The next selection for the book club is The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. The meeting will be April 10 at 10:00.
The Lovely Bones is a lovely novel that begins with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl.
An audacious contradiction? Perhaps, but Alice Sebold's debut novel rises, literally and figuratively, above its plot.
Told from a mysterious heaven, it's more about life than death. It's about a family and a frayed marriage and a brother and sister growing up in the shadow of their older sister's murder.
Its more conventional elements deal with a serial killer and a detective's search.
But among the memorable points are the voice of its questioning narrator, the murdered girl, Susie Salmon, and her descriptions of heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday."
Susie is bemused by the adult world, explaining: "The school district made everyone take tests and then decided who was gifted and who was not." (She wasn't; her sister, "a burgeoning brain," is.)
She discovers there's not one heaven; there's her heaven, other heavens and "heavens where a girl like me didn't fit in." There are no angels (at least that word is not used), only "intake counselors" to advise new arrivals.
Susie's heaven resembles the suburban high school she never got to attend: "Large, squat buildings spread out on dismally landscaped lots." But it's a heaven with fields and roads to be explored when she's not watching her family on Earth.
She can watch, but she's told she can't help the living, no matter how much she wants to. "Heaven wasn't perfect," she explains. When her brother claims he can see his murdered sister, Susie wonders: "Had my brother really seen me somehow, or was he merely a little boy telling beautiful lies?"
She finds it strange "how much I desired to know what I had not known on earth. I wanted to be allowed to grow up."
"People grow up by living," she tells Franny, her intake counselor. "I want to live."
"That's out," replies Franny, who's already advised her not to mull over her murder: "It does no good. You're dead and you have to accept it."
The rest of the novel covers nearly a decade, on heaven and earth, of learning to accept not just the dead but the living. It's filled with much sadness and some joy.
Sebold hits a false note only when Susie is granted a brief return to temporal life and satisfies an unfulfilled love. The novel builds a theologically challenging view of heaven, then abandons it for the supernatural.
Beyond that, it's a risky novel that gracefully succeeds. One character mentions another character's gift for describing things that "made her feel as if she knew exactly what it felt like — not just what it looked like."
