Earth from above

Christian Century, Oct 9, 2002 by Stephen H. Webb

The Lovely Bones. By Alice Sebold. Little, Brown, 288 pp., $21.95.

IN THE MOST POWERFUL opening chapter of any novel I have read, 14-year-old Susie Salmon narrates the hellish scene of her own brutal rape and murder--from heaven. There are many stories about people witnessing their own funeral, but this bold move transcends such pedestrian plot tricks. It allows the author to document the terrible consequences of human depravity from the heights of divine perfection, and the tension between the two is almost unbearable. Remarkably, when the reader is done, it seems obvious that, far from being a contrived resurrection of the old-fashioned omniscient-narrator point of view, this unique perspective is the only way to fully comprehend such an intolerable tragedy.

The Lovely Bones is Alice Sebold's first novel, but not her first attempt to turn pain into poetry. Her first book, ironically titled Lucky, is a memoir about her experience of being raped at the age of 18. The police told her that she was lucky she wasn't murdered, but she is also lucky to be blessed with a literary voice that is as precise as it is profound. This pair of books--one a careful documentation of events that are all too real, the other a fanciful tale full of the miraculous and the supernatural--constitutes one of the most memorable reflections on a kind of violence that many of us would rather ignore.

Like Susie Salmon, Sebold was a virgin when she was raped, and her memoir ends, after many excruciating revelations, with a description of a night of "almost virginal" sex with her boyfriend. In her heaven Susie also longs for love, a love she never had the opportunity to experience. In the marvelous climax of the novel she returns to earth and to the man she might have loved by exchanging bodies with a young woman who has been haunted by her death. This incarnational event gives her a bliss more heavenly than anything she finds in heaven itself. Through this otherworldly sexual encounter Susie is saved from her obsession with earthly life. Perhaps Sebold also has found a way to put to rest her own painful memories.

If Sebold has a weakness as a novelist, it is her desire to save everyone. Her novel's ending is as happy as its beginning is disturbing. This false promise of earthly happiness betrays the novel's premise that only heaven provides the comfort and security needed to make sense of evil, Happy endings should happen in heaven, not on earth.

Although the heaven of this story is not full of crosses and saints, it provides more material for somber theological reflection than a score of Sunday sermons. The first person Susie meets in the afterlife is Franny, her intake counselor, who tells her that, even though she can have anything in heaven, she has to understand her desires before they will come true. Her first desire is for Mr. Harvey, her killer, to die, but she soon realizes that she can have only what is truly good or true to her best self. She must learn to dream of desires she has never experienced.

Sebold's imagination will disturb those who picture heaven as full of ethereal spirits floating toward the light, or of the morally righteous waiting in line for their reward. This is a heaven that is, by and large, fun. Susie has a roommate who keeps her company, and she keeps busy by spying on her family and friends. She becomes a watcher, and is able to intervene on earth in small, ghostly ways.

Much of the plot of the book pivots on the question of whether Susie can help mend her broken family. As with many families tormented by violence, strains that were hardly noticed before begin to rip the family apart. The parents' marriage begins to break under the weight of her father's quest to prove Mr. Harvey's guilt and her mother's withdrawal into a world of lonely regret. And Susie's younger sister must navigate a changed world as she grows into a woman, something Susie was prevented from becoming.

Susie also needs mending. She aches with the memory of the boy with whom she shared her only kiss, and she is jealous of the way her younger brother clings to their father. In fact, through her family's courage and survival, they help her as much as she helps them. Susie needs their thoughts and prayers. This reverses the traditional Roman Catholic view of saints mediating on our behalf. It also challenges the Protestant view of the dead as so secure in their salvation that they do not need us at all. As I thought about this portrait of heaven, I could not help wondering about my own reluctance to visit cemeteries and the feebleness of my attempts to pray for those who have died. This novel is a powerful indictment of our neglect of the dead.

Susie's spiritual progress is linked to her ability to give up trying to control events on earth. She has to give her family time to heal, and her recognition that she has all the time in the world is the beginning of her own healing. She has to learn to let go of "the dark bright pity of being human." When she meets her grandfather for a dance that seems to last forever, she knows that there are many more levels of joy and healing awaiting her.