I’m always afraid of treating
popular material unfairly in the name of insincere anti-conformity, so I do my
best to give mainstream stuff every possible chance. How “mainstream” Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones actually is might be
debatable, but I’ll take the fact that my mom knows about it to mean it’s
crossed some noteworthy threshold in popularity. Imagine my relief to find that
I really dug the story, that I found the prose to be easily the strongest of
any of the works we’ve covered so far, realizing a depth and poetic grace that
Shirley Jackson, in my opinion, attempted and failed in Hill House. Imagine my disappointment to find that, after a
powerful opening and a workable middle, Sebold apparently threw in the towel
and opted to let her story peter out into a dull series of slice-of-life snapshots
that everyone claims literary fiction is snobbishly committed to. I felt
deflated by the time things rolled to a slow, yawning stop, and after looking
back at the pages that I did enjoy, I realized that I should have expected it
all along.
The
story is about grief and overcoming loss more than it is about seeking justice
for a murder. I get that. That’s no excuse for spending the first half of the
book toying with the reader’s legitimate expectation that events will develop
into a conflict between George Harvey and the Salmons, only to look back
innocently at the end of it all and say, “Oh, you were expecting resolution?
What ever gave you that idea?” If poetic justice was never on the table, why
show us so much of Harvey when a view of the Salmon family and the teenage
hipsters would have been enough to explore the eventual focus? The argument
that “it’s about dealing with the fallout of murder and Harvey’s one of the
people dealing with it” doesn’t really hold, because nothing ever changes about
the man. Every passage involving him only goes on to explain the depths of his
evil and some off-putting features of his childhood, right up until the moment
he’s killed by an icicle (‘anticlimactic’ doesn’t do it justice). It was a tease.
Look how much you want him dead but nope-sorry-kids-life-is-tough-sometimes. At
least when No Country for Old Men
pulled this stunt it had the decency to make injustice the overt theme of the
story.
Harvey’s
static nature underlies the bigger problem I had, which is that weight is never
actually attributed to any of the characters’ decisions. Everything that
happens is a product of coincidence, happenstance, or spontaneous insight, and
the path each character takes is portrayed not as a series of crossroads but as
arbitrary reactions to events they never influence. Jack just knows that Harvey
did it. Ruth locked eyes with Susie once and remained obsessed ever after.
While much of the novel seems to be establishing realism by denying any
connection between value judgments and tangible consequences--Harvey does
terrible things but he never suffers
consequences; Abigail runs away from her family but nothing changes in her relationship with Jack--it saves its
romanticism for absurdly hollow gestures like the Ray/Susie sex scene at the
end. Their morally questionable intercourse is among the closest things we get
to a climax (no pun intended, it was the best word for the sentence), and it
doesn’t show us anything about either character we didn’t already know. None of
the decisions did, really. Everything we needed to know was already told to us
through Sebold’s beautiful, elegant narrative commentary, sparing the reader
the burden of deciding for themselves what to make of the story’s events.
I enjoyed the book a lot, mostly because it made me think about someone I love that passed away and them hanging out with me, dead. And, as you say, the "beautiful, elegant narrative." Listing to the author read her own story was like a meditation. However, I also did not like the serial killer character. I found him very boring and I'm not sure why. I tried to tell myself he wasn't scary because that was not what the book was about. It was not about fear or justice. But I remember thinking I don't ever want to make a serial killer character that lame. He should have been scary. I wanted to be scared of him.
ReplyDeleteWhat's really funny is that I listened to this on audio-book. I listen to most books, because I have to multitask, but I do pay very close attention and try not to miss anything. Well, I missed the icicle somehow. I thought he was never caught or killed or anything at all. But I think I missed it because it didn't really matter, anyway.
With the exception that you think that there was good writing hidden throughout this book, I largely agree with most of what you say here, Jeremy. A static environment devoid of consequences doesn't make a very good book. I was not fond of this one.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the poetic style. As horrible of a concept as hurting a child is, there were beautiful phrases I would have underlined if it wasn't an ebook. There's a truth to the story that problems aren't always solved the way we want them to be but that there can still be peace and beauty in some things.
ReplyDeleteFor some time, I avoided reading Lovely Bones at the height of its popularity. My mother asked me to return a stack of library books for her. It was in the stack, and they weren’t due for a couple of days, so I thought I’d give it a look. I too was surprised when I enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteA lot of people seem to think the icicle was an unsatisfactory end for George Harvey. I didn’t; in the context of the book, I thought it was perfect. Susie played “icicle” in the perfect murder weapon game earlier in the book. She was told that as she came to understand her desires in heaven, they would be granted. In the beginning, her wishes were a two-story house and peppermint stick ice cream. Once she came to understand that only want Harvey punished, but stopped from hurting more girls, her desire is granted. Susie is there and notices the icicles just before they fall. They fall at the exact moment to avoid harming Harvey’s intended victim but not him. In truth, icicles very seldom fall on their own, let alone at the exact moment needed. I didn’t see Harvey’s end as coincidence or deus ex machina, but as Susie’s desire being granted and as her having a hand in own revenge—a higher punishment, if you will.