SOURCE: Eder, Doris L. “The Saving Powers of Memory and Imagination in Alice Sebold's Lucky and The Lovely Bones.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism 193, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2004.

[In the following essay, specially commissioned for Contemporary Literary Criticism, Eder offers a comparison of The Lovely Bones with Sebold's memoir, Lucky, discussing the novel's characterization, structure, and imaginative perspective.]

Alice Sebold's two works published to date resemble each other in significant ways but also differ in important respects. The sardonically titled Lucky (1999),¹ a memoir about the author's rape at the age of eighteen, how the rapist was brought to trial and sentenced, and how she and her family survived the experience, was written before her best-selling debut novel, The Lovely Bones (2002).² In an interview, Sebold reveals she was struggling with a novel that had stalled when the voice of Susie Salmon suddenly entered her brain. She transcribed the first chapter of Susie's story, only to discover that she must write about her own rape and victimization fifteen years earlier in order to get her own story out of the way. Her story was obstructing the novel's progress in some way. Sebold herself acknowledges that “Lucky was part of the process of writing Lovely Bones.” She adds that, “whereas in Lovely Bones the rape and murder scene was the first thing I wrote, in Lucky it was the last.”³ The beginnings of both books are brilliant, whereas their endings are blemished and raveled. Indeed, one may consider they subvert or undermine what has gone before.

Having read these books in order of publication, I would urge readers to read them in reverse order—the novel first, the memoir afterwards. Why? Such a recommendation is not dictated by a preference for nonfiction over fiction but because, contrary to publishing history, Lucky is the more integrated and successful book. Sebold's memoir was marginalized by being shelved in mega-bookstores under “Addiction and Recovery” (addiction to rape?) and Women's Studies, and as a result did not sell well, but is less flawed than the much acclaimed Lovely Bones. The two books each illustrate the remarkable recuperative powers of memory and imagination, respectively, and it is instructive to compare the fiction with the reality that engendered it. The memoir's viewpoint is more restricted but more grounded in reality than the novel's—what, after all, could be freer, more ethereal, or limitless than the first-person omniscient olympian perspective of Susie in The Lovely Bones?

Lucky opens with a scarifying description of a rape in an underground tunnel where a murder formerly took place. From the first, rape and murder are intertwined in the victim's (as perhaps in the rapist's) mind. “I knew I was staring up into the eyes of the man who would kill me. … I was convinced that I would not live. … Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped …” (L [Lucky], 14-15.) Along with a feeling of absolute helplessness, this violent crime engenders a sense of the deepest alienation, as well as fear of loss of identity. As she is being raped, Alice tries to keep sane by remembering the lines of a poem. Afterwards she registers, “All that remained unpossessed was my brain.” (L, 19.) When the rapist steals her money and tries to take her driver's license, it becomes clear she fears losing her identity: “I was petrified of him having my identification. Leaving with anything other than what he had: all of me, except my brain and my belongings.” (L, 21-22.)

One striking resemblance between memoir and novel is the victim's obsession, after the event, with protecting her family. Most children expect their parents to protect them, but teenagers Alice and Susie expend inordinate time and energy trying to protect their family members. In the emotional economy of the family in Lucky, Alice is aligned with her alcoholic and panicky mother, her elder sister being closer to her cool, laid-back, professorial father. (The line-up in the Salmon household differs somewhat, Susie hovering most anxiously over her father, though she feels sympathy for her mother.) Alice's concern for her mother may strike one as excessive. She analyzes it thus: “… the way I survived in the early hours after the rape was by spiraling the obsession of how not to tell my mother over and over. … Convinced it would destroy her, I ceased thinking of what had happened to me. … My worry for her became my life raft.” (L, 28-29.) In fact, Alice's mother holds up pretty well, whereas Abigail Salmon of The Lovely Bones goes to pieces.

Whereas Jack Salmon, Susie's father, is a tower of love and strength for her and tries to pursue the man he suspects of raping and murdering his daughter in The Lovely Bones, in Lucky, Alice's father remains his undemonstrative self, incurring the wrath of his wife and other daughter when he asks how Alice could have been raped once her assailant dropped his knife. Patiently Alice reasons with him, already keenly aware that rape causes more cleavage between the sexes and between the victim and others than any other crime. To her cost, she discovers that, “after telling the hard facts to anyone … I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury … for reasons I remain unsure of. Some men and lesbians see it as a turn-on or a mission, as if … they can pull me back from the wreckage …” She adds that no one can save a rape victim from the consequences of rape—“You save yourself or you remain unsaved.” (L, 69.)

One way in which memoir and novel pursue different tracks is in their depictions of the police and the rapist/murderer. The character of Len Fenerman in The Lovely Bones is a pale parody of the kind of detective who inhabits most crime novels and whodunits. Fenerman (who briefly becomes Abigail's lover) discourages her husband from investigating serial rapist/murderer, Harvey. The detective's plodding investigations permit the trail to run cold; in pursuit of his adulterous affair, he even allows the murderer to skip town and evade capture. When it comes, the villain's nemesis is casual and fortuitous and has little to do with human agency. The police pay a more central role in Lucky and one or two of them earn Alice's hardwon respect.

One of Sebold's most extraordinary imaginative feats in The Lovely Bones is her portrayal of George Harvey. A remarkable study in the banality of evil, he is at once frightening and pathetic. As Laura Miller observes in a review, his portrait is without a trace of “fetishism” or, for that matter, “forgiveness.”⁴ The rapist in Lucky, though he terrifies his victim and continues to overshadow her as “the husband to my fate,” is one of society's failures, more a victim than Harvey, though we know little more about him than that he is black. (L, 61.)

Lucky's structure is simple, like that of The Lovely Bones. Commencing with the crime, it follows the Salmon family as its members try to come to terms with Alice's rape. She has her heart set on leading a normal life, so she returns to Syracuse University. Six months after the rape Alice sees her attacker on the street, has a sketch made of him, and calls the police. Scheduled for a workshop that day with celebrated writer Geoffrey Wolff, she excuses herself. Wolff gives her this advice: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Alice comes to understand that “memory could save you, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, and the brutalized.” [L, 114.) She shows preternatural powers of memory and intelligence as a witness at her trial, although so frightened by the lineup beforehand that she identifies the wrong man as her assailant. In fact, Alice and her family are on the road to recovery when the rape of her best friend causes a relapse.

Lila, Alice's close friend and roommate, is raped in their rooming house. Alice tries to help Lila lovingly and responsibly, but her friend's reaction is one of denial. She has no wish to follow Alice's example in pressing charges, and she rebuffs her: “I know you want to take care of me, but you can't. I don't want to be touched. Not by you, not by anybody,” she declares. (L, 231.) The aftermath of this second encounter with rape by proxy is that Alice lapses into despair, all hope of leading a normal life draining away. She fails to graduate, going to Houston and then New York, where she drifts into the life of dissipation and debauchery detailed in the Epilogue. The Epilogue to Lucky is a mistake, as much an excrescence on her memoir as the sudden incursion of Susie from heaven into earth is a betrayal of the established viewpoint and of Sebold's first novel as a whole.

The Lovely Bones covers a time span of about a decade. After her rape and murder by Harvey in December 1973, Susie watches over her family from heaven. She sees her father beginning to harbor suspicions about her murderer, which he confides to detective Fenerman, only to have Fenerman warn him off. Eventually, Salmon becomes so convinced of Harvey's guilt that, when he observes a figure prowling at night through the Stolfuz cornfield where Susie met her end, he follows. But this turns out not to be Harvey—just one of Susie's former schoolmates keeping a tryst; Salmon is beaten up for his pains. He is permanently lamed by this encounter, so Lindsey takes up the cudgels for her father. She breaks into Harvey's house, discovering a drawing he made of the cornfield and the underground dugout into which he lured Susie. Lindsey runs off with this, though Harvey, returning home, sees her as she clears his garden. Harvey then disappears.

Abigail, Susie's mother, meanwhile tries desperately to embark on a new life; she has an affair with Lenerman, even as her husband lies in hospital. She leaves him. A few months later her mother comes to live with the Salmons to take care of the children. Lindsey grows up and is engaged to her boyfriend Samuel, while Ruth—a girl Susie brushed by on her way to heaven, who has, as a result, become obsessed with the dead girl—pairs off with Susie's former boyfriend, Ray Singh. When Jack Salmon has a heart attack, Abigail returns and Susie's parents are reconciled. Salmon recovers, Lindsey and Samuel marry, and Susie temporarily reincarnates herself in Ruth so that Ray can make love to her. The Lovely Bones ends with Susie finally leaving go of Earth and her family to graduate to a more advanced heaven.

In a workshop at the University of California at Irvine, where the author took her MFA in Writing, Sebold said that her agent and editor responded to a capsule description of the book thus: “If you had told me that was what it was about, we never would have bought it,” but they added, “Thank God we got to read it.”⁵ Similarly, Ron Charles's review of The Lovely Bones is right in pointing out that mere plot summary makes this novel sound “mawkish, like a ghastly version of Beloved for white suburbia.”⁶ Other critics note that its concept, voice, and perspective make this novel a high-wire act, with most finding the author negotiating the tightrope successfully. I dissent, finding the novel mawkish at times. Sebold occasionally lapses into “inspirational” prose reminiscent of Hallmark or Deepak Chopra. Consider, for instance, this comment on life on earth: “I had taken this time to fall in love … with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death—the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human—feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light …” (LB [The Lovely Bones], 309.) Or Susie's description of how she falls from heaven to become incarnated in Ruth, while Ruth temporarily ascends to take her place: “I was a soul back on Earth. AWOL a little while from heaven …” (LB, 302.) The first passage teeters between the sublime and the sentimental; the second is limping humor.

Nevertheless, The Lovely Bones is a feat, a tribute to its author's imagination: its perspective is challenging and interesting, its narrative voice is generally compelling, and its style is appealing, sometimes even memorable. One agrees with Dennis McLellan and Michiko Kakutani in finding the point of view, combining “the warmth of a first-person narrative and the freedom of an omniscient one,” artful and beguiling.⁷ The omniscient voice is often considered out of date and the first person loose. However, as she distances herself from her family, as she contemplates the “lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent” that proliferate after her death, Susie finds herself able “to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.” (LB, 320.) A good description of earned omniscience.

The characterization of the Salmon family is also persuasive, particularly the portraits of Jack Salmon and Lindsey. Salmon is the center of his family. He loves all his children and feels overwhelming guilt at not having been able to prevent Susie's rape and death. He never stops loving his wife, though she abandons him temporarily. Because of this, their reconciliation is believable. (Abigail's character is, however, problematic.) Susie's sister Lindsey is an admirable character, the one seen most “in the round,” for she achieves independence from the narrator despite the fact that Susie identifies with her as a “twin,” more closely than with anyone else. “In watching her I found I could get lost more than with anyone else,” Susie comments. (LB, 232). Attractive and plucky, Lindsey moves from sheer terror, roused as she embodies the “Walking Dead Syndrome,” in which “other people see the dead person and don't see you,” (LB, 59) to resolute pursuit of her own life and happiness. She is the catalyst who enables Susie finally to “let go.” Reviewer Tony Buchsbaum observes that Lindsey “seems to internalize the violence, reshaping her life around it the way an oyster uses … a grain of sand to make a pearl.”⁸

Buckley, the youngest child, is only four when Susie is murdered and not much older when his mother leaves, so must digest two great losses at a tender age. With his father's help, he absorbs the first loss better than the second. This child's character is complex, somewhat schizoid. Intensely loving toward his father, Buckley internalizes his hatred for his mother: “He had been keeping, daily, weekly, yearly, an underground storage room of hate. Deep inside this, the four-year-old sat, his heart flashing. Heart to stone, heart to stone.” (LB, 269.) A kind of triangulation occurs among Susie, her father, and her brother at critical moments—when, for instance, Salmon has a heart attack and stands at the threshold of death. Buck prays for his survival; Susie would like him to die and join her on the other side; both children want their father for themselves.

The characters of Abigail Salmon, Ruth Connors, and Len Fenerman are less satisfactory. Abigail seems hollow and negative; Ruth is contrived, and Len Fenerman is deliberately plodding and colorless. The weak link in the Salmon family, Abigail is a woman with a touch of alienation about her, who had no vocation for motherhood and so, Susie says, “had been punished in the most horrible and unimaginable way for never having wanted me.” (LB, 266.) She did love her elder daughter, probably subconsciously blaming herself for Susie's death, yet needing to deny this and run away—“she needed Len to drive the dead daughter out.” (LB, 152.) Grandmother Lynn, a spirited former alcoholic, brings fresh air into the Salmon household when she takes Abigail's place.

The poet Ruth Connors is a feminist with lesbian leanings who becomes obsessed with victimized women and children, keeping journals about them. She resembles Alice, as portrayed in Lucky, in being bohemian, weird, and slightly old-fashioned. But she strikes the reader as more of a plot device than a character in her own right.

Harvey, the serial killer, is given a convincing background. As a child he was his mother's accomplice in stealing, pilfering, and scavenging even from the dead. His mother is driven off by his father and afterwards he internalizes her, seeking women and little girls as victims. He is diabolically canny and astute, enabling him to throw the police offtrack. When Fenerman comes to search his house after Lindsey shows him the drawing she took, Harvey simulates sympathy for the Salmons, explaining the drawing as his way of figuring out how the crime might have been committed. Asked why he didn't share his speculations with the police, he responds this would not have brought the dead girl back and that he was afraid of appearing a meddling amateur!

As for the novel's otherworldly setting, critics are wont to praise Susie's heaven as an inspiration. Sebold says she dispensed with many versions of heaven before settling on this one. Susie's high-school heaven is a teenager's delight: “There were no teachers. … We never had to go inside except for art class. … our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue.” (LB, 18.) Posthumously, Susie is able to indulge a taste for an architecture opposed to the suburbs' boxy functionalism. She inhabits a duplex and a gazebo and is surrounded by dogs. There are hints throughout that she may move on to a more rarefied empyrean, but that this too will be “cozy.” For some, Susie's “Great Good Place” lacks credibility.

Sebold's genre is “suburban gothic.”⁹ A product of the suburbs, the author marvels (in a discussion at her literary stock in trade: “Who would have thought that the place I most despised growing up—where I felt like the weirdest freak and biggest loser—would turn out to be a gift to me?”¹⁰ The kind of story that attracts Sebold is this:

My family was watching television when a couple—the mother and father to a woman who lived one street over … were hit by a car and landed on our front lawn. The man who hit them leapt out of his car and shouted to two boys … playing basketball … “These people need an ambulance.” He then proceeded to jump back in his car and drive three houses down, where he calmly parked in his own driveway and went inside his house. The daughter of the couple who had been hit … now came upon the scene. We heard screaming. … Both her parents were killed. One died on our lawn, the other died … in a hospital. And the man who struck them? He was both one of our neighbors and, by profession, a paramedic.¹¹

The Lovely Bones testifies to the oddness and grotesquerie of suburbia. Other critics have compared Sebold to such authors as Aimée Bender and Alice MacDermott. For her suburban gothic strain she is comparable to the Sylvia Plath of The Bell Jar, who evokes the same incursions of terror into the blandest milieux and who would also glory in such a diabolic juxtaposition as “the Gilberts' dog found my elbow and brought it home with a telling corn husk attached to it.” (LB, 10) For her interest in regeneration, however, Sebold is comparable—not to her advantage—to contemporary British novelist Pat Barker. These two writers share a profound interest in the process of regeneration or healing, though Barker's is grittier and harder won. Still, one can agree with Kathleen Bouton that Sebold's novel transforms “the stuff of neighborhood tragedy” into literature.¹² And one affirms Michiko Kakutani's assessment that The Lovely Bones is an “affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed … through love and acceptance.”¹³

Notes

1. Alice Sebold, Lucky (New York: Scribner, 1999). All further references to this work are given as page numbers within the text.

2. ———. The Lovely Bones (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 2002). All further references to this work are given as page numbers within the text.

3. David Weich, “The World Meets Alice Sebold.” July 22, 2002. Powells.com http://www.powells.com/authors/sebold.html

4. “Imagining Death.” Aug. 1, 2002. Salon.com http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/08/01/fiction

5. Ehzra Cue, “An Evening of Fiction.” April 26, 2000.

6. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” Christian Science Monitor, July 25, 2002, p. 15.

7. See reviews by McLellan in the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 15, 1999, and by Kakutani in the New York Times, June 18, 2002, late ed., sect. E, p. 1, col. 4.

8. “Voice from Beyond.”

9. Lev Grossman. Time 160, July 1, 2002, p. 62.

10. “The Oddity of Suburbia—Alice Sebold in Her Own Words.”

11. Ibid.

12. “What Remains?” New York Times Book Review, cli, issue no. 52179, July 14, 2002, p. 14.

13. “The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death,” New York Times, June 18, 2002, late ed., sect. E, p. 1, col. 4.

References

Bouton, Kathleen. “What Remains?” New York Times Book Review, cli, issue no. 52179, July 14, 2002, p. 14.

Buchsbaum, Tony. “Voice from Beyond.”

Charles, Ron. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Christian Science Monitor, July 25, 2002, p. 15.

Cue, Ehzra. “An Evening of Fiction.” April 26, 2000.

Darby, Ann. Interview with Alice Sebold. Publishers Weekly, 249, June 17, 2002, pp. 40-41.

Grossman, Lev. Time 160, July 1, 2002, p. 62.

Kakutani, Michiko. “The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death.” New York Times, June 18, 2002, late ed., sect. E, p. 1, col. 4.

McLellan, David. Los Angeles Times, Sept. 15, 1999.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Novel of the Year.” New York Review of Books, 50, no. 1, January 16, 2003.

Miller, Laura. Salon.com http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/08/01/sebold/print.html See also “Imagining Death.”

“The Oddity of Suburbia—Alice Sebold in Her Own Words.” www/twbookmark.com/authorslounge/articles/2002/may/article_150960.html

Press, Joy. “Heaven Can't Wait.” Village Voice, June 14, 2002. See also http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0225/press.php

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

———. Lucky. New York: Scribner, 1999.

“Voice from Beyond.” www.januarymagazine.com/fiction/lovelybones/html

Weich, David, “The World Meets Alice Sebold.” July 22, 2002. Powells.com www.powells.com/authors/sebold.html