The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

It took me about two and a half days to read this book, and those were days during which I had plenty of other things to do. What I'm saying is, it's a very quick read. It was easy to read, which may explain some of its "astonishing" universal appeal.

It is difficult for me to really latch onto whatever the amazing bestseller list creators of this world latched onto when they ate this book up. I do not have children, nor do I have friends with children. I was fourteen years old just over a decade ago, and I certainly wasn't one in the 1970s with a nice loving family appropriate to that decade. I have not encountered murder, never known anyone who was murdered, or of any friends of friends who were murdered. I have watched a lot of Law & Order.

And that's what this book felt like, in a lot of ways. It trades on its dramatic irony too heavily for my money, as you know the killer and the details of the protagonist's death within the first chapter or two, I was primarily interested in if the man would be caught and how and so forth. Sebold focuses instead on the family dynamics and some intrapersonal dynamics that develop after the protagonist is killed. That is all well and good, but for my money her characterizations are not particularly engaging or thrilling. There are effectively sentimental or insightful moments, but nothing that challenged me to think differently.

Perhaps that is this book's strength, and a source of its popularity - it never really REALLY challenges you in a significant way. Sebold describes things well, if something erring on the side of purple prose, and it can be very powerful to have an unreliable narrator who is also omniscient? But overall, I just couldn't go with this book. Parts of it were really interesting, but there are some spoiler-related plot twists that I did not care for at all, that sustained the feeling that I was watching an episode of Law & Order that was trying to wind everything up in the last 12 minutes of showtime.

I didn't dislike this book, but I also didn't love it. I thought about not finishing it, but I finished it if only because it was so easy to do so, so easy to read and digest. I can see why it would get picked up to be made into a movie, but I also wonder how they will be able to commit it to film without making it REALLY cheesy.

I could see myself encountering someone who loved this book intensely that I already don't like, and getting into an argument about the book's merits. But I have not met that person yet. As it stands, this is mainstream packaged writing, very sentimental, very manipulative, very straight-forward, very traditional but with a "new" narrative twist and some versions of heaven that are palatable to today's am-I-or-am-I-not theist intellectual. I felt somewhat pandered to while reading this book.

There are better things for me to read, but there are also much worse things that the public in general could be reading. After all, you can't really beat up a book whose main themes include love, recovering from pain, learning to live, blah blah. Those things are universally appealing, they apply to all age groups, all social groups. Perhaps that is what stopped the book from engaging me, it was TOO universal in that way.

Also, most of the writing was not particularly impressive. I got the feeling that I was reading something that I could have conceived of and written. Yes, it's true that I did NOT conceive of or write it, and that Sebold did, so who am I to criticize - yes, that's all very true. But I enjoy books the most when they seem to be these messages sent across time and space by a person who artistry is somehow magical to me. How could Frank Herbert write Dune? I couldn't do it. Too much vocabulary, too much planning. I couldn't write even something like Blindness, another book I wasn't crazy about. But I couldn't have written it, or have come up with the idea. So good for them.

As for Sebold, I don't know. I guess this means she is a very accessible writer, and whether that is a good thing or not depends on each individual reader. I like to work a little bit, or have my notions about things twisted around, and so forth. I am not everyone.

I'll admit that amongst the many bits of sentimentality in The Lovely Bones, there were some that struck a cord and remained. I would never begrudge Sebold that. She succeeded wonderfully in a type of writing that I just don't particularly care for.

The end.