No bones
Daniel Mendelsohn reviews The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Some necessary extracts:
“Michael Pietsch [the publisher], suggested that the book’s appeal lies in its fearless and ultimately redemptive portrayal of dark material: ‘grief, the most horrible thing that can happen in a life.’
And yet darkness, grief, and heartbreak is what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of its appeal.
It is hard to read [it] without thinking of cinema - or, perhaps better, of those TV ‘movies of the week’ with their predictable arcs of crisis, healing, and ‘closure’, the latter inevitably evoked by an obvious symbolism.
The real point of Sebold’s novel isn’t to make you confront dreadful things, but, if anything, to assure you that they have no really permanent consequences.
In the weeks following September 11, there was much dark jocularity at the expense of those Islamic terrorists who, it was said, had volunteered to die in order to enjoy the post-mortem favors of numerous virgins in Paradise. But how much more sophisticated, or morally textured, is Sebold’s climactic vision of Heaven, or indeed of death, as the place, or state, that allows you to indulge a recuperative fantasy of great sex?
The level of Sebold’s writing, it must be said, does not often rise above that of her moral seriousness. The prose wobbles between a grotesque ungainliness (”The time she’d had alone had been gravitationally circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back”) and a nervous tendency to oversaturation with “lyrical” effects. Horror, Susie opines, is “like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained” - nonsense that has the superficial prettiness you associate with the better class of greeting cards.
Sebold’s novel consistently offers healing with no real mourning, and prefers to offer clich�s, some of them quite puerile, of comfort instead of confrontations with evil, or even with genuinely harrowing grief.”
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- Decay, despair, grief and hurt
- Book of the Year?
- Relevance, continued
- The Memory Room
- Exit Arts & Letters
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