I wasn’t really looking for something to read when I walked through the book aisle at Target Thursday. But it’s difficult to pass them and not look, so there I was, drinking in each title as if I were parched and they precious liquid.
A woman made the space too small when she joined me in the aisle, dragging her cart in backwards, like she thought it would take up less room that way. Barely glancing at me, she asked ‘are you looking for something to read?’ and I replied ‘always’. Beating a path directly to the back wall, she picked up Alice Sebold’s ‘The Lovely Bones’ and held it out for me to take while stating emphatically ‘this is a good book’. How can you argue with that? It’s like she was sent to tell me to read this book. So I did.
As it turns out, The Lovely Bones is a very good book. I love a good storyteller and Sebold is certainly that. Both easy to read and understand… yet she weaves an intricate tale so visually stunning she even makes you feel sorry for a serial killer.
That’s her gift, the balance. The understanding she bestows is a gift and a curse, much like 14 year old Susie’s heaven. Everyone gets their own heaven when they die, you see… and when Susie is raped and killed in a cornfield she goes to her own heaven where she can watch the living if she wants. But even there things are never ‘perfect’. One miraculous afternoon she actually ‘falls back to earth’ but does not, cannot stay.
Now that I’ve finished I can see obscure references, allegories and touchstones everywhere. The snowglobe, the icicle, the suburbs.
Susie’s body is never found, though the reader knows the location. It doesn’t matter, because ‘lovely bones’ are not her remains. Lovely bones [I think] references the framework of man, on a smaller scale the framework of family.
I could write a book about the book, but then you’d not need to read the real thing.
