The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

Dick gave me this book for xmas, and while I was reluctant for some unknown reason, I started reading it on the BART ride back home immediately afterwards. I have had various sleep disorders over the past month or so, the most recent of which I would call The Lovely Bones sleep disorder. Reading before bed ceased to work as I considered if it was possible to finish the book tonight each night. I saw 2, 3, maybe 4 AM each night regardless of my morning plans (of which I usually had none, in all honesty).

Aside from being a page-turner, The Lovely Bones is an important book about violence against women, grief, justice on a universal level, what suburbia does to culture, intuition, and, you guessed it, Love. I don’t want to give anything away (it is that kind of book) because I think everyone can and should read it, but a young girl is raped and murdered in the corn field behind her suburban home. She watches from heaven as her younger siblings grow up, her parents marriage dissolves, and her school classmates destinies are affected by this event. She watches the investigation of her murder, and she watches her murderer go on with his life.

The book is not beautiful written, in the sense that my chosen quotations do not resemble poetry, but they were emotionally powerful for me as my eyes passed over the lines of the book. Usually, there was a certain wisdom to them that moved me. Here goes:

A neighbor woman on her husband: “She had a premonition. She did no believe it was a woman, or even a student who worshiped him, that made him late more and more often. She knew what it was because it was something she too had had and had severed herself from after having been injured long ago. It was ambition.” (pg. 199) “….she was someone to whom order was also a sort of meditation….” (pg 199) But alas, it is not her story. At the end she begins thinking “divorce” but we are left without this destiny being fulfilled or denied.

Another portrait of a different relationship is the mother and father of the murdered girl: “His love for my mother wasn’t about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything – for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in (he had a heart attach). It was about touching that hair with the side if his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.” (pg 281) and later “My mother had been with my father for forty eight hours straight, during which the world had changed for them and for others and would, I saw now, change again and again and again. There was no way to stop it.” (pg 315)

One of the narrator’s classmates is deeply affected by the murder. First, because she is literally haunted, but later because her life has been formed by these visions. She focuses on writing poetry and researching (sometimes through her intuition) violence against girls and women. “Her journal was her closest and most important relationship. It held everything.” (pg 252)

“She (Grandma Lynn) no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.” (pg 254)

The narrator says of the boy she liked right before she was murdered, years later, “I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye.” (pg 283)

“’Your first kiss is destiny knocking.’ Grandma Lynn said…” (pg 284)