[In the following review, Churchwell praises the first half of The Lovely Bones, but derides the novel's latter half, calling it “saccharine” and “false.”]

Alice Sebold's first novel [The Lovely Bones], which has been top of the American bestseller lists for weeks, is narrated by fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon, who has just been raped and murdered by a serial killer and is now in heaven sadly watching the effects of her death on her family and friends. Not a murder mystery (Susie knows perfectly well who killed her, and doesn't dissemble), The Lovely Bones concerns effects, not causes. Susie must learn the same lessons about loss as her family: as they become reconciled to losing her, she must become reconciled to losing them—and herself. “Heaven wasn't perfect”, Susie observes, deadpan, on being informed that she will be denied what she most wants, the chance to grow up. But that is exactly what Susie will do, over the course of this unusual, often touching novel: the death of a precocious, witty, but essentially ordinary child proves in Sebold's hands a metaphor for the death of childhood itself.

Susie's death is a travesty of the fall from innocence into experience—sexual, cruel and, in her case, fatal. In her superb first chapter, Sebold captures the wryness and regret that the remembered pain of this fall provokes: Susie says “I guess I figured” and “I guess I was thinking”, as she describes the danger signals she overlooked while taking a short cut home from school one dark winter's afternoon and encountering a neighbour she slightly knew. The point is that she wasn't thinking at all, because she was unsuspecting, innocent. When her killer invites her into an underground cave he has built, she is embarrassed to report that, instead of feeling wary, she felt only curious, and blurted out “neato!”: “I completely reverted”, she adds ruefully, knowing that this reversion to childhood is what killed her.

The account of the rape and murder, which closes the chapter, is ferociously sad: “I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close.” As Susie feels the victim's psychic detachment from her body, Sebold offers a simile that captures all too well what it is like to be at the mercy of someone else's act of will: “I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat.” A few sentences later, the distance of simile has become brutal metaphor: “I was the mortar, he was the pestle.” Sebold is the author of a memoir about her own rape at the age of eighteen, Lucky (1999); her fictional account also bears the authority of her experience, but art, not knowledge, conveys its pain.

Susie watches the rest of the book's events unfold from a thoroughly secular heaven, in which everyone is granted only their “simplest dreams” (which is why heaven isn't perfect); each heaven is populated by those whose dreams have coincided. Susie lives in a duplex with a Vietnamese “roommate”, Holly (who speaks without an accent in her idea of heaven), near a high school that duplicates the kind they hoped to attend; new residents of heaven are put under the supervision of an “intake counselor”, who, in Susie and Holly's case, is a motherly woman, a social worker in life. That this heaven is so entirely earthbound is, presumably, Sebold's point: for Susie, the banal details of adolescence are a lost paradise.

The first half of The Lovely Bones proves a wonderfully observed, moving portrait of adolescence as a series of losses and accommodations to the pains of adulthood. Susie has a younger sister, Lindsey, who becomes her surrogate. Susie identifies with Lindsey's chance to grow up; Lindsey identifies with her lost sister; and the grief-stricken community looks at Lindsey and sees Susie. Susie is, by believable turns, protective, proud and envious of the little sister who will get the chances she has lost.

As the story proceeds, however, it gradually loses its seasoned blend of ambivalent feeling, becoming first sweet, and then saccharine. If Susie's heaven looks a lot like earth, the earth she has left behind starts to look a little too much like heaven. The bad are punished, the good but erring repent, and everyone except the killer seems free of spite, cruelty or meanness. The worst crime anyone else commits is grief-stricken withdrawal. No mistake is permanent, no betrayal unforgiven, and the supporting characters never falter. Lindsey's boyfriend, in particular, is idealized beyond all hope of recognition; his older brother, although suspiciously leather-jacketed and motorcycle-riding, spends his free time building forts for Susie's baby brother and baking in the kitchen with her grandmother, who has moved in to hold the family together. Reconciliation as adjustment and acceptance are lessons we all need to learn; reconciliation as reunion is just too easy.

In the end, Sebold issues everyone a reprieve—even Susie, in a false move that violates the contract of willingly suspended disbelief. Hope becomes not the source of human endurance, an occasional state of grace, but a simple promissory note to be redeemed. Solace is one thing; total recompense is just a lie. Sebold's fable collapses into fairy tale: it is not just a feel-good book, but a feel-better book. Those in the mood to believe that suffering guarantees maturity, hard-earned wisdom and the smell of baking downstairs, will love all of The Lovely Bones. But those feeling at all swindled by life's duplicities may find it palling in the end, as it offers neither the gratifying fellowship of dissatisfaction, nor commiseration about the real insufficiencies in our lives.