settle us with harsh, intransigent
truths about human cruelty. Written with the wry panache of contemporary young−adult fiction, its tone
gamely “light” and chatty, The Lovely Bones is something of an anomaly: a “survivor” tale that is in fact
narrated from Heaven. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that left many Americans stunned and reeling,
Joyce Carol Oates (review date 20 June 2003)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
yearning to be assured of the possibility of Heaven and the immortality of the human soul, the extraordinary
success of Alice Sebold's first novel is perhaps not so mysterious. Like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird,
another young−adult novel skilfully marketed for an adult audience, The Lovely Bones tells a good story, and
provides us with good, sympathetic characters with whom we can “identify”.
For those to whom The Lovely Bones is simply too sugary a confection to swallow, Sebold's memoir Lucky,
the author's first book (published in the United States in 1999), will be something of a revelation, if not a
shock. For Lucky is an utterly realistic, unsparing and distinctly unsugary account of violent rape and its
aftermath in the author's life, based upon her experience as an eighteen−year−old freshman at Syracuse
University in May 1981. Where the novel transports us immediately to a fantasy Heaven, the memoir
transports us immediately to very plausible Hell:
In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an
amphitheater … a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this by the police. In
comparison, they said, I was lucky.
Lucky is terse, ironic, controlled and graphic. It begins with a literally blow−by−blow account of the
protracted beating and rape suffered by Sebold as a university freshman surprised in a park by an assailant
who will turn out to be a resident of the city of Syracuse with a prior police record, a young black man so
arrogantly self−assured that, when he and Sebold accidentally meet on a Syracuse street some months after
the rape, he laughs at her terror: “Hey, girl. Don't I know you from somewhere?” After the ordeal of a
preliminary hearing and a trial during which the rapist's defence attorney attacks Sebold's testimony with
every weapon allowed in courtroom procedure, her rapist is found guilty of first−degree counts of rape and
sodomy and is sentenced to eight to twenty−five years in prison—with time off for good behaviour, the
minimum eight years could be considerably reduced. Should anyone imagine that a jury verdict of “guilty” is
a happy ending to any crime case, Sebold notes that the rape of her friend and room−mate the following year
in Syracuse is theorized by police to have been a “revenge” rape committed by friends of the convicted man,
and includes a harrowing final chapter in which she speaks of years of drinking, drug addiction and
psychological unease that followed her rape: “I loved heroin. … Ecstasy and mushrooms and acid trips? Who
wanted to enhance a mood? My goal was to destroy it”.
Ours is the age of what might be called the New Memoir: the memoir of sharply focused events, very often
traumatic, in distinction to the traditional life−memoir. The New Memoir is frequently written by the young or
relatively young, the traditional memoir is usually the province of the older. In this sub−genre, the motive isn't
to write a memoir because one is an individual of stature or accomplishment, in whom presumably readers
might be interested, but to set forth out of relative anonymity the terms of one's physical/psychological ordeal;
in most cases, the ordeal is survived, so that the memoirist moves through trauma into coping and eventual
recovery. Though the literary structure may sound formulaic, exemplary memoirs like Lucky break the
formula with their originality of insight and expression. Like most good prose works, Lucky is far from
unambiguous: the memoir can be read as an alarming and depressing document, and it can be read as
genuinely “uplifting”. The pivotal point in Sebold's recovery doesn't occur until years after the rape when,
ironically, she comes upon her own case discussed in Dr Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery in terms of
“post traumatic stress disorder”.
[Individuals suffering from this disorder] do not have a normal “baseline” level of alert but
relaxed attention. Instead, they have a baseline of arousal: their bodies are always on the alert
for danger. … Traumatic events appear to recondition the human nervous system.
The act of writing a memoir can be seen, ideally, as an act of reclaiming the victim's very nerves. Having been
encouraged by her admirable writing instructors at Syracuse, Tess Gallagher and Tobias Wolff, to remember
as much as she can and to write freely about it, Sebold will come in time to discover
Joyce Carol Oates (review date 20 June 2003)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
that memory could save, that it had power, that it [is] often the only recourse of the powerless,
the oppressed or the brutalized.
When Sebold was raped at the age of eighteen she was, unlike the majority of her classmates, a virgin,
inexperienced in sexual matters. This fact would be many times reiterated in police and court documents as if,
had the victim not been a virgin, the rapist's assault would not have been so heinous and the victim's claim of
rape might have been undermined. The (suspicious, male) detective assigned to Sebold's case is finally more
sympathetic because Sebold was a virgin than he would have been otherwise, though in his initial report, after
having interrogated the injured, dazed, exhausted and sedated Sebold at length, in the middle of the night, the
detective comes to the thoroughly unwarranted and arbitrary conclusion that Sebold was not being
“completely factual” and that her case should be referred to the “inactive file”. After Sebold's painfully vivid
description of the assault and rape, the quoted police report is a masterpiece of banality, its flat, stereotypical
language seemingly calculated to minimalize the horrific experience.
It will be upsetting for many readers, and certainly for women, to learn that the rape victim must “perform”
convincingly, if she is to be believed. In giving police and courtroom testimony, it isn't enough to simply tell
the truth (“if you just tell the truth, you lose”); one must play a prescribed victim−role, dress the part as
deliberately as if one were appearing in a stage play, and above all appear innocent, humble, even repentant
and apologetic in the face of others' suspicions (“Juror: Didn't you know that you are not supposed to go
through the park after nine−thirty at night? Didn't you know that?”). Sebold endures the ordeal of the trial
with a minimum of bitterness: “While still in court I thanked the jury. I drew on my resources: performing,
placating, making my family smile. As I left that courtroom I felt I had put on the best show of my life”.
Sebold's experience helps to explain why, in the United States, it is believed that approximately 50 per cent of
rapes are never reported to police. For many women, the ordeal of rape's aftermath is simply not worth it.
Lucky is interlarded with astonishing remarks made to Sebold by well−intentioned but unthinking individuals,
including Sebold's father: “How could he have raped you unless you let him?”. Comparing Sebold with her
allegedly more sensitive sister, Mr Sebold says: “If it had to happen to one of you, I'm glad it was you and not
your sister”. Another classic line is delivered by a feminist psychiatrist: “Well, I guess this will make you less
inhibited about sex now, huh?” After Sebold has managed to write a poem expressing hatred of her rapist a
fellow (male) poet protests not to understand: “You're a beautiful girl”. Months after the rape, when Alice
Sebold is trying gamely to lead a normal life, she assures a man in whom she is romantically interested that
she has had sex three times since the rape, though in fact she has not had sex, and he says with approval:
“That's a good amount. Just enough to know you're normal”. The most devastating of remarks, however, is
delivered by the rapist himself when he sees his victim naked: “You're the worst bitch I ever done this to”.
Where The Lovely Bones ends with the greeting−card sentiment, “I wish you all a long and happy life”, Lucky
ends on a more ambivalent note: “It is later now, and I live in a world where the two truths coexist; where
both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand”. That the victim−memoirist would one day make of her trauma
the “runaway” Lovely Bones is a wonderfully ironic turnabout no one, surely not the victim, could have
foreseen.
Claudia FitzHerbert (review date 21 June 2003)
SOURCE: FitzHerbert, Claudia. “Two Bites at the Cherry.” Spectator 292, no. 9124 (21 June 2003): 65.
[In the following review, FitzHerbert compares The Lovely Bones with Lucky, finding the former an
unsuccessful attempt to improve on the author's memoir.]
Alice Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University when she was brutally raped by a stranger in a park in
Claudia FitzHerbert (review date 21 June 2003)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
1981. Several months later she recognised her attacker in the street. He was arrested, prosecuted and jailed.
Sebold, a virgin at the time of the attack, was a wise−cracking clown with literary ambitions from a bookish
family in Philadelphia. She was praised by a detective involved in the case as ‘the best rape witness’ he had
ever seen. A year later her student house was broken into and her best friend raped. Sebold's celebrity as a
successful rape victim was in the end too much for her room−mate, who cut loose from the friendship when
she decided not to proceed with a prosecution.
Lucky is Sebold's memoir of her ordeal. It is a precise and unforgiving book, which charts the mainly
inadequate responses of family and friends to the rape, as well as praising those who gave her permission to
rage and to hate. In a postscript she sketches her private descent into drink and drugs after dropping out of
graduate school. Outwardly her life continued on a successful track: she held down teaching jobs, published
an article about rape in the New York Times and appeared on Oprah as ‘the victim who fought back’. It was
only after she found herself cited in the first half of a book called Trauma and Recovery that she began to
listen to her therapist's hints of post−traumatic stress disorder, to take stock and to start over.
Lucky's title comes from a policeman telling her that she was lucky compared to another girl, who had been
murdered and dismembered in the same tunnel where Sebold was merely raped. It is impossible not to wonder
at the relation between that murdered girl and Susie Salmon, the 14−year−old girl who is raped, murdered and
dismembered at the beginning of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's first novel.
Profound unease about the dead being able to witness the mess which the living make of life is a standard
reason for unbelief. In The Lovely Bones Sebold turns this unease to ingenious account: the novel is narrated
from heaven by the murdered girl, who keeps a mawkishly fond and adolescently baleful eye on her mourning
family as first they fall apart and then regroup in the years following her death.
The Lovely Bones has enjoyed huge critical acclaim as well as commercial success in America, where it
appeared last year. When it was published in Britain a few months later it was broadly dismissed as saccharine
whimsy. Its success, kinder critics intimated, was only explicable in terms of America's post−twin−tower
trauma. But still it sold, and now Sebold's British publishers have packaged Lucky, which first appeared in
America three years ago, as a companion volume.
To read the books in succession is to be persuaded of Sebold's sure−footedness as a writer, if nothing else.
Having set up the conceit of the novel, she makes no mistakes. Her vision of a godless heaven, where the
simplest dreams of the inhabitants are made real, is for instance only a backdrop, but still it is painstakingly
realised. So too is the gimmick of having the narrator stuck forever at the age of 14. Susie Salmon's voice
remains the same, even as her thoughts mature. She learns to move on, although she will never grow up. The
other characters in the novel are, more or less, from stock, but the ingenuity of Sebold's narrative device
prevents boredom as we flit with Susie from detached mother to obsessive father to dipsomaniac grandmother
to psychopathic killer, never spending too long in the company of any one of them.
As for the memoir, it is a better book for the fact that Sebold's recovery is left to the postscript. Much of the
interest of the story lies in its rawness, in the writer's attempts to make sense of a shattered world. ‘I did not
want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to
survive,’ she writes of an unsatisfactory encounter with a rape crisis centre counsellor. And while Sebold does
not herself make any explicit connection between this feeling and her friend's subsequent determination to
escape from Sebold, it is there to be made. The impossibility of sisterhood is one of the book's unhammered,
underlying themes.
While both books touch on healing, and neither on forgiveness, in many ways The Lovely Bones is an obvious
attempt to improve on Lucky, to make an easier, happier story out of the bare bones of a violent act. In the
memoir the rapist is black, provoking a vicious random attack on some loitering black men by a policeman
Claudia FitzHerbert (review date 21 June 2003)
34
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
accompanying Sebold on a search for her attacker. The author, bravely and disturbingly, describes her instinct
that the brutal policeman ‘lived on my planet’. Later, in the courtroom, Sebold was ‘made to feel guilty for the
race of my rapist’. It was, she adds, not ‘the first time, nor the last, that I wished my rapist had been white’. In
the novel, surprise surprise, the girl's attacker is white, the police are hopeless and the father figure, loving but
inadequate in the memoir, emerges as the golden−hearted vigilante with all the right instincts about his
daughter's killer.
If the charge against The Lovely Bones is that it takes a troubling landscape and bathes it in a sugary mist, then
the defence may be that the mist lures rather than conceals. And although there is, arguably, one reconciliation
too many at the novel's end, this does not detract from the power of the central image of the lovely bones,
which the narrator characterises as ‘the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but
often magnificent—that happened after I was gone’. Lucky, by contrast, deals in images of irreversible
damage. At home Sebold was compelled to say the word rape out loud when neighbours came to call. ‘But I
felt also that saying it was an act of vandalism. As if I had thrown a bucket of blood out across the living room
at the blue couch.’ Blood and sugar. What will follow?
Andrea Dworkin (review date 30 June 2003)
SOURCE: Dworkin, Andrea. “A Good Rape.” New Statesman 132, no. 4644 (30 June 2003): 51−2.
[In the following review, Dworkin presents a detailed synopsis of the memoir Lucky, preferring it to Sebold's
novel The Lovely Bones.]
Alice Sebold is the author of the bestselling novel The Lovely Bones, in which a teenager who has been raped,
murdered and dismembered narrates the story, from heaven, of those events and the aftermath. The narration
is a chilling juxtaposition of innocence against evil. Why do people read it? Can a book be truthful about the
rape and murder of girls and still be a popular phenomenon?
The novel is often accused of being sentimental, which some feel accounts for its success. It does have several
happy endings: the serial killer falls down a ravine in freezing ice and snow and dies; the adulterous mother
who has left the home, unable to bear the burden of her murdered child, returns; the child's sister makes a
happy marriage; and the father recovers from a near−fatal heart attack and falls in love with the mother a
second time. The mother and father are treated with extraordinary empathy. There are also resting places in
the novel: descriptions of friendships, classmates, teachers, landscapes, weather, and “my heaven”, the
cognitive world of the murdered child. For those who like feminism straight−up, there is a character who,
through her hypersensitivity, can feel where women and girls have been brutalised.
There are no resting places in Sebold's memoir of being raped in her first year of college. The title Lucky
comes from the police, who told Sebold that a girl had been murdered and dismembered where she was raped.
She was “lucky”, they said. The bitter irony of the title resonates throughout the memoir.
And in many ways, Sebold was lucky. She experienced what rape−crisis counsellors call “a good rape”: she
was beaten so badly that an accusation of rape would be believed. She was wearing loose clothes that covered
her body. She fought the rapist fiercely, although at some point, badly hurt and convinced he would kill her,
she began to comply. She was a virgin when raped. Eventually, she identified the rapist and got a conviction
in a court of law. The conviction made her a hero for local law enforcement. Rape just doesn't get any better
than that.
Still, not everyone believed her. Her beloved father did not. He couldn't understand how, once the rapist
dropped his knife, which he did as he was getting her to lie down, there was any force. Even though she
Andrea Dworkin (review date 30 June 2003)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
believed the rapist would kill her, she had consented. Remember the beating, I want to say on her behalf.
Rather than give her father all the details, she decides to accept his ignorance.
She found that she had crossed a line. People were embarrassed or self−conscious around her. She was “other
than”. She was isolated in the horror of what had happened to her. In the immediate aftermath, one friend tried
to stay with her until her mother came. Another helped her to stand up in the shower when the police said she
could have one. But eventually they disappear from her life.
Returning to the same college in her second year, she makes a new friend. Each is the “clone” of the other.
They get an apartment together. One night when Sebold is out, this friend is raped. She has been tied to
Sebold's bed. This suggests to the police that it was a revenge rape, retaliation for the conviction of Sebold's
rapist. The police even downplay the violence in the friend's rape by comparing it to Sebold's. Sebold tries to
help her friend, but later the friend rejects her: the friend does not want to press charges; she cannot do what
Sebold did in getting a conviction. She cuts Sebold dead. This is devastating.
The suffering from Sebold's assault and its consequences is unbearable. She wrote about the rape in the New
York Times and she went on Oprah as “the victim who fought back”; snorting heroin becomes her survival
mechanism. Years later she cleans up. She lives, as she puts it, “where both hell and hope lie in the palm of
my hand”.
The Lovely Bones is a tribute to the girl who died where Sebold was later raped; Lucky is burdened with facts,
more pedestrian, more real. Lucky is the more important book.
Doris L. Eder (essay date 2004)
SOURCE: Eder, Doris L. “The Saving Powers of Memory and Imagination in Alice Sebold's Lucky and The
Lovely Bones.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism 193, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter,
Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2004.
[In the following essay, specially commissioned for Contemporary Literary Criticism, Eder offers a
comparison of The Lovely Bones with Sebold's memoir, Lucky, discussing the novel's characterization,
structure, and imaginative perspective.]
Alice Sebold's two works published to date resemble each other in significant ways but also differ in
important respects. The sardonically titled Lucky (1999),1 a memoir about the author's rape at the age of
eighteen, how the rapist was brought to trial and sentenced, and how she and her family survived the
experience, was written before her best−selling debut novel, The Lovely Bones (2002).2 In an interview,
Sebold reveals she was struggling with a novel that had stalled when the voice of Susie Salmon suddenly
entered her brain. She transcribed the first chapter of Susie's story, only to discover that she must write about
her own rape and victimization fifteen years earlier in order to get her own story out of the way. Her story was
obstructing the novel's progress in some way. Sebold herself acknowledges that “Lucky was part of the
process of writing Lovely Bones.” She adds that, “whereas in Lovely Bones the rape and murder scene was the
first thing I wrote, in Lucky it was the last.”3 The beginnings of both books are brilliant, whereas their endings
are blemished and raveled. Indeed, one may consider they subvert or undermine what has gone before.
Having read these books in order of publication, I would urge readers to read them in reverse order—the
novel first, the memoir afterwards. Why? Such a recommendation is not dictated by a preference for
nonfiction over fiction but because, contrary to publishing history, Lucky is the more integrated and successful
book. Sebold's memoir was marginalized by being shelved in mega−bookstores under “Addiction and
Recovery” (addiction to rape?) and Women's Studies, and as a result did not sell well, but is less flawed than
Doris L. Eder (essay date 2004)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
the much acclaimed Lovely Bones. The two books each illustrate the remarkable recuperative powers of
memory and imagination, respectively, and it is instructive to compare the fiction with the reality that
engendered it. The memoir's viewpoint is more restricted but more grounded in reality than the novel's—what,
after all, could be freer, more ethereal, or limitless than the first−person omniscient olympian perspective of
Susie in The Lovely Bones?
Lucky opens with a scarifying description of a rape in an underground tunnel where a murder formerly took
place. From the first, rape and murder are intertwined in the victim's (as perhaps in the rapist's) mind. “I knew
I was staring up into the eyes of the man who would kill me. … I was convinced that I would not live. …
Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped …” (L
[Lucky], 14−15.) Along with a feeling of absolute helplessness, this violent crime engenders a sense of the
deepest alienation, as well as fear of loss of identity. As she is being raped, Alice tries to keep sane by
remembering the lines of a poem. Afterwards she registers, “All that remained unpossessed was my brain.” (L,
19.) When the rapist steals her money and tries to take her driver's license, it becomes clear she fears losing
her identity: “I was petrified of him having my identification. Leaving with anything other than what he had:
all of me, except my brain and my belongings.” (L, 21−22.)
One striking resemblance between memoir and novel is the victim's obsession, after the event, with protecting
her family. Most children expect their parents to protect them, but teenagers Alice and Susie expend
inordinate time and energy trying to protect their family members. In the emotional economy of the family in
Lucky, Alice is aligned with her alcoholic and panicky mother, her elder sister being closer to her cool,
laid−back, professorial father. (The line−up in the Salmon household differs somewhat, Susie hovering most
anxiously over her father, though she feels sympathy for her mother.) Alice's concern for her mother may
strike one as excessive. She analyzes it thus: “… the way I survived in the early hours after the rape was by
spiraling the obsession of how not to tell my mother over and over. … Convinced it would destroy her, I
ceased thinking of what had happened to me. … My worry for her became my life raft.” (L, 28−29.) In fact,
Alice's mother holds up pretty well, whereas Abigail Salmon of The Lovely Bones goes to pieces.
Whereas Jack Salmon, Susie's father, is a tower of love and strength for her and tries to pursue the man he
suspects of raping and murdering his daughter in The Lovely Bones, in Lucky, Alice's father remains his
undemonstrative self, incurring the wrath of his wife and other daughter when he asks how Alice could have
been raped once her assailant dropped his knife. Patiently Alice reasons with him, already keenly aware that
rape causes more cleavage between the sexes and between the victim and others than any other crime. To her
cost, she discovers that, “after telling the hard facts to anyone … I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe
or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury … for reasons I remain unsure of.
Some men and lesbians see it as a turn−on or a mission, as if … they can pull me back from the wreckage …”
She adds that no one can save a rape victim from the consequences of rape—“You save yourself or you
remain unsaved.” (L, 69.)
One way in which memoir and novel pursue different tracks is in their depictions of the police and the
rapist/murderer. The character of Len Fenerman in The Lovely Bones is a pale parody of the kind of detective
who inhabits most crime novels and whodunits. Fenerman (who briefly becomes Abigail's lover) discourages
her husband from investigating serial rapist/murderer, Harvey. The detective's plodding investigations permit
the trail to run cold; in pursuit of his adulterous affair, he even allows the murderer to skip town and evade
capture. When it comes, the villain's nemesis is casual and fortuitous and has little to do with human agency.
The police pay a more central role in Lucky and one or two of them earn Alice's hardwon respect.
One of Sebold's most extraordinary imaginative feats in The Lovely Bones is her portrayal of George Harvey.
A remarkable study in the banality of evil, he is at once frightening and pathetic. As Laura Miller observes in
a review, his portrait is without a trace of “fetishism” or, for that matter, “forgiveness.”4 The rapist in Lucky,
though he terrifies his victim and continues to overshadow her as “the husband to my fate,” is one of society's
Doris L. Eder (essay date 2004)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
failures, more a victim than Harvey, though we know little more about him than that he is black. (L, 61.)
Lucky's structure is simple, like that of The Lovely Bones. Commencing with the crime, it follows the Salmon
family as its members try to come to terms with Alice's rape. She has her heart set on leading a normal life, so
she returns to Syracuse University. Six months after the rape Alice sees her attacker on the street, has a sketch
made of him, and calls the police. Scheduled for a workshop that day with celebrated writer Geoffrey Wolff,
she excuses herself. Wolff gives her this advice: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Alice comes to
understand that “memory could save you, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the
powerless, the oppressed, and the brutalized.” [L, 114.) She shows preternatural powers of memory and
intelligence as a witness at her trial, although so frightened by the lineup beforehand that she identifies the
wrong man as her assailant. In fact, Alice and her family are on the road to recovery when the rape of her best
friend causes a relapse.
Lila, Alice's close friend and roommate, is raped in their rooming house. Alice tries to help Lila lovingly and
responsibly, but her friend's reaction is one of denial. She has no wish to follow Alice's example in pressing
charges, and she rebuffs her: “I know you want to take care of me, but you can't. I don't want to be touched.
Not by you, not by anybody,” she declares. (L, 231.) The aftermath of this second encounter with rape by
proxy is that Alice lapses into despair, all hope of leading a normal life draining away. She fails to graduate,
going to Houston and then New York, where she drifts into the life of dissipation and debauchery detailed in
the Epilogue. The Epilogue to Lucky is a mistake, as much an excrescence on her memoir as the sudden
incursion of Susie from heaven into earth is a betrayal of the established viewpoint and of Sebold's first novel
as a whole.
The Lovely Bones covers a time span of about a decade. After her rape and murder by Harvey in December
1973, Susie watches over her family from heaven. She sees her father beginning to harbor suspicions about
her murderer, which he confides to detective Fenerman, only to have Fenerman warn him off. Eventually,
Salmon becomes so convinced of Harvey's guilt that, when he observes a figure prowling at night through the
Stolfuz cornfield where Susie met her end, he follows. But this turns out not to be Harvey—just one of Susie's
former schoolmates keeping a tryst; Salmon is beaten up for his pains. He is permanently lamed by this
encounter, so Lindsey takes up the cudgels for her father. She breaks into Harvey's house, discovering a
drawing he made of the cornfield and the underground dugout into which he lured Susie. Lindsey runs off
with this, though Harvey, returning home, sees her as she clears his garden. Harvey then disappears.
Abigail, Susie's mother, meanwhile tries desperately to embark on a new life; she has an affair with
Lenerman, even as her husband lies in hospital. She leaves him. A few months later her mother comes to live
with the Salmons to take care of the children. Lindsey grows up and is engaged to her boyfriend Samuel,
while Ruth—a girl Susie brushed by on her way to heaven, who has, as a result, become obsessed with the
dead girl—pairs off with Susie's former boyfriend, Ray Singh. When Jack Salmon has a heart attack, Abigail
returns and Susie's parents are reconciled. Salmon recovers, Lindsey and Samuel marry, and Susie temporarily
reincarnates herself in Ruth so that Ray can make love to her. The Lovely Bones ends with Susie finally
leaving go of Earth and her family to graduate to a more advanced heaven.
In a workshop at the University of California at Irvine, where the author took her MFA in Writing, Sebold
said that her agent and editor responded to a capsule description of the book thus: “If you had told me that was
what it was about, we never would have bought it,” but they added, “Thank God we got to read it.”5 Similarly,
Ron Charles's review of The Lovely Bones is right in pointing out that mere plot summary makes this novel
sound “mawkish, like a ghastly version of Beloved for white suburbia.”6 Other critics note that its concept,
voice, and perspective make this novel a high−wire act, with most finding the author negotiating the tightrope
successfully. I dissent, finding the novel mawkish at times. Sebold occasionally lapses into “inspirational”
prose reminiscent of Hallmark or Deepak Chopra. Consider, for instance, this comment on life on earth: “I
had taken this time to fall in love … with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death—the helplessness of
Doris L. Eder (essay date 2004)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
being alive, the dark bright pity of being human—feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your
arms to light …” (LB [The Lovely Bones], 309.) Or Susie's description of how she falls from heaven to
become incarnated in Ruth, while Ruth temporarily ascends to take her place: “I was a soul back on Earth.
AWOL a little while from heaven …” (LB, 302.) The first passage teeters between the sublime and the
sentimental; the second is limping humor.
Nevertheless, The Lovely Bones is a feat, a tribute to its author's imagination: its perspective is challenging
and interesting, its narrative voice is generally compelling, and its style is appealing, sometimes even
memorable. One agrees with Dennis McLellan and Michiko Kakutani in finding the point of view, combining
“the warmth of a first−person narrative and the freedom of an omniscient one,” artful and beguiling.7 The
omniscient voice is often considered out of date and the first person loose. However, as she distances herself
from her family, as she contemplates the “lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the
connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent” that proliferate after
her death, Susie finds herself able “to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.” (LB,
320.) A good description of earned omniscience.
The characterization of the Salmon family is also persuasive, particularly the portraits of Jack Salmon and
Lindsey. Salmon is the center of his family. He loves all his children and feels overwhelming guilt at not
having been able to prevent Susie's rape and death. He never stops loving his wife, though she abandons him
temporarily. Because of this, their reconciliation is believable. (Abigail's character is, however, problematic.)
Susie's sister Lindsey is an admirable character, the one seen most “in the round,” for she achieves
independence from the narrator despite the fact that Susie identifies with her as a “twin,” more closely than
with anyone else. “In watching her I found I could get lost more than with anyone else,” Susie comments.
(LB, 232). Attractive and plucky, Lindsey moves from sheer terror, roused as she embodies the “Walking
Dead Syndrome,” in which “other people see the dead person and don't see you,” (LB, 59) to resolute pursuit
of her own life and happiness. She is the catalyst who enables Susie finally to “let go.” Reviewer Tony
Buchsbaum observes that Lindsey “seems to internalize the violence, reshaping her life around it the way an
oyster uses … a grain of sand to make a pearl.”8
Buckley, the youngest child, is only four when Susie is murdered and not much older when his mother leaves,
so must digest two great losses at a tender age. With his father's help, he absorbs the first loss better than the
second. This child's character is complex, somewhat schizoid. Intensely loving toward his father, Buckley
internalizes his hatred for his mother: “He had been keeping, daily, weekly, yearly, an underground storage
room of hate. Deep inside this, the four−year−old sat, his heart flashing. Heart to stone, heart to stone.” (LB,
269.) A kind of triangulation occurs among Susie, her father, and her brother at critical moments—when, for
instance, Salmon has a heart attack and stands at the threshold of death. Buck prays for his survival; Susie
would like him to die and join her on the other side; both children want their father for themselves.
The characters of Abigail Salmon, Ruth Connors, and Len Fenerman are less satisfactory. Abigail seems
hollow and negative; Ruth is contrived, and Len Fenerman is deliberately plodding and colorless. The weak
link in the Salmon family, Abigail is a woman with a touch of alienation about her, who had no vocation for
motherhood and so, Susie says, “had been punished in the most horrible and unimaginable way for never
having wanted me.” (LB, 266.) She did love her elder daughter, probably subconsciously blaming herself for
Susie's death, yet needing to deny this and run away—“she needed Len to drive the dead daughter out.” (LB,
152.) Grandmother Lynn, a spirited former alcoholic, brings fresh air into the Salmon household when she
takes Abigail's place.
The poet Ruth Connors is a feminist with lesbian leanings who becomes obsessed with victimized women and
children, keeping journals about them. She resembles Alice, as portrayed in Lucky, in being bohemian, weird,
and slightly old−fashioned. But she strikes the reader as more of a plot device than a character in her own
right.
Doris L. Eder (essay date 2004)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
Harvey, the serial killer, is given a convincing background. As a child he was his mother's accomplice in
stealing, pilfering, and scavenging even from the dead. His mother is driven off by his father and afterwards
he internalizes her, seeking women and little girls as victims. He is diabolically canny and astute, enabling
him to throw the police offtrack. When Fenerman comes to search his house after Lindsey shows him the
drawing she took, Harvey simulates sympathy for the Salmons, explaining the drawing as his way of figuring
out how the crime might have been committed. Asked why he didn't share his speculations with the police, he
responds this would not have brought the dead girl back and that he was afraid of appearing a meddling
amateur!
As for the novel's otherworldly setting, critics are wont to praise Susie's heaven as an inspiration. Sebold says
she dispensed with many versions of heaven before settling on this one. Susie's high−school heaven is a
teenager's delight: “There were no teachers. … We never had to go inside except for art class. … our
textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue.” (LB, 18.) Posthumously, Susie is able to indulge a taste
for an architecture opposed to the suburbs' boxy functionalism. She inhabits a duplex and a gazebo and is
surrounded by dogs. There are hints throughout that she may move on to a more rarefied empyrean, but that
this too will be “cozy.” For some, Susie's “Great Good Place” lacks credibility.
Sebold's genre is “suburban gothic.”9 A product of the suburbs, the author marvels (in a discussion at her
literary stock in trade: “Who would have thought that the place I most despised growing up—where I felt like
the weirdest freak and biggest loser—would turn out to be a gift to me?”10 The kind of story that attracts
Sebold is this:
My family was watching television when a couple—the mother and father to a woman who
lived one street over … were hit by a car and landed on our front lawn. The man who hit them
leapt out of his car and shouted to two boys … playing basketball … “These people need an
ambulance.” He then proceeded to jump back in his car and drive three houses down, where
he calmly parked in his own driveway and went inside his house. The daughter of the couple
who had been hit … now came upon the scene. We heard screaming. … Both her parents
were killed. One died on our lawn, the other died … in a hospital. And the man who struck
them? He was both one of our neighbors and, by profession, a paramedic.11
The Lovely Bones testifies to the oddness and grotesquerie of suburbia. Other critics have compared Sebold to
such authors as Aimée Bender and Alice MacDermott. For her suburban gothic strain she is comparable to the
Sylvia Plath of The Bell Jar, who evokes the same incursions of terror into the blandest milieux and who
would also glory in such a diabolic juxtaposition as “the Gilberts' dog found my elbow and brought it home
with a telling corn husk attached to it.” (LB, 10) For her interest in regeneration, however, Sebold is
comparable—not to her advantage—to contemporary British novelist Pat Barker. These two writers share a
profound interest in the process of regeneration or healing, though Barker's is grittier and harder won. Still,
one can agree with Kathleen Bouton that Sebold's novel transforms “the stuff of neighborhood tragedy” into
literature.12 And one affirms Michiko Kakutani's assessment that The Lovely Bones is an “affecting meditation
on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed … through love and acceptance.”13
Notes
1. Alice Sebold, Lucky (New York: Scribner, 1999). All further references to this work are given as page
numbers within the text.
2. ———. The Lovely Bones (Boston: Little, Brown &Company, 2002). All further references to this
work are given as page numbers within the text.
3. David Weich, “The World Meets Alice Sebold.” July 22, 2002. Powells.com
http://www.powells.com/authors/sebold.html
4. “Imagining Death.” Aug. 1, 2002. Salon.com http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/08/01/fiction
Doris L. Eder (essay date 2004)
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
5. Ehzra Cue, “An Evening of Fiction.” April 26, 2000
http://www.newu.uci.edu/archive/2000−2001/spring/010430/f−010430−alice.html
6. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” Christian Science Monitor, July 25,
2002, p. 15.
7. See reviews by McLellan in the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 15, 1999, and by Kakutani in the New York
Times, June 18, 2002, late ed., sect. E, p. 1, col. 4.
8. “Voice from Beyond.” http://www.januarymagazine.com/fiction/lovelybones/html
9. Lev Grossman. Time 160, July 1, 2002, p. 62.
10. “The Oddity of Suburbia—Alice Sebold in Her Own Words.”
http://www/twbookmark.com/authorslounge/articles/2002/may/article_150960.html
11. Ibid.
12. “What Remains?” New York Times Book Review, cli, issue no. 52179, July 14, 2002, p. 14.
13. “The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death,” New York Times, June 18, 2002, late ed., sect.
E, p. 1, col. 4.
References
Bouton, Kathleen. “What Remains?” New York Times Book Review, cli, issue no. 52179, July 14, 2002, p. 14.
Buchsbaum, Tony. “Voice from Beyond.” http://www.januarymagazine.com/fiction/lovelybones/html
Charles, Ron. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Christian Science Monitor, July
25, 2002, p. 15.
Cue, Ehzra. “An Evening of Fiction.” April 26, 2000
http://www.newu.uci.edu/archive/2000−2001/spring/010430/f−010430−alice.html
Darby, Ann. Interview with Alice Sebold. Publishers Weekly, 249, June 17, 2002, pp. 40−41.
Grossman, Lev. Time 160, July 1, 2002, p. 62.
Kakutani, Michiko. “The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death.” New York Times, June 18, 2002,
late ed., sect. E, p. 1, col. 4.
McLellan, David. Los Angeles Times, Sept. 15, 1999.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Novel of the Year.” New York Review of Books, 50, no. 1, January 16, 2003.
Miller, Laura. Salon.com http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/08/01/sebold/print.html See also
“Imagining Death.” http://www.archive.salon/books/feature/2002/09/09/fiction/
“The Oddity of Suburbia—Alice Sebold in Her Own Words.”
www/twbookmark.com/authorslounge/articles/2002/may/article_150960.html
Press, Joy. “Heaven Can't Wait.” Village Voice, June 14, 2002. See also
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0225/press.php
Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little, Brown &Company, 2002.
———. Lucky. New York: Scribner, 1999.
Doris L. Eder (essay date 2004)
41
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
“Voice from Beyond.” www.januarymagazine.com/fiction/lovelybones/html
Weich, David, “The World Meets Alice Sebold.” July 22, 2002. Powells.com
www.powells.com/authors/sebold.html
Kenneth Womack (essay date 2004)
SOURCE: Womack, Kenneth. “‘My Name Was Salmon, Like the Fish’: Understanding Death, Grief, and
Redemption in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism 193, edited by Tom
Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2004.
[In the following essay, specially commissioned for Contemporary Literary Criticism, Womack uses the
framework of family systems theory to examine acts of narrative therapy and the grieving process presented
in The Lovely Bones.]
As with so many other works of contemporary fiction and film, Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely
Bones (2002) fulfills our fundamental and indelibly human desires for establishing vital interconnections with
the lost friends and loved ones who adorn our personal pasts. Their deaths leave unspeakable voids in our
lives that the progress of time and the erosion of memory render ever more vexing and inconsolable with each
passing day. Time and time again, the most cherished works of our literary and popular culture reflect this
abiding need to seek out our lost siblings, parents, and grandparents. Like the fictive characters in such
dramatic and cinematic fare as Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future
series (1985−1990) and Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), we long for the opportunity to
wade back into the recesses of time in order to enjoy impossible reunions with the people who left their
imprints upon our very souls. On the one hand, of course, we are motivated by a sense of nostalgia for an
ostensibly comforting past; yet on the other, we hunger for a sense of renewed familial connection that death's
finality has forever put asunder. By narrating the events surrounding the Salmon family's tragic dislocation
and heart−wrenching reunion, The Lovely Bones deftly taps into our yearnings to eclipse the laws of space and
time. Even more powerfully, the novel depicts the many ways in which interpersonal tragedy possesses the
capacity for tearing survivors' lives apart at the very moment in which they need familial companionship the
most. The parlance of family systems therapy—with its accent upon the interpersonal dynamics that shape
literary works as well as our own senses of self—provides us with a useful lens for understanding the Salmon
family's trials and tribulations in The Lovely Bones.
In contrast with other forms of psychological criticism—particularly Freudian and psychoanalytical
approaches, which focus upon individual, rather than familial, experiences—family systems theory affords us
with the clinical terminology for exploring “that most dangerous of places,” in the words of John V. Knapp,
“the family circle” (93). Both as a form of therapeutic treatment and as an interpretive methodology, family
systems psychotherapy maintains that the family presupposes the individual as the matrix of identity. In The
Theory and Technique of Family Therapy (1979), Charles P. Barnard and Ramon Garrido Corrales observe
that “the members of one's family are one's significant others par excellence” (9). Proponents of family
systems psychotherapy acknowledge that the family's most important role is fraught with difficulty: as an
inherently open system, the family must at once provide support for its individual members' integration into a
solid family unit, as well as their differentiation, or emotional and psychological separation, into relatively
autonomous selves. This mutual developmental process possesses the capacity for producing functional and
dysfunctional families. In functional families, individual members evolve into fully realized selves that allow
them to act, think, and feel for themselves. In dysfunctional families, however, family members develop
pseudo−selves—often fostered by fear and anxiety within the system—and thus, such individuals frequently
remain unable to maintain any real equilibrium between their inner feelings and their outward behavior
(Barnard and Corrales 85−87). In addition to its therapeutic applications, family systems psychotherapy's
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clinical vocabulary supplements the interpretive efforts of literary scholars with a critical mode for
investigating the role of the family in fictional narratives both as an agent of change, as well as a mechanism
for maintaining stasis.1
Family systems psychotherapy also offers a valuable terminology for understanding the significant roles of
death, the grieving process, and narrative therapy in The Lovely Bones. At the beginning of the novel, the
Salmons' interpersonal relationship exists as a functional family system. Jack and Abigail Salmon enjoy a
busy, albeit satisfying family life in eastern Pennsylvania, where they raise their three
children—fourteen−year−old Susie, her younger sister Lindsey, and their four−year−old brother Buckley.
After Susie's rape, murder, and dismemberment in December 1973, the family lapses into a dysfunctional
spiral as they attempt to cope with a stultifying sense of grief. The effect of Susie's untimely death is rendered
even more painful by the disappearance of her body save for a stray elbow, as well as by Jack's suspicions that
a reclusive neighbor, George Harvey, is responsible for her demise. The novel essentially functions as both
Susie and her family's personal act of narrative therapy—as the discursive mechanism through which she and
her survivors both grieve for her loss and attempt to fashion new means for living with such an immutable
absence. In this manner, The Lovely Bones necessarily encounters the processes via which human beings cope
with death and its interpersonal consequences. Reading Susie's act of narrative therapy in terms of Elizabeth
Kübler−Ross's landmark psychological study, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors,
Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families (1969), furnishes us with an interpretive mechanism for examining
the nature of the Salmons' collective sense of loss, mourning, and eventual redemption.
In Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990), Michael White and David Epston augment the tenets of the
family systems paradigm to account for the ways in which narrative experiences such as the Salmons' provide
their narrators with a means for interpersonal development and growth. As White and Epston note, “In order
to perceive change in one's life—to experience one's life as progressing—and in order to perceive oneself
changing one's life, a person requires mechanisms that assist her to plot the events of her life within the
context of coherent sequences across time—through the past, present, and future” (35). These
mechanisms—works of narrative therapy—offer cogent methodologies that assist clients (or readers) in
simultaneously identifying with and separating from the dilemmas that plague their lived experiences.
Therapists such as White and Epston argue that the externalization of interpersonal problems through
narrative therapy enables readers, then, to address their various issues via the liberating auspices of the
imagination. Such stories encourage them “to explore possibilities for establishing the conditions that might
facilitate performance and circulation of their preferred stories and knowledges” (76). In short, the telling and
retelling of stories furnishes readers with the capacity for transforming their lives through the therapeutic
interpretation of their textual experiences.
Much of the narrative power inherent in The Lovely Bones finds its origins in the unusual method via which
Sebold allows the novel to be focalized. Told entirely from Susie's perspective, the novel details the
post−traumatic experiences of her family as they attempt to make their various ways among the living.
Existing in a form of atemporal limbo that she describes as a kind of heaven, Susie observes her family and
friends as they try to understand her loss in terms of their own survivorship. In addition to her significant role
as witness, Susie must also contend with her own anxieties about her untimely separation from her family
unit, as well as her severance from the young life that she was only just beginning to comprehend. In
Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1988), Donald E. Polkinghorne discusses the healing
possibilities inherent in the kind of storytelling in which Susie engages. “The reflective awareness of one's
personal narrative provides the realization that past events are not meaningful in themselves but are given
significance by the configuration of one's narrative,” Polkinghorne observes. “This realization can release
people from the control of past interpretations they have attached to events and open up the possibility of
renewal and freedom for change” (182−83).
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In the novel, Susie can only watch in horror as her family devolves from a functional system into a
dysfunctional shadow of its former self. Family therapists describe the fashion in which the Salmons maintain
their systemic dysfunctionality as a psychological state of homeostasis, which Barnard and Corrales define as
a family's tendency—no matter how detrimental it may be—to preserve constancy. “There is no question,”
they write, “that families devote considerable energy to maintain a certain amount of order and stability.
Security,” they add, “seems to be tied with a certain amount of stability and predictability” (13). Despite its
considerable danger to a given family member's ability to achieve selfhood beyond the family system,
homeostasis is the process by which the family as a whole preserves its various—and often unhealthy—value
systems. Conversely, functional family systems possess the capacity for allowing family members to evolve
as individuals through morphogenesis, which family therapists define as the process that allows a given
family system “to deviate from its usual relationship among component parts and even to amplify that
deviation” (Knapp 67). In Systemic Family Therapy: An Integrative Approach (1986), Williams C. Nichols
and Craig E. Everett explain morphogenesis as the mechanism through which families effect radical,
meaningful change. Morphogenesis, they write, “involves altering the nature of the system itself so that new
levels of functioning are achieved” (130).2
In The Lovely Bones, Susie composes her narrative in an explicit attempt to make sense of her family's
dysfunctionality and to explode the homeostasis of her former family system, thus allowing them to effect
their own “new levels of functioning.” Although feelings of morphogenesis for Susie will always be tempered
by the finality of her death, she intuitively realizes that the sublimation of her family's homeostasis will allow
both herself and her family to continue their progress toward selfhood—although obviously in decidedly
different locales and through highly disparate states of being. The particular manner in which Susie sorts
through the tragic events of her family's post−traumatic experiences can be usefully understood by
interpreting her act of narrative therapy in terms of the five “attitudes” toward death that Kübler−Ross
postulates in On Death and Dying. These attitudes—which themselves mirror the five stages of dying that
terminally ill patients undergo—include denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
“The one thing that usually persists through all these stages is hope,” Kübler−Ross writes. “It is the feeling
that all this must have some meaning, will pay off eventually if they can only endure it for a little while
longer” (139).
Family therapists often illustrate Kübler−Ross's five attitudes toward death in terms of the Circumplex Model
of Marital and Family Systems, developed by David H. Olson and his colleagues at the University of
Minnesota. The evolving anxieties associated with death and mourning can be depicted on a Circumplex
Model via the relationship between a given family's capacity for flexibility and the family's possibilities of
achieving cohesion. Before the family descends into crisis, the unit can be understood to be “flexibly
connected” on the Circumplex Model. During the crisis itself, family members cling to each other and become
“flexibly enmeshed.” As time passes, functional family units progress toward a state of being “structurally
cohesive.” Conversely, dysfunctional families drift in a range of directions, including states of being
“structurally disengaged” or “rigidly disengaged.” The dysfunctional family's tendency toward becoming
disengaged doesn't necessarily preclude its ability to become “structurally cohesive” once more—or, for all
intents and purposes, a functional unit (Olson and DeFrain 429). In the Salmons' case, Susie's death exposes a
number of weaknesses in the family's interpersonal bedrock, thus causing them to splinter emotionally for a
considerable period of time after her murder. Their passage from functionality to dysfunctionality and then
back again parallels the novel's depiction of the five attitudes toward death in a number of intriguing
aspects—especially in terms of the manner in which both Susie and her family find new ways of
recontextualizing their former life together and its role in creating a foundation for the future. In this way,
Susie ultimately emerges as a differentiated person with the capacity for moving beyond the boundaries of her
family system.3 This phenomenon accrues considerable meaning in the novel, particularly because Susie is
physically dead yet “living” in a kind of heaven that remains separate and distinct from the spatial environs of
her Earthbound friends and loved ones. Within the constructs of Sebold's novel, heaven exists as a
weigh−station of sorts, a place that mirrors the totality of the deceased's hopes and dreams, as well as his or
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her favorite aspects of earthly life. Hence, Susie's heaven features its own ice−cream shop, a kindly roommate
named Holly, and numerous puppies of every shape and size, among other attributes befitting a pre−teenaged
girl.
In The Lovely Bones, the first portion of Susie's narrative highlights the narrator and her family's struggle with
denial and isolation as they simultaneously come to grips with and attempt to disavow the unsettling reality of
her murder.4 Their feelings of denial and isolation function as “coping mechanisms,” according to
Kübler−Ross, as well as the result of the “inability of [clients] to look at their situations realistically” (37, 41).
Unable to make sense of Susie's sudden disappearance from their lives, the Salmons initially cleave to each
other, hoping against hope that somehow she will return to their midst. After the police report to the family
that Susie must be dead, given that so much blood had been found at the scene of the crime, they begin the
difficult work of having to confront her fate, as well as their own. Like her family, Susie finds herself unable
to accept her passing: “I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother,” she reports.
“That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound
silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it” (27).
While her father purposefully refuses to allow himself to cry for her loss—to do so, he reasons, would make
Susie's death seem all the more real—Jack copes by attempting to establish normalcy in the Salmon
household within only a few scant days of her disappearance. Meanwhile, Abigail isolates herself by delving
into the workaday world of the suburban housewife. Her obsession with the preparation of the family's meals
and her daily chores allows the time to pass more quickly, thus limiting her ability to reflect upon her
daughter's ordeal. As with her parents, Lindsey attempts to lose herself in the business of living. Opting to go
to school the first Monday after Susie's death, Lindsey begins steeling herself against the world. In class,
Susie observes, “my sister did not look at Mrs. Dewitt when she speaking. She was perfecting the art of
talking to someone while looking through them. That was my first clue that something would have to give”
(30). In this fashion, Jack, Abigail, and Lindsey each develop pseudo−selves in order to quell their devastating
senses of anxiety and pain. As the youngest member of the family, little Buckley can hardly begin to
comprehend his sister's fate. He only begins to understand the extent of her absence from his life during a
game of Monopoly, when he realizes that there is no one to play with the shoe, Susie's favorite game piece.
Unable to cope with the significance of the moment, Buckley hides the shoe in his bedroom. As with the rest
of his family, Buckley can only consider the depth of her absence in isolation from the rest of the unit. To do
anymore, it seems, would force them to contend with the awful reality of a world in which Susie simply no
longer exists.
In the second stage of their confrontation with Susie's death and the slow, almost imperceptible collapse of
their family system, the Salmons experience the anger about which Kübler−Ross remarks in On Death and
Dying. “When the first stage of denial cannot be maintained any longer,” she writes, “it is replaced by feelings
of anger, rage, envy, and resentment.” According to Kübler−Ross, people in such situations often find it
difficult to control their anger or to differentiate logically between the various objects of their animus. “The
reason for this,” Kübler−Ross observes, “is the fact that this anger is displaced in all directions and projected
onto the environment at times almost random” (50).5 In The Lovely Bones, the family's anger takes many
forms. Susie's own anger reaches a fever−pitch when she learns the maddening extent of her killer's depravity.
As she recognizes that her own death was just the latest in a series of unsolved homicides, Susie seethes as she
realizes that Mr. Harvey's house exists as a “town of floating graves, cold and whipped by the wind, where the
victims of murder went in the minds of the living. I could see his other victims as they occupied his
house—those trace memories left behind before they fled this Earth” (182).
While Susie's anger rages in heaven, her father's inability to come to terms with her death pushes the Salmon
household to the brink of psychological disaster. His suspicions about his daughter's killer begin to emerge
after he visits Mr. Harvey's home and assists his reclusive neighbor in the construction of a backyard bridal
tent. Mr. Harvey's bizarre behavior—including his odd remark that “the neighbors saw us. We're friends
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now”—culminates in Jack's nearly round−the−clock surveillance of the murderer's behavior. Egged on by
another neighbor's advice that he should find a covert way of avenging his daughter's homicide, Jack begins
casing the cornfield where his daughter died. After he mistakenly accosts a young couple in the field, an
altercation ensues that nearly results in Jack's own death. “I wanted my father's vigil,” Susie reports, “but also
I wanted him to go away and leave me be” (140). As they attempt to deal with their own angry impulses,
Jack's family acts out in a number of ways. Having sublimated her grief for so long and with her husband's
increasingly risky behavior testing the boundaries of her patience, Abigail indulges in an extramarital
affair—with the local homicide detective, no less—in order to stave off her guarded emotions. Meanwhile,
Lindsey and Buckley act as their father's accomplices in his efforts to trap Susie's killer. In one particularly
harrowing instance, Lindsey slips into Mr. Harvey's house in order to search for evidence. She narrowly
escapes from his clutches, ultimately becoming the object of Mr. Harvey's sociopathic fantasies herself. In
each instance, the family members' behaviors serve to exacerbate their ability to come to terms with their
grief, rather than to sate their enduring despair.
In the third stage of their post−traumatic experiences, the Salmons engage in the act of “bargaining,” the
grieving phenomenon that Kübler−Ross describes as the product of a given client's irrational fears about the
future and his or her “attempt to postpone,” if only temporarily, the inevitable processes of life and death
(83−84). In such instances, clients often feel that their own good behavior or innate senses of goodness will
somehow inoculate them against the dismal fate that an uncertain future seems to promise. In the Salmons'
case, the third stage involves very explicit efforts to delay their acceptance of the finality of Susie's death. In
so doing, they postpone their capacity for achieving morphogenesis and become typecast in their familial
roles.6 Such self−imposed constraints inevitably lead to identity diffusion. For many people, the only way out
is to finds a means for escaping from the rigid boundaries of the family unit.
For Abigail, the overwhelming anxiety over her daughter's loss and the psychological disintegration of her
surviving family prompt her to seek refuge by fleeing the Salmon household. When the first anniversary of
Susie's death arrives, Abigail can simply no longer fathom the mind−numbing flow of the grieving process: “I
don't think lighting candles and doing all that stuff is honoring her memory,” she tells Lindsey (206). After
spending the winter in her late father's cabin in New Hampshire, Abigail drives across the country to
California, where she finds a job as a day laborer in a winery. As Denis Jonnes notes, “The transactional basis
of family systems therapy presupposes a ‘relational’ concept of identity and self, but as all members of the
family (whatever their age or gender status) are perceived as ‘players,’ it also ascribes greater margins of
power and freedom to each member for initiating moves, counter−moves, or acts of distancing” (277). In
short, Abigail seeks to empower—or, perhaps more accurately, re−empower—herself by effecting her escape
from the larger Salmon family system.7 Yet mere distance can hardly provide her with the emotional
sustenance that she so desperately desires:
On her days off, she would walk down the streets of Sausalito or Santa Rosa—tiny upscale
towns where everyone was a stranger—and, no matter how hard she tried to focus on the
hopeful unfamiliar, when she walked inside a gift shop or café the four walls around her
would begin to breathe like a lung. She would feel it then, creeping up the side of her calves
and into her gut, the onslaught, the grief coming, the tears like a small relentless army
approaching the front lines of her eyes, and she would breathe in, taking a large gulp of air to
try to stop herself from crying in a public place.
(223)
Her flight to California forces the remaining family members to reconsider their own roles in the family unit.
As one might expect, Lindsey and Buckley respond to their mother's departure by rallying around their father,
whose physical deterioration in the wake of his daughter's murder has rendered him into a shadow of his
former, pre−trauma self. Yet by opting to become their father's protector and ally, Lindsey and Buckley also
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succeed in erecting complicated emotional walls between themselves and their estranged mother.
As Kübler−Ross observes in On Death and Dying, a period of depression typically follows a given client's
efforts at postponing his or her grief. In this fourth stage, according to Kübler−Ross, the subject's “numbness
or stoicism, [his or her] anger and rage, will soon be replaced with a sense of great loss” (85). As the family
members realize the enormity of that loss, they each succumb to bouts of depression and malaise in their own
particular ways. Buckley's youth is understandably complexified by his psychological over−identification
with his father, and their intensely close relationship results in Abigail's triangulation after her return from the
west coast. As Salvador Minuchin and Michael P. Nichols note in Family Healing: Strategies for Hope and
Understanding (1993), “Almost nowhere in family life are triangles more notorious than in stepfamilies”
(195). Triangulation occurs when two members of the family—a dyad, in the terminology of family systems
psychotherapy—manipulate and form a triangular relationship around a third member of the family.
Typically, one member of the dyad becomes enmeshed, or overly involved, with the third party while the
other either disengages or is disengaged from the newly created system. Nichols and Everett ascribe some
manifestations of triangulation to the notion of “scapegoating,” a process that “involves an attempt to
dissipate or remove the stress [in the family relationship] by pushing it away and placing it outside of the
subsystem” (136). Scapegoating provides dysfunctional families with a means for distancing themselves from
unwanted stressors or value systems that threaten the balance that they achieve through the process of
homeostasis.8 Now a seventh−grader, Buckley scapegoats his mother for her disappearance from his life,
which he associates, in turn, with Susie's absence. When Jack suffers a near−fatal heart attack in the family's
backyard, Abigail returns to Pennsylvania, where she attempts to slip back into the lives of her estranged
family. Yet Buckley initially refuses to allow her to regain the emotional connection that she severed via her
escape to California: “No amount of tears would sway Buckley. He had been keeping, daily, weekly, yearly,
an underground storage room of hate. Deep inside this, the four−year−old sat, his heart flashing. Heart to
stone, heart to stone” (269).9
After the family reunites and begins revivifying the emotional support system that they enjoyed before Susie's
passing, a sense of acceptance ultimately replaces the Salmons' feelings of depression as The Lovely Bones
comes to a close. For the Salmons, morphogenesis involves the unsettling realization that they can only
explode the homeostasis of their past by coming to terms with Susie's absence, albeit at a tremendous
emotional and interpersonal cost. The client enjoys some sense of peace during this final stage of acceptance,
according to Kübler−Ross, because the “struggle is over.” Yet “acceptance should not be mistaken for a
happy stage,” she writes. “It is almost void of feelings” (113). Such feelings of benign recognition often
distinguish the period of acceptance, and in such instances, Kübler−Ross observes, a person “will reach a
stage during which [the client] is neither depressed nor angry about [his or her] fate” (112). The Salmons
evince similar emotions—or a lack thereof—as Susie and her family conclude their poignant work of
narrative therapy. Resigned to their collective fate, the Salmons recast their feelings about Susie's death and
begin to find news of commemorating her life even as they proceed with the business of living. In The Family
Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy (1978), Augustus Y. Napier and Carl Whitaker usefully
refer to a given person's ability to affect the psychological state of another from beyond the grave as that
person's “ghost” (97). Clearly, Susie functions in The Lovely Bones as the Salmons' “ghost,” as the person
who influences the nature of their memories and the direction of their future interpersonal relationships.
Having regained their systemic functionality, the Salmons enjoy a sense of communal redemption when they
find themselves free to interact with the larger world around them and able to establish emotional connections
with people who have never been touched by Susie's life. In Families and Larger Systems: A Family
Therapist's Guide through the Labyrinth (1988), Evan Imber−Black astutely observes that “all families
engage with larger systems.” Healthy, differentiated families, moreover, “are able to function in an
interdependent manner with a variety of larger systems, utilizing information from these systems as material
for their own growth and development” (14). Indeed, most families succeed in accomplishing morphogenesis
and creating other functional and differentiated family units beyond their original family systems. Lindsey's
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marriage to Samuel signals the Salmons' capacity for finally moving forward with their lives. Meanwhile,
Susie fulfills her dreams of consummating her relationship with Ray Singh, the would−be boyfriend with
whom she shared a furtive kiss before her murder. In the novel's most fanciful passage, Susie assumes the
corporeal body of her friend Ruth and seduces a very grown−up Ray. For a fleeting moment, she becomes
Earthbound once more.
I remembered once, with my parents and Lindsey and Buckley, riding backward on a train
into a dark tunnel. That was how it felt to leave Earth the second time. The destination
somehow inevitable, the sights seen in passing so many times. But this time I was
accompanied, not ripped away, and I knew we were taking a long trip to a place very far
away.
(311)
Susie's quasi−encounter with Ray allows her to fulfill, if only briefly, the precious dreams of her truncated
youth. Susie discovers that life in heaven—as with life on Earth—involves the act of “navigating into the
unknown” (309). With Susie's death receding into their collective past—an emotional netherworld marked
forever by nostalgia's whimsy and memory's pain—the Salmons can also persevere if they learn to develop
their own modes for navigating amongst the mysterious shoals of an unknown future.
Notes
1. For additional discussion regarding family systems psychotherapy as a means for explicating literary
works, see Barbara A. Kaufman's “Training Tales in Family Therapy: Exploring The Alexandria
Quartet.” Kaufman argues that “inclusion of novels in didactic contexts encourages trainees to search
their own experiences, thereby maximizing the opportunity for positive therapeutic interaction and
highlighting the variety of treatment approaches in the field” (70). See also Janine Roberts's Tales and
Transformations: Stories in Families and Family Therapy (1994), which features an appendix that
enumerates a host of existing “family systems novels.”
2. In short, reaching “new levels of functioning” means that family members achieve selfhood beyond
the boundaries of their family systems. Richard C. Schwartz usefully defines the notion of the self or
selfhood as “a state of mind to be achieved—a place of nonjudgmental, clear perspective” (4−5).
3. In The Theory and Technique of Family Therapy (1979), Charles P. Barnard and Ramon Garrido
Corrales discuss the healthy aspects of “differentiated” selves, which may be defined as functional
family members who possess the transgenerational capacity for producing yet other selves with full
senses of identity (36−37).
4. The Salmon family's motive for denial is intimately related to their need to maintain the illusion of
wholeness. As Jerome Bump notes, “From the perspective of family systems therapy, the motivation
for narrative is no longer defined as primarily a potentially dysfunctional nostalgia for an ideal family
that never was (that easily becomes denial, compensation, totalizing fiction, or mere wish fulfillment)
but rather a practical, reasonable desire to live in a more functional family, a desire that motivates
some fictional narrators and protagonists to achieve that goal. In other words, besides obsession with
the past, the concept of the family dance makes us more aware of therapeutic possibilities in the
present and of a more practical hope for the future” (153). Simply put, the Salmons utilize denial as
their only available means for building a functional life in a future that seems unimaginable, given
Susie's glaring absence from their lives.
5. This is not to suggest, however, that the Salmons' anger is not a constructive response to the
powerlessness inherent in their situation. Their behavior in this instance mirrors the fourth tier of
Robert Kegan's five−step evolutionary standard of human interpersonal development. In this stage,
anger usefully allows people like the Salmons to enjoy a “new capacity for independence” that will
serve them well as they traverse more complicated vistas of emotional experience in the future (101).
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6. As James M. Decker astutely observes, family members become “role−locked” in such instances, thus
making it impossible for them to free themselves from their homeostatic bonds: “For the typecast or
role−locked individual, actions may seem predetermined, already written. Role−locked individuals
may experience a sense of entrapment, which may lead to bitterness or depression. In this way,”
Decker writes, “family scripts share common ground with social defenses, for they both may foster a
crippling homeostasis rather than differentiation or growth” (238).
7. Abigail's self−preservational behavior might be usefully understood as the result of her inability to
maintain her social defenses—and, hence, her socially inscribed roles as wife and mother—in the face
of the all−consuming grief that has transformed her life in the Salmon household into a virtual prison
of sorts. As Yvonne M. Agazarian points out, “Social defenses against communication enable people
to moderate their interactions so that they have as much freedom as possible from the social anxieties
and irritations that inevitably arise when one person tries to relate to another. Unfortunately, these
social defenses are also the prison that prevents people from having authentic relationships when they
want to” (119−20).
8. While the Salmons' protracted homeostasis and collective depressive tendencies can be directly
attributed to Susie's untimely death, the length of their recovery and their inability to conquer their
stressors might be profitably understood in terms of their lack of interpersonal and emotional support.
This is not to suggest that they were an unhappy unit before Susie's demise. Unfortunately, they had
achieved a delicate family balance that made it difficult for them to usurp the traumatic events
involving Susie's murder. As Olson and DeFrain observe, a given system “can use a wide variety of
resources inside and outside the family to deal with the stressor, and the more resources there are, the
less the chances of turning it into a crisis” (427). While the novel offers a number of clues regarding
the family's fragile systemic balance before Susie's death, the Salmons' problematic relationship with
members of their extended family—especially Abigail's eccentric mother—might explain at least one
component regarding the lack of emotional support beyond their immediate family unit.
9. Buckley's emotional silence exemplifies the Salmon family's overarching inability to express
themselves openly about Susie's murder. This factor undoubtedly accounts, at least in part, for the
lengthy duration of their grieving process, as well as their partial disintegration during that same
period. As Olson and DeFrain note, “the recovery process lasts longer for families who believe it is
not healthy to talk about death.” In Jack and Abigail's case, “this conspiracy of silence probably
makes a couple's pain much greater than it might otherwise be. Couples who grieve openly, talking
and crying with loved ones and friends, recover more quickly” (428−29).
Works Cited
Agazarian, Yvonne M. Systems−Centered Therapy for Groups. New York: Guilford, 1997.
Barnard, Charles P., and Ramon Garrido Corrales. The Theory and Technique of Family Therapy. Springfield:
Thomas, 1979.
Bump, Jerome. “Family Systems Therapy and Narrative in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.” Knapp and
Womack 151−70.
Decker, James M. “Hollywood Exiles: Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and Family Systems
Therapy.” Knapp and Womack 236−53.
Imber−Black, Evan. Families and Larger Systems: A Family Therapist's Guide through the Labyrinth. New
York: Guilford, 1988.
Jonnes, Denis. “Transgenerational Subsystems in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction.” Knapp and Womack
276−304.
Kenneth Womack (essay date 2004)
49
Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
Kaufman, Barbara A. “Training Tales in Family Therapy: Exploring The Alexandria Quartet.” Journal of
Marital and Family Therapy 21.1 (1995): 67−75.
Kegan, Robert. The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1982.
Knapp, John V. Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism. Lanham: UP of
America, 1996.
Knapp, John V., and Kenneth Womack, eds. Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and
Literary Study. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2003.
Kübler−Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and
Their Own Families. 1969. New York: Collier, 1970.
Minuchin, Salvador, and Michael P. Nichols. Family Healing: Strategies for Hope and Understanding. New
York: Touchstone, 1993.
Napier, Augustus Y., and Carl Whitaker. The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy.
New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
Nichols, William C., and Craig A. Everett. Systemic Family Therapy: An Integrative Approach. New York:
Guilford, 1986.
Olson, David H., and John DeFrain. Marriages and Families: Intimacy, Diversity, and Strengths. 4th ed.
Boston: McGraw−Hill, 2003.
Polkinghorne, Donald E. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.
Roberts, Janine. Tales and Transformations: Stories in Families and Family Therapy. New York: Norton,
1994.
Schwartz, Richard C. Internal Family Systems Therapy. New York: Guilford, 1995.
Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.
White, Michael, and David Epston. Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York: Norton, 1990.
FURTHER READING
CRITICISM
Benson, Heidi. “Feeling the Horror in her Bones; Sebold Gives a Voice to Missing Girls.” San Francisco
Chronicle (23 July 2002): D1.
Benson discusses the commercial success of The Lovely Bones and details the novel's origins.
Clarson, Jennifer. “A Dream Finally Realized.” Book (July/August 2002): 64−5.
Clarson details Sebold's literary goals and personal idiosyncrasies.
FURTHER READING
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Contemporary Literary Criticism: Sebold, Alice
DeLint, Charles. Review of The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Fantasy & Science Fiction 104, no. 2
(February 2003): 29−30.
DeLint defends The Lovely Bones's popular appeal, considering it a superlative example of fantastical
literature.
Grenier, Cynthia. “Novel Gods: A Pair of Bestsellers Roll Their Own Religion.” Weekly Standard 9, no. 2 (22
September 2003): 32−4.
Grenier compares The Lovely Bones to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, another bestseller, commenting on
the absence of God in both novels.
Hensher, Philip. “An Eternity of Sweet Nothings.” Observer (11 August 2002): 16.
Hensher criticizes The Lovely Bones, claiming that, despite its readability, the novel is overly cute and
mawkish.
Kakutani, Michiko. “The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death.” New York Times (18 June 2002):
E1.
Kakutani provides a favorable review of The Lovely Bones, calling the novel “deeply affecting.”
Review of The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. The New Yorker 78, no. 19 (15 July 2002): 87.
A favorable review of The Lovely Bones, calling the novel a “stunning achievement.”
Prose, Francine. “Comfort Cult: On the Honest Unloveliness of William Trevor's World.” Harper's Magazine
305, no. 1831 (December 2002): 76−81.
Provides a comparison of William Trevor's novel The Story of Lucy Gault with The Lovely Bones, criticizing
the latter for offering only “facile reassurance and wholesome caring and sharing.”
Salij, Marta. “This Startling, Beautiful Novel Is Heaven Sent.” Detroit Free Press (30 June 2002): 4K.
Salij describes The Lovely Bones as “the most touching and yet bracing imagining of what the dead may
have to say to the living.”
Additional coverage of Sebold's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson
Gale: Contemporary Authors, Vol. 203; and Literature Resource Center.
FURTHER READING
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