his book came out back in 2002 and apparently sold a ton, over a million copies in two months, which is extraordinary for any book that doesn't include "Harry" and/or "Potter" in the title.  I had heard of it as an original and literary-style book about a young girl's rape/murder by a serial killer, and the aftermath of that event as her family members are all impacted by the tragedy. I went in expecting a more literary version of Silence of the Lambs, or something along those lines. It's not at all like that.

This review will contain spoilers, but they're not really all that spoilery, since there's really nothing to spoil. The cool and original aspects of the book are all detailed right at the start. Within the first chapter you know the story is being narrated by the young girl who was murdered, that she's in heaven talking about this and looking down on her family, that she was murdered by a neighbor who she names, in a place she describes.  The book is in no way a mystery or crime novel, since the descriptions of the ongoing investigation are cursory at best, and there's never any suspenseful chase scenes or police work. The only possible suspense is whether or not they'll catch the guy, and that's basically all I kept reading to find out, after growing bored with it by page 200 or so. Strangely, it really doesn't matter. By the time you find out if he's caught or not you no longer care, it hardly matters for the plot of the story, it doesn't happen at the very end, and it's written in a very offhand, anti-climactic style.

Before discuss the novel in any more detail, here's my usual categorized rating:

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
Plot: 2
Concept: 7
Writing Quality: 7
Characters: 8
Page Turner: 5
Rereadability: 3
Overall: 3.5

My score is relatively harsh, perhaps harsher than it should be, because I was so disappointed by the last 1/3 of this 288 page novel. If I'd rated it after reading the first 50%, I would have given it 7's or higher in every category. Unfortunately, the last half was boring and pointless as the plot vanished entirely into a series of vignettes of perpetually-grieving people and flashbacks to their younger days. And it wasn't just that the last half sucked, it was that it revealed how hollow the first half was. Once the stylistic devices and flowery description grew familiar, I began to see how naked the emperor was beneath them.

The opening chapters are great; original, captivating, emotional, touching, full of fascinating characters and broken "how a novel should be" rules. After the great opening, the middle third begins to drag as you slowly realize there is no real plot and you're only reading it to keep reading it, as time passes and all of the main characters age and change over time. At that point, I stopped reading it for about a week when I was up around page 200, since I was just bored with it.

Nothing had happened for 50 pages, all the originality of the plot devices had long since worn off, and the plot writing devices of constant flashbacks, scenes from childhood, ancient memories, etc, had lost of their novelty. The story most reminded me of the desperate "I am zee arteeist!" style overly-literary short stories that I saw from the mopey, sensitive types in my college creative writing classes. You know, the type of stories that win awards and prizes, despite never being about anything.

Most literary type stuff is well written, artistic, full of flashbacks and burdened consciences and lovely language and detailed, incisive descriptions. It's generally enjoyable, so long as you don't mind the fact that it's not really about anything, and can overlook the fact that nothing really happens. The Lovely Bones does a better job being about something than your typical navel-gazing short story, but that's only because its setting and story-telling device (the dead girl narrator) are interesting. Once you're no longer fascinated by that the story becomes pointless, since it's no longer a story. It's just one scene after another of the same few characters, as they live their lives. There's no sense of rising conflict, drama, action, tension, or a pending climax. It's just scene after scene after scene, and it feels like it could go on forever, chronicling the next 20 or 40 years in the characters' lives.

And it does go on for quite a while, extending out 8 or 10 years past the opening when Susie is murdered, but fortunately it does eventually end. I wouldn't say it concludes, since there's no real ending; it just sort of stops, like one of those mediocre pop songs that have two verses, then a chorus, then repeated verses, and then endless repetition of the chorus, over and over again, until the audio cut and paste finally ends with a gradual fade out as the volume is dialed down. That technique works okay for music, but it's pretty lame for a novel, where you'd like the last 50 pages to be the best 50 pages, as all of the loose ends are tied up and the action rises to a climax.

I'll run over the categories briefly, since I'd like to elaborate a bit more.

Plot: 2
To put it simply, there is no plot. Not once you get past about page 150. From there on it's just random, unrelated events in the lives of the characters who were once related. The plot of this one works sort of like a firework. Everything is tight and together at the start, there's the explosion of Susie's murder, and then all of the characters are like glowing points of light, blasted out from the central explosion. Points of light that are pretty and artistic, but that seldom interact or bump into one another.

The other aspect of the plot rating is how logical, intelligent, realistic, etc, things are, and on that level the book fails pretty miserably. It's not meant to be a detective thriller or crime procedural or anything like that; it's a literary story with a crime as the tent pole to get things off the ground. But all the same, there's a crime in it, a policeman investigating the crime, and a serial killer on the loose, so as a reader you have the right to expect some sort of logic and intelligence in the investigation. Unless one of the plot points is that the cops are entirely incompetent, and they are not portrayed as that in word. They are in deed though, but I think that's mostly on the writer. She either doesn't have an analytical mind or has not absorbed anything from the crime thrillers she's read, since I spent much of the book thinking, "Oh God, the police would never do that." or "Come on, that's stupid, of course they'd investigate that possibility." or other things along those lines. It's like a love story where the man murders his love's stalking ex-husband on page three, and then the cops never bother to take his fingerprints or check his alibi since it would be inconvenient for the love story, even though he'd obviously be suspect #1 in any real world investigation.

Concept: 7
It's clever, and it's a great hook to get the reader reading. It's just unfortunate that the book does nothing with it after the introduction.

Writing Quality: 7
I might be a bit generous here, and you definitely have to buy into the flowery style of the writing, with the verbose and strained metaphors, but it's a consistent style, and works well with the melodramatic subject matter and presentation.

Characters: 8
They aren't actually all that interesting, and the male characters especially aren't very developed or original, but every character in the novel is sketched out with words to the point that the reader has a vivid impression of them. It would be nice if they did more interesting and original things, but after reading this you feel that you know them all intimately. Even if they are boring.

Page Turner: 5
Very page turny, for the first half or two thirds. After that, you've got to want to find out how it ends. I read the last 100 pages during commercial breaks in game one of the NBA finals, or I'd never have made it. It wasn't interesting enough to keep at for a solid hour+, but with frequent breaks for something else it wasn't so bad.

Rereadability: 3
I can't see any reason to read it again, unless you wanted to really sink into the first third and have a good cry at the amazingly tragic and painful events and character reactions to them.  Romance Fiction fans in need of emotional release only.

Overall: 3.5
It's hard to give it an overall, since the first half was a 7 or 8 overall, and the last half was about a 3. If I averaged it out the book would get at least a 5, but after such a good opening I was very disappointed by the conclusion ending, so the overall score is much lower than the sum of the parts.

In conclusion, this is not a book to read if you're in it for the plot, conclusion, climax, narrative, etc. It's all about the writing style and the character portraits and the heart string-tugging. It could not be less like Silence of the Lambs or other serial killer books. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and I could have liked it for what it was, if it hadn't lost all semblance of a plot down the home stretch.

I was curious to see how most readers took this novel, and checked out the listing on Amazon.com. My expectation was that most would love it, eagerly swallowing up the sad syrup. And while it's got a 4 out of 5 star rating overall, with an enormous 2000 reader reviews/ratings, almost all of the most-helpful reviews are bad ones. 1 and 2 star reviews, mostly, and most of them say something similar to what I've said here. Even the quicker ones that haven't been much agreed with say something like, "I liked the start and then it got boring and there was no resolution." 

Of course there are far, far more 5 star reviews; enough of them to pull the average up to 4/5, even with the hundreds of 1-star complaints, so this book is clearly doing something for someone. And it did something for me, moving me and involving me and making me very sad several times over the first 80 or 100 pages. It's just that after that, it went downhill. To paraphrase several of the 1-star reviews, "Just because a book makes you cry doesn't mean it's any good."

Spoiler time.

Okay, so you're vaguely curious, but you're not going to read it, and you just want to know how it ends?  The killer vanishes about 1/3 of the way through the book when he's finally coming under some suspicion, and that's as good as a confession to the cops. His disappearance ends the only enduring mystery to that point; whether or not the father (who is sure he knows the guy did it, despite a lack of evidence) will convince anyone else. The reader has known who did it all along; so the only suspense or mystery is for the characters themselves.

The killer is hardly mentioned after that, for at least a hundred pages. We get a bit of his serial killer background (multiple rape murders are mentioned, though none in any detail) and presumably he's killing other women all along, though none are detailed other than by a mention of a gravesite he dug that the cops found. No one is hunting him, no one is really haunted by his absence, and the book hardly talks about him at all. Eventually, basically out of the blue, he decides to drive back to the old neighborhood, and sees the sister of the dead girl through the window of her home, next door to his old home... and then he drives on, never to return or be mentioned for another 50 pages.

His eventual end? After sneaking up behind a girl at a truck stop and creeping her out a bit she takes off, and then an icicle falls and hits him in the head, sending him falling down a steep hillside where his body is not found until spring. The angel/dead girl is watching him at the time, and she sees the icicle over him, but it's not made clear if she's able to "break through" enough to knock it down herself, of if it's just a coincidence. Despite the fact that she definitely wants him dead, she's never been able to break through enough to touch anything in the entire story (Other than one Ghost-like possession of another female character, during which she has a quickie with the only boy she ever kissed before she was killed.) and she doesn't exult or celebrate or even feel relieved when she describes the man dying from the icicle.  Her lack of reaction is weird under any circumstances, since even if she couldn't kill him herself, she should have at least been overjoyed at his death.

Odder yet, this whole thing happens about 50 pages from the ending of the novel, and no one else in the story ever knows the guy is dead. Despite the fact that several of them have basically devoted their lives, since Susie's murder, to wanting the killer captured. The experience completely broke her father's heart and health, for instance; and it felt inexcusable to not have any sort of scene showing how he felt about finally knowing the escaped murderer was dead.

The other strange thing is the title. All along the reader assumes "The Lovely Bones" are the dead girl's physical remains, which vanished entirely, all except for one elbow bone found by a dog. Her family has always wondered where she ended up, what became of her, if maybe she's really still alive somewhere, etc. The reader knows that they were sealed in an old safe and dumped into a sinkhole by the killer. We find that out early on, then spend the next 200+ pages waiting for someone (Oh... the police, perhaps? Especially once they know who the killer was, and could simply ask the old lady who owns the land if he ever dumped anything large there during that time frame.) to think to look there, or for a construction crew to stumble upon them.

No one ever does, until near the end, just before the Ghost-like body possession return from the other side, two of the characters are out looking down into the old sinkhole and wondering about Susie's murder (which completely captivates and motivates and controls virtually every action and thought of every other character in the novel, even 10 years after the fact). You expect them to find the bones then, or at least wonder about them, since there's construction going on and the hole is being filled up as the land is improved.

Nope, it's all a false alarm, and her bones are never found at all. What we do find is a very strained metaphor about how "the lovely bones" are the support network and connections that have grown between all of the 8 or 10 main characters over the years since Susie vanished. No, it doesn't make any more sense in the book either. My impression is that the author had the title early on, knew it would seem to refer to the vanished carcass, and tried and tried and tried to think of a metaphor for something, anything that she could call "lovely bones" and make that a twist near the end, just when the reader is sure Susie's bones are going to be found to give everyone closure.. and then they aren't. Mostly since no one ever really bothered to look for them with any intelligence.

Unfortunately the lovely bones metaphor doesn't work well enough, and it therefore feels like the entire title and our perception of it has been a cheat. One last disappointment to send us out the door.

Reader Feedback and Oprah's Bookclub Discussion

June 14, 2004

On another subject, here's a mail from Elisabeth, spurred by my rambling The Lovely Bones review/discussion, which appeared in this space on June 8, 2004. Her mail spurs quite a bit of rambling by me, mostly on Oprah's Book Club.

Hmm - I had to laugh at your review of that book - its success owes far more to being selected for Oprah's Book Club back a year or two than for any actual earned merit. I bought it quite awhile ago and was very disappointed - in fact I don't believe I actually finished it. Had I realized (Prior to the purchase) that it was an Oprah selection, I would have read the Amazon reviews before spending the $15-20 at Costco.....

I've always meant to blog about the Oprah book club, while never getting around to it. The only problem is that I've never seen the Oprah show in my life, and have very little desire to ever do so. I'm somewhat familiar with her, but just via cultural osmosis. I wasn't even sure she was still on the air, since I remembered her talking about retiring a few years ago, and she never seems to be in the news anymore. But no, she's still filming new shows, though you have to wonder that she didn't retire out of penance for inflicting that smug Dr. Phil dillhole upon the world.

Her book club began back in the mid-90s, when she would feature a book on her show one day a month (I think), have the author on, and generally talk it up for a full hour. Given her vast housewife audience, any book so featured would become an instant bestseller, much to the rejoicing of most authors and all publishers. Lobbying for a slot on the show became intense, books selected increased ten fold or more in sales, etc.  With cultural critics (such as myself) forever lamenting the overpopularity of bad TV shows, music, movies, computer games, and the underpopularity of books, you'd think anything that got more people reading would be a wonderful thing. And it is, but as with everything in this world, it's not too hard to find something to criticize about it, if you look.

What did people dislike about Oprah's Book Club? The types of books offered, since they became very familiar over time, as this Slate article from 2002 summarizes:

The Oprah club is now its own recognizable market brand—and its very titles serve as shorthand for commonly recognized genre conventions: tales of lurid family abuse, tales of the individual struggle of redemption, and—God help us all—tale upon tale of three generations of women absorbing life's hard knocks in a small town.

Basically "good for you" tear-jerkers. Literary lima beans and brussels sprouts, books that you won't especially enjoy, unless you really enjoy crying as you read about other people's pain, but that you feel like you should read. Of course this definition is much more accurate if you're a 30-65 y/o female who feels you know far more about life's hard knocks than most other people, through your own unique struggle to maintain a life of your own while still being a good wife, a nurturing mother, and a person who is entirely unable to parallel park your gigantic SUV that you have never and will never drive over any terrain rougher than that patch of gravel in the middle school parking lot when you pick up the twins from soccer practice.

The only time in recent years that Oprah's Book Club has been much in the news was then Jonathan Franzen had the almighty cojones to turn down a spot on the show when he was invited on to promote his new novel, The Corrections. Making matters worse, he did it in sniffy fashion, and dared to point out that most of Oprah's book choices were pretty cheesy stuff. He was roundly-excoriated for being elitist and commercially-insane, but I thought it was pretty cool, at the time. I've never read his book either, and I doubt I'd much enjoy it; it sounds like the "well written but about nothing" type of novel that I generally get bored by 1/3 of the way through.

To be honest, his objections were pretty wimpy, rather than a good, strong, "her book choices suck and I don't want to be tarred by the same brush" statement, so really, all you can enjoy about it is how out of shape Queen Oprah got.

"There's something very uneasy-making for me about having that corporate branding right there next to my name and title."

...

"I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn't want that logo of corporate ownership on it," he told The Oregonian. He feared the Oprah symbol would be seen as "an implied endorsement, both for me and for her" and that her selection of his book would tarnish his artistic purity. "I feel like I'm solidly in the high art literary tradition," he explained, and the knowledge that his book was being read by hundreds of thousands of (ugh) talk-show viewers filled him with "these feelings of being misunderstood." Yeah, it stinks when crowds of people who never even went to graduate school show up to buy and read your "high art" novel.

On National Public Radio, Franzen commented that "more than one reader" had confided to him that they were "put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick." He worried that men would think it was a chick book, dashing his "hope of actually reaching a male audience." In a typical backhanded compliment, he said of Oprah: "She's picked some good books, but she's picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself..."

Anyway, Oprah's book club is now gone, at least as a regular feature, despite the fact that books about "heroic but flawed women working to overcome their difficult childhoods" still abound. I guess even Oprah got sick of the same old thing after a while, and rather than expand her horizons to other types of books, or lower them to include romance fiction or other junk her audience laps up on their own, she just pulled the plug on the whole thing. And I have to give her some credit for that, I suppose.

Her imprint is still useful for most of us though, since if you like the type of books Oprah tends to Book Club, then you know where to get them, and if you don't like that type, you know what to avoid.  There's always the off chance that you might hate Oprah's taste and therefore pass up a book you would otherwise have enjoyed, but really, what are the odds?

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