I read this book because it's the latest pick in my book club and because a friend who read it said she stayed up all night to finish it. What she didn't say (until this morning after I'd lost much sleep) was that while yes, this book was difficult to put down, it was also pointlessly depressing. I stayed up last night reading with my stomach in knots, thinking I'd be sick at any minute, thinking that this could have been my child. But actually? I could have put it down without reading the last 100 pages at all.
Did I like it? Well...I look forward to reading Sebold's memoir (the excerpt just on amazon.com seems to explain where she got the idea for The Lovely Bones), and new fiction she might produce. I enjoy her language and her uncanny ability to get into the minds of parents when she is not one. No, it's not that she got into the parents' heads: what she did well was capture the feelings of being a young child.
"Something so divine that no one in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult." When Jake does something he knows he shouldn't, he worries more about me being unhappy than he does about getting in trouble. "You happy, Mommy?" I remember being the same way about my mom when I was young.
"...what I remember most is watching things hit my mother while I looked at her, how the life she had wanted and the loss of it hit her in waves. As her firstborn, I thought it was me who took away all those dreams of what she had wanted to be." I think every child wonders about this. What would my mother have been if she hadn't raised a child? Reading this sentence was heartbreaking for me: will Jake wonder this someday? Does a child ever understand that he is his mother's dream?
Okay, if you're going to read this book, stop reading my entry here.
But here's what I didn't like about The Lovely Bones. The concept. The narrator in this short novel is Susie, a 14-year-old girl recently raped and murdered. That's right, she's already dead, and we the readers go to heaven with her. See, now that I read that idea, I think it's intriguing. Except what I thought would be intriguing simply wasn't there. No exploration of soul. A heaven with no depth. No growing as a character. Dead Susie spends 328 pages watching, pining after, spooking, and actually possessing the people she left behind. No resolution, and in fact, no conflict. Yes, she was murdered, but even that wasn't particularly intriguing. No real conflict, so any resolution is...well, who cares?
At age 14, I kept a diary. I still have that diary. Whenever I take it out to remember old times, I'm embarrassed by the immaturity and triviality of it. This book had a similar feel for me.
Hey, but the book club is meeting at a restaurant I've been wanting to check out.
Posted by Becky at June 3, 2004 09:42 PM