Winter 2003 Vol. 10, Issue 1
By Alice Sebold
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 2002, 328 pages.
Review by Catherine Belling, PhD
Assistant Professor, Preventive Medicine
Stony Brook University School of Medicine, New York
Death challenges the imagination, in part because imagining is the only means we have to engage death directly, as an experience. This fact may lie behind the recent commercial and critical success of Alice Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, a book that takes as its starting point the brutal rape and murder of 14-year-old girl. Susie Salmon is attacked on her way back from school, the murderer dismembers her and discards her remains in a sinkhole. Her agonized family learns she is dead when someone's dog finds her elbow in a cornfield. This last detail is appalling but important: the arbitrary body part signifies not only that Susie is dead but that her death has reduced her to a disposable object. Set against this detail is the narrative itself, in which Susie is reconstituted as a very vocal subject. Literature that leads us to imagine even the most horrible aspects of death are welcomed by many in their struggle, perhaps more urgent at present, to make sense of the realities of death. This novel does not shy away from the real horror of its protagonist's death, but it also offers an original and optimistic perspective on that horror: the story is told by Susie herself, even though she is dead.
In many ways, The Lovely Bones is a familiar domestic drama of bereavement and grieving. Sebold conveys the Salmon family's lives and their sorrow with rich detail. The story traces the 10 years following Susie's death: her parents' marriage disintegrates and then begins to regrow; her sister, Lindsay, struggles to develop a new identity as an only daughter; and her younger brother grows up resenting the destruction of his family. Susie's school friends, too, find their lives changed in various ways by their encounter with violent death. Gradually, all adapt, the loss now a permanent part of each one's own biography. Sebold constructs a vivid portrait of grief, both in its horror (Lindsay's matter-of-fact nausea on hearing about her sister's elbow makes readers imagine their own reactions to what is just about unimaginable) and in its recognition that the bereaved continue, almost despite themselves, to live (as in the funny but wistful account of Lindsay's first sexual experience, so different from her sister's).
None of this is especially new: other novels, such as Russell Banks' The Sweet Hereafter, recently reviewed by Delese Wear in these pages, have offered profound explorations of bereavement. But in most such stories of death, the ones who actually die are silenced, not just by death but by the limits of our ability to know or imagine being dead. In having The Lovely Bones narrated entirely by Susie Salmon, the novelist allows us to pretend, in a quite serious way, that death is not after all a place from which nobody speaks.
Susie introduces herself by saying, "I was fourteen when I was murdered." It may take the reader a moment to grasp just how radical this sentence is. Susie is in what she calls heaven. It is, in keeping with Sebold's views on religion, an entirely secular heaven. This heaven is determined by the imagination of the dead person, and it expands as that person's ability to conceive of it develops and matures. Susie's particular heaven begins, as it would for someone in the 7th grade, by resembling an idealized kind of high school. This is Sebold's most satisfying idea: in her book, death does not mean an end to growth. As Susie narrates her first 10 years in heaven, spent watching her family and friends as they suffer and change, she learns, as they do, to adapt to new circumstances, and, finally, to reach for wider possibilities. Her heaven by the novel's end has changed too.
Out of Susie's autobiography of the first years of being dead arises the structure that gives the book its title. Her physical remains are never found, but she describes her story as the creation of a different kind of skeleton, a narrative framework that offers the development and closure that death usually, at least from a secular view, seems to prohibit. "These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence," Susie says, "the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it."
Writing a memoir about having breast cancer, Christina Middlebrook expresses the problem of imagining one's own death in Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying Before I Do. "The dead cannot tell their story. We have so much more experience surviving the death of a loved one than we have of dying. When I was first diagnosed, I thought of death this way, from the aspect of the survivor, from the feelings of the person who attends the funeral." In The Lovely Bones, Sebold imagines hearing one dead person tell her story.
Of course this story is fiction, something imagined and made. This does not matter much: in its sturdiness, it is a fiction that may lead others to do the important work of imagining their own and their loved ones' deaths. Many problems in Western medicine's treatment of death arise from our avoidance of this imagining. Fear that leads to active not imagining means, for instance, the evasion of honest terminal diagnoses, the too-late involvement of hospice, the lack of advance directives. Instead, Sebold's novel might suggest, we should confront death by looking at it closely and then imagining, in order to learn, as Susie puts it, how to "hold the world without me in it."
in collaboration with
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
The opinions expressed in the journal, Lahey Clinic Medical Ethics,
belong to the individual contributors and do not represent the institutional position
of Lahey Clinic on any subject matters discussed.
