Book Review: The Lovely Bones
>> 19 April 2010
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have put off writing a review of this novel for several months, in part because I'm still not entirely sure what I think about it. Perhaps my expectations had been shaped by seeing previews for the film (I haven't seen the actual movie), which made me think that I was about to read a gripping supernatural murder mystery. For the first fifty-or-so pages, that's what I got: a murder mystery narrated by the victim from her vantage point in the afterlife. The murder mystery gets wrapped up fairly quickly, and the bulk of the novel tells the story of the surviving family and the way that they deal with the grief of losing their daughter/sister/friend.
The characters were fairly believable and complex, but they also felt sort of anonymous. They could have been taken from the pages of any short story in The New Yorker, or Atlantic. Perhaps this is more indicative of my boredom with self-proclaimed 'literary fiction' than it is of the quality of the novel, but the only character who didn't seem like a ghost was the one who was actually dead! All of the others - the grandmother who drinks too much but is fiercely loyal to her family, the mother who feels stifled by her domesticity, the father who blames himself for the loss of his daughter, the creepy serial killer who builds doll houses - seemed like reflections of characters that I had encountered before.
The ending of the novel was satisfying, but somehow it didn't feel earned. It was like that author decided that the characters had suffered enough, so now it was time to balance out the karmic scale and make them happy again. The German philosopher Hegel is credit with saying: "To be free is nothing; to become free is everything." This concept might apply here as well. It is nice that the characters are able to recover from the emotional trauma of the loss of their daughter/sister/friend, but I guess I never felt like they did anything to earn their new happiness. I think that most people would accept the truism that 'Time heals all wounds.' I never doubted that eventually things would get better for the survivors, so it isn't very surprising when they eventually do. I don't know if bad things happen unexpectedly and it takes time to get over them is really an idea that demands a book to hash out.
Overall, you could do a lot worse than The Lovely Bones but I don't think it will be a book that you want to read over and over.
View all my reviews >>
2 comments:
I agree it's not a book to read over and over.
However, I found it's views of life after death to be somewhat intriguing. You are bothered by the family seeming more like ghosts but couldn't that be the point, that tragedy sometimes causes people to forget to live, and sometimes getting back to life is as simple as a decision to pick yourself up and keep living your life. Though it may be a predictably happy ending, i think it would have been much more predictable to have the family end in divorce and each member find a whole new life to provide happiness rather than finally see what they have and embrace it.
I haven't seen the movie, but if you watch it, let me know if it's any good (better, worse, different than the book).
I liked the book overall but had some issues with the ending. Mainly because I wanted more vindication for the dad. I was hoping the dad would, in the end, be the one to solve the murder and go ape crazy on the guy like no one other than a father could. For me, a bad person who's life ends in death (esp a death where he doesn't know how he died or who killed him) is not as appropriate as a bad person who's life is spent with mental torture and guilt and living with the punishment of what he did. When that's the case, I feel like death is the easy way out. [True only in a literary sense since we know what after-death holds for people like that.]
I also didn't like her Patrick Swayze/Whoopi Goldberg moment where she gets it on with her old guy friend. Completely random.
Post a Comment