The Lovely Bones

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

The Lovely Bones

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

The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being raped and murdered, watches fromheaven as her family and friends go on with their lives, while she herself comes to terms with her own death. The novel received a great deal of critical praise and became an instant bestseller.

A film adaptation of the novel, directed by Peter Jackson who personally purchased the rights, was released in American theatres on January 15, 2010 and in the UK on 15 February 2010.

Title

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

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

Synopsis

The Salmon family at first refuses to accept that Susie is dead, until Susie's elbow is found by a neighbor's dog. The police talk to Harvey, finding him odd but seeing no reason to suspect him. Jack, Susie's father, becomes suspicious and later begins to obsess about Harvey; Susie's sister, Lindsey, comes to share these suspicions. Jack, consumed with guilt over not having been able to protect his daughter, remains on extended leave from work and isolates himself at home, although he becomes very close with his son, Buckley, the youngest child.

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

Still suspicious, Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds and steals a drawing of the underground den he had dug in the cornfield, but is forced to leave when Harvey returns unexpectedly. Sensing danger, Harvey flees Norristown and becomes a drifter. A year later the police bulldoze the cornfield and turn up a Coke bottle from the night of the murder with Harvey's and Susie's fingerprints, finally making him an official suspect. However, he remains at large. That fall, a hunter in Connecticut discovers the body of another of Harvey's victims, with one of Susie's charms nearby. In 1981, a detective in Connecticut links the charm to Susie's murder and calls Fenerman. As they uncover further evidence, the police realize that Harvey is a serial killer who preys on young girls. At about the same time, Susie meets his other victims in heaven and sees into his traumatic childhood; she also realizes that he has made occasional, failed attempts to stop killing.

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

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

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

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

Susie closes the story by wishing the reader "a long and happy life".

Characters

• Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is murdered in the first chapter, and narrates the novel from heaven.
• Jack Salmon, her father, who works for an insurance agency in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
• Abigail Salmon, her mother, whose growing family frustrates her youthful dreams and later has an affair with Detective Len Fenerman.
• Lindsey Salmon, Susie's sister, a year younger than she is, thought of as the smartest.
• Buckley Salmon, Susie's brother, is ten years younger than she is. His unplanned birth forced Abigail to cancel her plans for a teaching career. He sometimes sees Susie while she watches him in her heaven.
• Grandma Lynn, Abigail's mother, an eccentric alcoholic who comes to live with her son-in-law and grandchildren after her daughter leaves.
• George Harvey, the Salmons' neighbor, who murders Susie and goes unpunished, even though the Salmons come to suspect him, then leaves Norristown to kill again. Throughout the novel she refers to him as Mr. Harvey, the name she had addressed him by in life.
• Ruth Connors, a girl Susie went to school with, whom her dead spirit touches as she leaves the earth. She becomes fascinated with Susie, despite having barely known her in her life, and devotes her life to writing about the visions of the dead she sees.
• Ray Singh, a boy from India, (via England), the first and only boy to kiss Susie, who later becomes Ruth's friend. Was first suspected by the police of murdering Susie, but later proves his alibi.
• Ruana Singh, Ray's mother, with whom Abigail Salmon sometimes smokes cigarettes.
• Samuel Heckler, Lindsey's boyfriend and later her husband.
• Hal Heckler, Sam's older brother who runs a motorcycle repair shop.
• Len Fenerman, the police detective in charge of investigating Susie's death and finds her elbow. His wife commits suicide before the events of the novel take place and he later has an affair with Abigail.
• Clarissa, Susie's best friend on Earth. Susie explains that she admired Clarissa because she was always allowed to do things Susie was not, like wear platform shoes and smoke. She has a boyfriend named Brian.
• Holly, Susie's best friend in heaven. While the text does not say so explicitly, it is implied she is Vietnamese American. She has no accent, and took her name from Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Her own life and death are never expanded upon. Holly plays the tenor saxophone in heaven with accompaniment by a violinist and hound dogs as the vocals.
• Franny, a middle aged woman who worked as a social worker before being shot. She becomes Susie and Holly's mentor in their Heaven.
• Mr. Dewitt, the boy's soccer coach at school. Mr. Dewitt encourages Lindsey, a successful athlete, to try out for his team.
• Mrs. Dewitt, Mr. Dewitt's wife, an English teacher at Susie's school. She teaches both Lindsey and Susie.
• Holiday, Susie's dog.

Commercial and critical reception

Alice Sebold in 2007

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

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

The novel also sold well in other English-speaking countries, though reviews were not as glowing. While admitting the novel "has its very fine moments", The Guardian's Ali Smith ultimately said, "The Lovely Bones is so keen in the end to comfort us and make safe its world that, however well-meaning, it avoids its own ramifications". Her Observer colleague Philip Hensher was more blunt, conceding that the novel was "very readable" but "ultimately it seems like a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy".

Controversies

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

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

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

Film adaptation

Main article: The Lovely Bones (film)

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

The film opened to a limited release in three U.S. theaters on December 11, 2009. It received international and wide release on January 15, 2010.

External links

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