Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"

                 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.