Horror and Healing--The Lovely Bones

Vickey Meyer
Christine Specht
Contemporary Women’s Fiction
17 July 2008

Horror and Healing

I have a problem with dead girl lit. While I enjoyed reading Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and respect her as one of the authors who have the courage to write from a first dead person point of view, I worry at the implication that a young girl only gets a voice after she is dead. Sebold weaves her story well, including intimate portraits of characters so touched by the horror of Susie’s death that their own lives begin to unravel as in the case of Abigail and Jack or begin to begin as in the case of Lindsey and Samuel. Susie may have been the narrator of this novel, but she is not the only character who calls forth the reader’s sympathy.
Unlike many stories that build up to a violent act, the atrocious horror that steals Susie’s innocence and her life occurs as the inciting incident of the novel, and Sebold uses the rest of her plot to force the readers to look through a magnifying glass at the wreckage left behind. From the first chapter, I wanted retribution for Susie’s rape and death. Mr. Harvey buried alive would have suited me nicely, but Sebold refuses to give the reader that satisfaction, and we are left at novel’s end with an old and pathetic Mr. Harvey who never did get the disemboweling he deserved. Sebold instead focuses on how human hope can still flourish even in horror’s aftermath.
After Susie’s death, I found myself, strangely, empathizing with her father more than with her sister or her mother. Lindsey found solace in the ordinary glory of first love while Abigail escaped into “merciful adultery” (Sebold 197). These are just some of the paradoxical ideas included in The Lovely Bones, whose title, perhaps a nod to Theodore Roethke’s poem beginning “I knew a woman lovely in her bones,” even juxtaposes horror and beauty. Jack was left to attempt to pick up the slivers of debris, crying only “into the deep ruff of fur surrounding the dog’s neck” (Sebold 29). In his own sorrow, he does not turn to family to offer and receive comfort. My favorite character is definitely Grandma, who is both an alcoholic and a good person. She swoops in to remind the Salmons that life does indeed go on.
The reader is given closure, not in Mr. Harvey’s death by icicle, but by Susie and Ruth’s strange switch, which gives Ruth the opportunity to receive rose petals and lecture old Beatniks in heaven, and gives Susie the “time to fall in love” (Sebold 309). Although I prefer the mysticism of Alice Hoffman, Sebold’s practical portrayal of heaven and the divine makes the appearance of this miracle both sudden and more believable for the reader. Overall, Sebold overcomes my reticence for dead girl lit. through her treatment of time and human connection being a harbinger of hope and healing.

Works Cited

Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 2002.