Alice Sebold penned The Lovely Bones in the late 1990s, with the book making its debut in June 2002. The narrative is set in the 1970s, and each of these timeframes holds particular significance. During the period Sebold was writing, America was transitioning into a new decade and a new millennium. By the late 1990s, Americans had witnessed the advent of the World Wide Web, engaged in heated debates over healthcare, social security reform, and gun control, and followed high-profile national sex scandals such as the Tailhook affair and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair. The nation was also captivated by the O. J. Simpson murder trial and shocked by the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. Sebold crafted her story against a backdrop of increasing awareness and concern regarding domestic, sexual, and teen violence. Her novel, in many respects, mirrors these issues and the cultural climate of the 1990s.

The timing of the book's release adds another layer of significance. Published less than a year after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the novel addresses a nation's craving for solace. The Lovely Bones emerged in an America that had lost its sense of invulnerability to terrorism and random acts of violence. The social and cultural environment of the time was marked by fear, distrust, sorrow, anger, and grief. Though Sebold completed her novel before the attacks, its themes resonate with the concerns prevalent in America during that period.

The story also taps into the historical, cultural, social, and political landscape of the 1970s. In many respects, America "came of age" during this decade, characterized by social change, governmental discontent, advances in civil rights for minorities and women, environmental awareness, and space exploration. The Vietnam War, which ignited antiwar protests and student demonstrations, along with the Watergate Scandal that led to a president's resignation, dismantled the remnants of a naive America. The 1970s also saw significant shifts in America's cultural and social climate, including the women's movement. Women's roles in American society broadened into political and professional spheres, prompting a reevaluation of traditional gender roles.

The transformations of the 1970s play a significant role in The Lovely Bones through several elements, starting with Sebold's female characters. Ruth Connors exemplifies the feminism of the era with her avant-garde approach to art, poetry, and literature. She rejects traditional norms in these areas as well as in her behavior and fashion choices. While Ruth openly embraces feminist ideals, Susie's mother, Abigail, wrestles with her dissatisfaction. Abigail represents many women of the 1970s who did not publicly identify as feminists but sought to break free from the limitations of motherhood and marriage, drawing on feminist principles. Additionally, the novel addresses the 1970s environmental concerns by highlighting the encroachment of construction and industry into the Salmons' suburban neighborhood. Finally, the unsettling theme of a child's rape and murder, along with Susie's stark depiction of her death, mirrors the gruesome images of the Vietnam War. During the 1970s, violent images entered suburban American homes via television, allowing Americans to witness the horrors of war from their living rooms. In The Lovely Bones, these violent intrusions into suburbia are not media images of war but the brutal reality of a raped and murdered girl.

Additional discussion on historical context:

Child Kidnappings

The publication of The Lovely Bones and its rise to bestseller status coincided with the nation's intense focus on the story of Elizabeth Smart, a fourteen-year-old girl abducted from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, in June 2002. Images of Smart saturated newspapers, television, and the Internet, echoing a trend from the 1980s of extensive media coverage of the kidnappings of young girls, lasting weeks or even months. Although the murder in Sebold’s novel occurs in 1973, its release during the same month as Smart's kidnapping and its subsequent success amid ongoing media coverage were both coincidental and indicative of the growing cultural fascination with such stories.

New Age Religious Movements

Sebold’s novel unfolds in a secular heaven where neither God nor Christ seem to be present. However, this heaven is populated by human souls who can observe earthly activities and even visit Earth to intervene in human matters. These elements might be influenced by the New Age movement, which originated in the 1970s and gained traction in the following decades. The New Age movement does not promote a specific orthodox doctrine. Instead, it commonly includes beliefs that angels and deceased individuals can intervene in human lives, emphasizes the benevolent and nonjudgmental aspects of spirituality, and typically upholds the notion of a diffused divine presence throughout the world, rather than a singular God residing in heaven. A surge of spiritualism, at least partly inspired by the New Age, swept across the nation in the decade leading up to the book's release. This trend included numerous books suggesting that the dead could maintain relationships with the living. Deepak Chopra, a prominent figure in the New Age movement, sold millions of copies of his over twenty-five books starting in the late 1980s. He argued that it was impossible for anyone to objectively determine the truth or falsehood of experiences like channeling, alien encounters, and angelic visits. This focus on validating personal experiences, regardless of how extraordinary, and their immunity to external scrutiny, is another hallmark of the New Age. Channeling souls, ghostly visitations, and paranormal phenomena also became common themes on television shows such as The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries. The concept of communicating with the dead has a long-standing history in America, with Ouija boards, séances, and ghost stories deeply rooted in the national culture. However, Susie's seamless transition from life on Earth to life in heaven, along with her effortless ability to influence the living and stay connected to Earth, aligns with New Age beliefs that the supernatural realm constantly interacts with humanity and that the soul is not permanently detached from Earth after death.

Drawing on folkloric and religious motifs and ideas, Alice Sebold presents a remarkable, complex, and comforting vision of heaven as the platform from which Susie Salmon, raped and murdered by a neighbor at the age of fourteen, tells her story. It is a heaven that indeed has many “mansions,” one of which is the “wide wide Heaven,” which can provide one’s every desire. It also grants omniscience to the narrator. The word Susie’s grandfather has for the dominant quality of this heaven is “comfort,” and oddly comforting, indeed, is Alice Sebold’s novel because it postulates a vision of heaven that begins with an “intake” level of simplicity that matches the experience level of the fourteen-year-old victim and becomes increasingly complex as Susie watches the changes her death effects on her family and friends over a dozen or so years following her death. Sebold’s conception of heaven is a complex and progressive spirit world in which the departed continue to grow and develop; thus, those individuals who die while children “mature” over the years as they would have done had they not died prematurely. Found in a number of formal religions, this progressive conception of the afterlife is, in the hands of Alice Sebold, a moving yet unsentimental perspective from which to tell the story of every parent’s worst nightmare.

Sebold has asked the unthinkable question, yet one writ large in every day’s news headlines: What if one’s young daughter does not come home for dinner one evening? How do parents and siblings, friends and neighbors, police and the rest of the community react to the growing conviction that the child has been murdered? How do they react when a dog brings home “a body part,” an elbow that, for the police at least, confirms her murder? How do they react to the failure of the police investigation to find the body, despite finding convincing quantities of blood in the dirt of the cornfield? How do they react to the failure to find the killer, to bring him to justice? Only gradually and painfully can the family and the police conclude that the investigation is a murder investigation, that Susie Salmon had been abducted, murdered, and forever obliterated from the face of this Earth. Although other evidence is accumulated, the killer is never arrested, tried, convicted, and executed.

Sebold’s choice to have Susie Salmon tell her story from heaven as the first-person narrator in charge of her own story works brilliantly to satisfy the reader of the truth of her vision of heaven as a complex, multidimensioned spiritual reality, a wide place, a place fashioned after the dearest wishes of departed souls. To support her conception of this story, Sebold weaves together cultural myths, Christian scripture, and deeply embedded folk ideas about revenants (souls who return, usually in corporeal form, to the scenes of their lives and their deaths), who may communicate successfully but rarely clearly with those they have left behind, and who sometimes even exact vengeance upon their murderers. Thus, this novel is a wonderful ghost story. However, because it also embodies a vision of a secular heaven to which spirits journey in stages from the moment of their death and are granted in some way the righteous desires of their hearts, the novel is also a complex meditation on those desires, including the desire for retribution.

In Susie’s case, the desire for knowledge is paramount. She wants to learn all that she had not been able to learn in her short time on Earth, the knowledge that living brings of love, sex, work, thought, and family, to grow fully through the whole range of life’s experiences. Franny, her intake counselor, herself murdered by a wife abuser, assures her that that option is not available (an assertion that Susie will later test with startling consequences). At first, her heaven is that mansion to which female murder victims go, shaped in the familiar forms of school grounds and buildings where her heavenly growth begins. She and Holly, her best friend in heaven, discover that just about anything one can desire is available if desired enough and if one understands why one desires it. She and Holly realize, for instance, that Franny reminds them both very much of their mothers because they miss their mothers intensely. Susie’s second desire is to observe, at least, the whole lives she has left behind on Earth so that she and her companion can pretend better, a wish that is granted, thus making the omniscient possibilities of this narrative point of view credible as well as functional.

The ultimate embodiment of Susie’s wish is to return in physical form, at least for a few moments, to permit her to make love with Ray Singh years after her murder. She does so, “borrowing” the body of Ruth Connors, a classmate against whom she had “brushed” on her way out of life. That connection gives Ruth her life’s calling to write the lives of female victims and suggests also the power of love to transcend mortality. Sebold’s conception of heaven is not a place of “gritty reality” but a place where one has fun. It is also a place from which Susie can continue to see how, sometimes at great cost, the relationships and the sometimes tenuous connections among her friends and family are made and developed in the years following her disappearance and the ongoing consequences of her life and death for those still living. These relationships are the “lovely bones” of the novel’s title, the armature on which Susie herself grows in knowledge and acceptance to develop the figures of Sebold’s themes.

Sebold avoids the pitfall of sentimentality by managing the tone and focusing on Susie’s reports of the psychological and physical effects of her murder on her family, on her classmates, on Detective Fenerman, and on the killer. For instance, in the character of Ruth Connors, poet and fearless and compulsive walker throughout Manhattan, Sebold focuses on identifying and commemorating all those women and children who were murdered or abused. Ruth is compelled to locate the places where these crimes occurred and to write the names of all such victims in her journal, doing “important work,” Susie tells us, “work that most people on Earth were too frightened even to contemplate” but which her “fans in heaven” cheer on. As Susie watches the lives she left behind, she also remembers when she and Ray Singh nearly but not quite kissed and they secretly witnessed Ruth Connors being scolded for drawing nudes that were too realistic for her art teacher’s comfort and that revealed her talent to be much greater than that of her art teacher.

Susie’s family members remember her in various ways as they deal with the intense pain, implacable and pervasive, that her murder generates. Susie’s mother Abigail in her pain withdraws from her husband, has a brief affair with Fenerman, and flees to the West Coast, working in a winery for several years and returning only when she learns of her husband’s stress- induced heart attack, thus reuniting with him eight years later. Jack is overcome by the loss of his daughter and obsessed with finding proof that Mr. Harvey is a viable suspect. Each day, when his consciousness wakes him, Jack’s guilt seeps in, poisoning his relationship with his wife and his other children, Lindsey and Buckley. His actions are those of a father deeply attached to his daughter and overwhelmed by loss and guilt. Thus, he is acutely sensible to “intimations” of her presence and of his culpability. The visions, sightings, and intuitions that Jack, Buckley, Ruth, Ray, and Lindsey experience are the results of Susie’s efforts to communicate with them. The police, however, require “hard evidence,” and Jack’s attempts to find it are interpreted as irrational at best and illegal in law, marking him in the minds of some as a dangerous and suspicious person. He pesters Fenerman to treat Mr. Harvey as a suspect to such an extent that the beleaguered detective orders him to quit calling and to cease in his attempts to investigate the case himself.

Susie also watches as Lindsey works hard to develop her identity as a young woman in her own right, not merely a living version of her dead sister. Helping her along this path are the attentions of Samuel Heckler, who gives Lindsay a present on the first Christmas after Susie’s death and receives a kiss from Lindsey in return. Susie in her heaven feels the electricity of the kiss and is “almost alive again.” Buckley, her four-year-old brother, is kept from the truth, so he continues to ask, “Where is Susie?” As Sam and Lindsey exchange presents, kiss, and begin their healing and life-long connection, Susie’s father finds a way to tell Buckley that his sister is dead. Taken during the first Christmas after Susie’s death (Christmas being the commemoration of the birth of Christ and thus a subtle promise of immortality), each of these moves begins the healing for Susie’s siblings and her father, but it will be a lengthy process and different for each person.

Learning that Mr. Harvey is her father’s prime suspect, Lindsey conspires with Jack to enter Harvey’s house and find evidence to support their suspicions. She is nearly caught by Harvey, who sees her escaping into the trees and knows he is discovered. Although Harvey immediately leaves town, Lindsey’s daring effort causes Harvey’s life to spin out of control and enables her to reunite with her father so that they can get on with their own lives after a fashion. Buckley, for instance, will, when he is in the seventh grade, develop a garden near the house, not exactly a “secret garden” but one that allows Susie to signal him by making the entire garden bloom. At the end, years later, through Susie’s omniscient witness, readers get to see Mr. Harvey, the serial rapist and her murderer, tumbled into deep snow, not to be found for several months. Nonetheless, justice so long delayed and achieved anonymously is denied for his victims and their families.

Sebold’s vision of how the healing process progresses in different ways for each life relies upon a body of traditional belief, customs, and images, including newborns being given the names of the dead and the seasonal resurrections of gardens. Susie continues on her own journey of progression and exploration, returning occasionally to look in on the family members who are now reunited in her absence but who find her manifested in whatever way they want her to be.

Sources for Further Study

Book: The Magazine for the Reading Life 21 (July/August, 2002): 64.

Booklist 98 (May 1, 2002): 1510.

Library Journal 127 (May 15, 2002): 127.

New Statesman 15 (August 19, 2002): 39.

The New York Times Book Review 107 (July 14, 2002): 14.

Publishers Weekly 249 (June 17, 2002): 40.

Seventeen 61 (July, 2002): 152.

Time 160 (July 1, 2002): 62.

Point of View

In The Lovely Bones, the point of view, which is the perspective from which the story unfolds, is essential to the narrative. Typically, a novel's point of view can be one of four traditional types: first person, second person, third person, and third person omniscient. The first person point of view narrates the events through the eyes of a single character. The second person point of view tells the story as if it is happening to the reader. In the third person point of view, the reader does not gain insight into the characters' minds and must interpret the action as it occurs. The third person omniscient offers a "godlike" perspective, transcending time and place, allowing the reader to see the actions and delve into the characters' thoughts, feelings, and motives.

Alice Sebold employs an omniscient first person point of view, narrated by Susie Salmon, who is deceased. From her perspective in heaven, Susie observes everything—actions, motivations, and thoughts—so her narration functions similarly to third person omniscient, though she tells the story in the first person. Susie's ability to access the minds of other characters also grants readers this same insight. Moreover, as an omniscient first person narrator recounting the story beyond the constraints of earthly time, she can and does experience many characters' memories. For instance, she witnesses and narrates events from her killer, Mr. Harvey's, childhood and his previous murders. Due to her omniscience, Susie often perceives deeply personal thoughts and actions, such as her mother's first affair with Detective Fenerman, or her mother's inner reflections on motherhood.

This blend of third person omniscient and first person points of view is an innovative choice by Sebold. Few novels feature a deceased protagonist—especially one who has suffered a brutal rape and murder. However, this unique point of view makes the disturbing subject matter more manageable and allows Sebold to incorporate humor and lightness into an otherwise horrifying story. Because Susie sees everything and narrates her observations, she provides readers with opportunities to empathize with various characters. Additionally, since this omniscient viewpoint is filtered through a first person, personal voice, it emerges as a specific perspective: sometimes angry, sometimes confused, sometimes spunky, and sometimes humorous, all contributing to a distinctive personality.

Setting

The setting encompasses the time, place, and cultural backdrop where the narrative unfolds. In The Lovely Bones, time and place are pivotal in grasping the setting. Traditionally, time includes three components: historical period, duration, and the characters' perception of time. Sebold incorporates dates throughout the narrative, beginning with December 6, 1973. This immediately situates the reader in the early 1970s and the winter season. As the story develops, the historical periods fluctuate as Susie guides the reader through the past and hints at the future. For example, after revealing the date of her death, she references contemporary images of missing children on milk cartons and in daily mail, raising questions about the time period from which Susie narrates. Sebold's time shifts—moving between past, present, and future—are intricately linked to elements of place.

Similarly, the location alternates between heaven and earth. The main action occurs on earth, while the narration comes from heaven. Some events also happen in heaven: Susie meets Mr. Harvey's other victims, explores with her roommate Holly, and dances with her grandfather. Although these actions do not necessarily drive the plot (the sequence of carefully selected events), they enrich the story (all events depicted). Both place and time are closely connected to the coming-of-age aspect of the book, as well as themes of loss and grief.

Foreshadowing and Flashback

Generally, Sebold's novel follows a traditional plot structure, but events do not always unfold chronologically. The novel starts with Susie's murder and gradually establishes relationships between events. To comprehend causality, the reader needs background information, which Sebold provides through flashbacks—actions that occurred before the story began. After establishing the murder, Sebold has Susie look back at how it happened. Like with point of view and setting, Sebold complicates the conventional idea of plot. For instance, in the first chapter, Susie talks about her murder and mentions a neighborhood dog finding her elbow and bringing it home. However, the actual incident of the dog finding the elbow and the police informing her parents occurs weeks after the murder. These moments of foreshadowing create anticipation. Through flashback and foreshadowing, Sebold diverges from a strictly chronological sequence of events, making the plot more circular, even as the narrative progresses chronologically through the 1970s.

Additional discussion on style:

Point of View

Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones, is narrated by the protagonist after her death. This first-person omniscient narration provides Sebold with a unique way to explore the characters in the story. Through this narrative style, the narrator can not only observe the actions of the characters but also delve into their thoughts and feelings. This technique allows for a richer development of the context in which each character grows. For instance, when Susie sees her sister’s grief over her death, the description of Lindsey crying in the shower with the lights off gives readers insight into Lindsey's way of coping with the tragedy that would be hard to convey otherwise.

The use of omniscient narration also enables the story to progress in a non-linear fashion. As the main character watches her family and friends, she recalls past experiences and describes them in great detail. Her memories are recounted from a first-person perspective, while her observations of the present are shared through her omniscient narration. This fluid transition between past and present is made more seamless by the omniscient point of view, as it grants the narrator complete access to the lives of all the characters, thereby enhancing the storytelling.

Susie's omniscient narration introduces two types of suspense in the novel. The first type stems from the limited knowledge of the secondary characters. While Susie is aware of everything happening in the lives of the other characters, they are not privy to her insights. Suspense arises from watching characters who are unaware they are being observed. This unique form of suspense is made possible through first-person omniscient narration. For example, Susie watches her father interact with her murderer and narrates the scene as it unfolds, but her father remains oblivious to the fact that he is conversing with his daughter's killer.

The second type of suspense generated by the omniscient narration of the protagonist stems from the first. Though readers are privy to the narrator’s extensive knowledge about the characters’ actions and thoughts, the narrator lacks the ability to foresee the future. This heightens the anticipation of future events, fueled by the insights provided through the omniscient narration. For instance, when the protagonist’s father engages with his daughter’s killer, the tension for the reader is amplified by their awareness of each character’s identity and their relationships. Without knowing that the protagonist’s father is interacting with his daughter’s murderer, the scene would appear mundane and irrelevant to the story's progression.

• In August 2002, Recorded Books released an unabridged audio CD version of The Lovely Bones.
• The film adaptation of The Lovely Bones is directed by Peter Jackson, known for helming the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Jackson is also producing the film, which is slated for a 2007 release, using his own funding. The screenplay is being co-written by Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh.

Sources

Abbott, Charlotte, "How About Them Bones?" in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 249, No. 30, July 29, 2002, pp. 22-23.

Bouton, Katherine, "What Remains," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the New York Times, July 14, 2002, Final edition, Section 7, Column 3, p. 14.

Charles, Ron, "'If I Die Before I Wake, I Pray the Lord My Soul to Take': In Alice Sebold's Debut Novel, the Dead Must Learn to Let Go, Too," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Christian Science Monitor, July 25, 2002, p. 15.

Churchwell, Sarah, "A Neato Heaven," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Times Literary Supplement, No. 5186, August 23, 2002, p. 19.

Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, W.W. Norton, 1997, p. 9.

Grossman, Lev, "Murdered, She Wrote," Review of The Lovely Bones, in Time, Vol. 160, No. 4, July 1, 2002, p. 62.

Kakutani, Michiko, "The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the New York Times, June 18, 2002, Section E, Column 4, p. 1.

Mead, Rebecca, "Immortally Cute," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the London Review of Books, Vol. 24, No. 20, October 17, 2002, p. 18.

Mendelsohn, Daniel, "Novel of the Year," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No. 1, January 16, 2003, pp. 4-5.

Russo, Maria, "Girl, Interrupted," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Washington Post, August 11, 2002, p. BWO7.

Sebold, Alice, The Lovely Bones, Little Brown, 2004.

――――――, "The Oddity of Suburbia," in The Lovely Bones, Little Brown, 2004, pp. 2-3.

Webb, Stephen H., "Earth from Above," in Christian Century, Vol. 119, No. 21, October 9-22, 2002, p. 20.

Woloch, Nancy, Women and the American Experience, 3rd ed., McGraw-Hill, pp. 508-09.

Further Reading

Baily, Beth L., and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies, University Press of Kansas, 2004.

America in the Seventies is a compilation of essays by prominent scholars. These essays delve into the cultural despair of the decade, analyze various aspects of 1970s culture such as film, music, and advertising, and explore how Americans sought to redefine themselves during this period.

Douglas, Susan, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, Three Rivers Press, 1995.

This book examines media portrayals of women over the last fifty years of the twentieth century. Douglas's insights on the 1970s provide valuable context for understanding the cultural backdrop of Sebold's The Lovely Bones.

Evans, Sarah, Born for Liberty, Simon & Schuster, 1997.

This comprehensive history of American women explores their evolving roles in society. The later chapters, particularly chapters 11-12, are useful for understanding characters like Abigail Salmon and Ruth Connors in Sebold's novel.

Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, Norton, 1963.

The Feminine Mystique, a seminal feminist work, investigates the dissatisfaction of white, educated, suburban wives and mothers. Although it was published in the early 1960s, Friedan's analysis is still relevant to Abigail Salmon's internal struggles in The Lovely Bones.

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying, Scribner, 1969, reprint, 1997.

This book, written in clear and accessible language, introduces the five stages of grief. It remains a classic resource for understanding both the dying and grieving processes.