The Lovely Bones (2002)

Do biographical details of an author's life matter? Even before I came to understand that Alice Sebold is herself the survivor of a violent crime—the subject of her first published book, a memoir, Lucky, which I haven't read—I had been vaguely troubled or put off by something in this carefully constructed first novel. The basic premise strikes one first as almost breathtakingly audacious, the story narrated from beyond the grave by Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who, in the first chapter, is captured, raped, murdered, and dismembered by a serial sexual predator living in her suburban neighborhood. At a suitably ghostly distance she observes the grief of her family and friends as they attempt to come to terms with what to them is only her unexplained disappearance. They are reasonably certain she wouldn't have run away, that she has probably been killed, but nothing will ever be certain for them again. Though Sebold includes some fanciful ideas about heaven and the afterlife, not all of which work, mostly she stays close to the ground, focused on the anguish of Susie's family and, more incidentally, that of Susie's spirit, almost completely helpless to comfort them. The tale thus careens uncertainly between a ghost story, a true crime case study, and a kind of Kubler-Ross self-help tome on coming to terms with grief. It tries to get the benefit of all and in the end cheats itself of everything. The idea that seems at first so fresh and original soon becomes mired down in the ungainly mechanics of lumbering a plot forward. Of course the family will get over it, even if it splits them apart; they have no other choice. And, inevitably, there will be a manhunt. Sebold's burden of what to do about her killer tends to sprawl suffocatingly over everything—letting him get away becomes all too quickly freighted with the frustrated baggage of victimology and vengeance, and yet bringing him to some kind of justice, particularly from the point of view of the transcendently spiritualized narrator, is if anything even more problematic, one that Sebold does not solve satisfactorily. By playing with the fire of such powerful material, Sebold only succeeds in creating a new cliché, one now on display in a new true-crime show on the Investigation Discovery channel, "Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets." Better, I think, that she had gone the route of a superior show on that same channel, "Disappeared," and focused on the bewilderment of those of us left behind who simply don't know, and can't know, rather than telegraphing everything in such a seductively explicit, overly clever way in the first place. This would also have enabled her to leave heaven out of it altogether.

In case it's not at the library.