I found The Lovely Bones to be, in a word, delovely. And delightful. And delicious. It was heartbreaking and beautiful, with flowing, wonderful prose and meaningful, thoughtful characters.
I don't mean to keep littering it with praise like every other review has, but it's been a while since I read something that was simultaneously a can't-put-this-down mystery / thriller / murder book, and a book that made me think profoundly about death, love, and what it means to live.
Death is always a touchy, strange sort of thing in literature. When you see it happen via murder or old age, see the burial, see the aftermath, it is always from a third-person sort of view. Once the character in question is gone, everything about them ceases; the light goes out. Their consciousness is gone.
In The Lovely Bones, that problem of discontinuity, that missing hole in the plot, is eliminated because Susie Salmon starts from and continues to speak from beyond the grave, after her rape and murder by her neighbor.
Susie is the perfect narrator; her age is ideal--she's at the prime of life, not quite a child, but not as jaded as an adult. She is on the brink of everything and here, in the worst kind of tragedy, her life is taken. I've already said it, but I'll say it again: heartbreaking. And that's not what surprised me most about a novel that I half-thought would have been an over-hyped bestseller like The Lost Symbol. It's not only the narrator that's great--it's the whole construct of the plot. The very first thing that happens is the worst one, and yet the novel is totally wrought with suspense, the whole way through. And yet the suspense doesn't get in the way of the plot, of the beautiful developments of the still-living characters--of Susie's family, her love interest, the oddball friend, Ruth.
Susie's vision of heaven, even, is simultaneously stunning and eerie, strange and lovely without being overly perfect or filled with sunshiney clouds. It reminded me a lot of the heaven in one of my favorite movies-- What Dreams May Come. And yet perhaps the most beautiful part of the whole thing is that Sebold manages to really give her not only a heaven, but also a final taste of earth, a first taste of the love, the sex, and the adulthood that Susie spends the whole novel dreaming of--all without being overthetop, or cheesy, or unbelieveable. It is the cherry on top of a well-envisioned world; it makes perfect sense. As much as I wanted to be like GAH! That's awful stupid happy ending blah blah blah, I couldn't. Because it was just right.
It fit perfectly, all the pieces together, even the way in which the family breaks and then reassembles. Some people, my friend Michelle, for instance, take some issue with it, the way the mother left and then was able to reconcile. But I thought it was more believable than if they'd all just managed to adjust. People experience horror, and then break, but then survive. And in Sebold's world, I truly believe the way in which it happens.
It's an achievement. I loved it.
FINAL VERDICT
***** out of *****
