I didn't want to like this novel. When I saw "The Lovely Bones" on the horror genre reading list, every nucleus in my body rebelled against it. It was a novel I'd heard young girls gushing over in the college parks and on the Metro in DC when I was riding home from work. I filed it into my mental bin of gooey literary novels...the kind I despise reading because everyone else does...because it's the "in" thing to do. Not because it's good, but because it's a talking point, one of the things the "in crowd" of society does. It's the thing to talk about at parties, and other social functions. And I hate social functions almost as much as I hate the "in crowd" and so I eschewed this novel, and was mapping my path of projectile vomit before having to read the mandated pages.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, because I can't decide which) what I received from this story was...unexpected. I hate that Scott Johnson made me read this novel. I also hate that I enjoyed it so very immensely, and that it turned me into one of those gooey eyed girls in the park and/or on the Metro. This novel was, in a sense, a ghost story...but it was so much more than that on many levels. It's a novel that stands out like a sore thumb among the other novels we've read because it's so visceral, so real, so emotionally packed.
Alice Sebold reaches the reader through a young teenage girl Susie, who is raped and then murdered by a neighbor who lives nearby. We see Suzie's brief life flicker out, and then watch life unfold around her after her death... and she see's what happens in the world without her. It was a unique perspective to read in, feeling like all the while I was sitting with Suzie listening to her thoughts/emotions, seeing what she was seeing. What I enjoyed most about Sebold's writing was that it was fresh, unencumbered by unnecessary words. It was believable from the perspective of a young teenage girl because the narrative and the dialogue wasn't too complex and the intimacy of tender youth wasn't covered up by excessive verbosity. :)
While this book may not rate among my favorite for this semester's readings ("The Shining" has got it so far...) I have to rate it as the most emotionally fulfilling and draining. Something in the pages drew sorrow out from the pores of my body, made me cry at how unfair both life and death can be, and helped me realize how desperately simple and loving our humanity is...even in death. For that, I'll both curse and give thanks to Scott Johnson for the experience, although I will still hide the novel from my bookshelf and try not to let my lower lip tremble when someone mentions it.
I wish I liked this book as much as you did, but it's great reading what you thought about it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you sometimes avoid books when they're "too in." I'm going to wait ten years, I think, before I even consider giving anything by Stieg Larsson a try.
I was in the same boat as you. For a long time I had no idea what this book was about, I just knew everyone and their mothers were reading it which completely turned me off. Sad, isn't it? What we should realize is most books that take the country by storm have something in them that pulls, drags, seduces, coerces, its reader's in. The Lovely Bones is a fantastic story with real heartbreak and heartache. It documents the domino effect of one life changing decision by one man. How unfair it is that one person can destroy the lives of many. Aside from the emotions explored in Sebold's novel, the heavenly plane is extremely interesting. I actually like when writers create their own views of heaven and hell. We all wonder and we all have our hopes of what it might be like if that's where we go.
ReplyDeleteI don't begrudge Scott haha. But he did force me into the world of The Lovely Bones when I really didn't wanna go there. Sometimes it works that way. :-)