The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
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Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading
Introduction
In her first novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), Alice Sebold delves into the horror and trauma resulting from by
the rape and murder of a young girl. The novel arose from Sebold's own experience with violence—her rape as
an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Similar to her 1999 memoir, Lucky, which details her own rape, its
psychological aftermath, and the arrest, trial, and conviction of the rapist, The Lovely Bones refuses to sanitize
sexual violence. Yet the novel does not sensationalize violence either; instead, it offers the ordinariness of it.
Both the setting in suburban Philadelphia, and the time period of the early 1970s, underscore Sebold's belief
that no one is immune from violence; it touches everyone. More importantly, the story of Susie Salmon and
her family exposes the way in which society marginalizes the victims of violence. The Lovely Bones becomes
a study of the effects of violence, in this case rape and murder, not only on the victim, but on her family,
friends, and community.
The Lovely Bones does not focus on evil; it does not attempt to make sense of bad people or bad acts. Instead
the novel investigates issues of loss and grief, life and death, identity and self, remembrance and forgetting,
womanhood and motherhood, coming of age and rites of passage, and heaven and earth. The readers watch
with Susie as her father, mother, sister, brother, and grandmother, as well as her middle school friends, her
killer, and the lead detective on the case, confront similar issues in their attempts to understand their grief.
Introduction
1
While the novel raises many questions, it does not, in fact, answer all of them. Sebold examines traditional
views, such as those about heaven, sexuality, and the place of women in American society, while
simultaneously challenging those views.
Introduction
When author Alice Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University, she was brutally raped. She wrote about
this harrowing experience in her non-fiction memoir Lucky, and she drew upon this horrific experience again
as the starting point for her first novel, The Lovely Bones.
The Lovely Bones is the story of Susie Salmon, who is raped and killed when she is only fourteen. However,
rather than write this story as a thriller, which had been done many times before, Sebold tells it from Susie's
perspective: the dead victim tells her own story. This shifts the focus from suspense to the emotional impact
of such a crime. The Lovely Bones evokes in minute detail just how much was taken from this young girl, and
how much she missed out on, but it also traces in exquisite, painful detail how this violent and undeserved
crimes distorts her family. Her mother leaves her father for eight years. Her father tries to catch Susie's killer,
and is crippled in the process. Susie's sister and brother are driven into emotional retreat, becoming very
distant from their previously idyllic family.
Given that Sebold lived through the initial experience that the main character suffers, it isn't really surprising
that The Lovely Bones captures her suffering so well. What is impressive is how Sebold combines well-chosen
detail and exquisite prose to paint heartrending portraits of an entire suffering community, and how well she
humanizes the serial rapist and killer Mr. Harvey, but without ever excusing his terrible crimes.
In 2004, The Lovely Bones won the Richard and Judy Best Read Award (given by the British Book Awards),
and a movie version is currently in production (as of January 2005).
Author Biography
Alice Sebold was born in 1963 and grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. In 1981 as a freshman at Syracuse
University, she was raped, an event that had a profound impact on her writing. At Syracuse she studied
writing under Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver, then, after graduating from Syracuse in 1984, she briefly
attended graduate school at the University of Houston before moving to Manhattan. Sebold lived there for ten
years, trying to earn a living as a writer. This attempt for the most part failed, and instead, she taught and
worked in restaurants. During this time, Sebold drank heavily and used many illegal drugs, including heroin.
She left Manhattan to move to California in 1994. There she briefly worked as the caretaker of an arts colony
before earning an MFA from the University of California at Irvine. She met her current husband and fellow
writer Glen David Gold at the university. After graduating, she began to write her memoir, Lucky, which
recounts the story of her rape and which was published in 1999. She had begun writing The Lovely Bones at
UC-Irvine but only completed the novel after writing Lucky. The Lovely Bones was published in the summer
of 2002. Sebold is currently working on a new novel from her home in Long Beach, California.
Author Biography
Alice Sebold was born in 1963 and grew up in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia. In her essay "The Oddity
of Suburbia," she confesses that she despised suburbia, but after living in both Manhattan and Southern
California, she "realiz[ed] … that within the suburban world of [her] upbringing there were as many strange
stories as there were in the more romanticized parts of the world." Her novel, The Lovely Bones (2002),
reflects her realization that suburbia can and does contain "a bottomless well of narrative ideas." However,
Introduction
2
that realization did not occur until Sebold left Philadelphia.
In 1981, as an eighteen-year-old freshman at Syracuse University in New York, Sebold was severely beaten
and raped. Rather than remain quiet about the incident, she was instrumental in the arrest, trial, and conviction
of her assailant. While at Syracuse University, Sebold took writing classes with poet Tess Gallagher and
fiction writer Tobias Wolff, both of whom encouraged her to remember and write about her rape. Sebold
graduated from Syracuse in 1984 and entered, but did not complete, a master of fine arts degree program at
the University of Houston. Instead, she moved to New York City, and as she details in the epilogue to her
1999 memoir, Lucky, she turned to alcohol and heroin as she struggled to come to terms with her rape. During
these years, Sebold taught writing classes at Hunter College and Bucknell College in New York, worked odd
jobs, and wrote. She left New York for California in 1995 and entered the M.F.A. program at the University
of California, Irvine, earning her degree in 1998.
Sebold began The Lovely Bones during her graduate writing studies, but recognized that until she confronted
and narrated her own story, she could not write the story of Susie, the main character and narrator of The
Lovely Bones. As many critics rightly note, the two books, Lucky and The Lovely Bones, seem to be
companion pieces. The Lovely Bones garnered
Alice Sebold AP/Wide World
Photostwo major awards, the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel and the American Booksellers
Association's "Book of the Year Award." While at UC Irvine, Sebold met Glen David Gold, a fellow master's
student. They married in 2001, the same year his novel Carter Beats the Devil was published. As of 2005,
Sebold and Gold lived in California.
Synopsis
Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones, begins, “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I
was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” The Lovely Bones is narrated by a suburban teen
who has been brutally raped and murdered by a neighbor. After the police confirm Susie’s murder, her family
struggles to cope with their loss and with the unanswered questions surrounding Susie’s death. Both of
Susie’s parents withdraw into their own despair and become incapable of confronting the tragedy. Susie’s
sister, Lindsey, deals with her own grief privately and maintains a stalwart image to the outside world.
Buckley, the youngest of the Salmon children, is unable to comprehend the tragedy and spends much of his
time with the family of a neighborhood friend. An acquaintance of Susie’s from school named Ruth befriends
Susie’s boyfriend, Ray, who is a suspect in the murder, while Susie's “real” murderer continues to live a few
houses down from the Salmon family, making sure to cover his tracks and appear to be as “normal” as the
suburban world around him.
Author Biography
3
Susie’s family eventually grows apart when her mother moves away from their suburban home. Her sister
continues to mature and experience adolescence despite her family’s disorder. Susie’s father eventually finds
a way to reconnect with his son and daughter and resumes his life without his wife until he suffers a heart
attack. The heart attack prompts Susie’s mother to return home and make amends with the family she
abandoned. The lives of the Salmons continue together, each member returning to their memories of Susie in
their own private ways. The novel ends with a couple finding Susie’s charm bracelet and speculating, “This
little girl’s grown up by now.”
Plot Summary
Chapters 1-2
Fourteen-year-old Susie tells her story from heaven, where she exists after having been raped, murdered, and
dismembered in a frozen cornfield by her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. She introduces her family—her father, Jack;
mother, Abigail; sister, Lindsey; and brother, Buckley—the boy she likes, Ray Singh; the lead detective on her
case, Len Fenerman; and her heavenly intake counselor, Franny. Susie begins to acclimate to her heaven and
learns that it reflects her desires and wishes, and that everyone's heaven is slightly different. With Franny's
help, she begins to understand what it means to be dead. She still wants to grow up and live, but now, since
she cannot experience actual living, she must be content to watch what happens on earth.
Three days after Susie disappears, Detective Fenerman tells Jack the police have found a body part. Susie's
parents have difficulty dealing with the horror of their daughter's disappearance—neither wants to believe that
Susie is dead. In addition to the body part, the police find various objects belonging to Susie that indicate she
was killed in the cornfield: a copy of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, her biology notes, a love letter from
Ray Singh, and her winter hat. This last item convinces the Salmons of Susie's death.
Ray Singh becomes the police's first suspect. Susie's family does not believe that Ray killed Susie;
nevertheless, the police believe that his absence from school on the day she died, his dark skin, and his rather
arrogant attitude make him a viable suspect. Despite his alibi, Ray, already considered an outsider by his
classmates because he and his family came from India, becomes more socially isolated at school.
Chapters 3-5
Susie continues watching family and friends, and as they go about the business of living, she narrates both
recent and past events. When Susie left earth, her spirit inadvertently brushed against Ruth Connors, a girl
from school. This contact initiates a connection between the girls. By following Ruth, Susie remains engaged
in the daily routines of adolescence.
Through conversations with Franny, Susie realizes her homesickness for her mother. She recalls the candid
picture she once took of her mother that captured Abigail as a woman, rather than as Mrs. Salmon, wife and
mother. When the film was developed, she did not share this picture of her mother; instead, she hid it in her
room. Susie watches now as Lindsey enters Susie's room and finds that picture of their mother. Like Susie,
Lindsey gets a glimpse of Abigail as Abigail.
Up to this point, Susie has only watched the living, but now she materializes, revealing herself to her father.
She sees Jack smash his collection of ships in a bottle that he and Susie built together. As her father stands
amid the wreckage, evidence of his rage and grief, Susie reveals herself in the myriad shards.
Susie recounts what happened after Harvey killed her. He dismantles the underground hole in the cornfield,
carries Susie's body parts to his house in a cloth sack, and showers to remove her blood from his body. Then
Synopsis
4
he places Susie's dismembered body in an old safe and drops it in a nearby sinkhole. Returning from the
sinkhole, he finds Susie's silver charm bracelet in his pocket. He drives to an industrial park under
construction, removes one charm—the Pennsylvania keystone from her father—and throws the bracelet into the
construction site. Susie discovers she was not his first victim.
Weeks later, Jack stops to watch Harvey build a ceremonial tent in his yard. Jack volunteers to help with the
project, and the two men—Susie's murderer and her father—work side by side. Susie tries to send her father a
message, but fails. However, Jack does feel Susie's presence and begins to wonder about Harvey. He believes
this strange man knows something about Susie's murder.
Each of the Salmons develops ways to cope with his or her individual grief and fear. Jack involves himself in
finding Susie's killer; Abigail isolates herself from her family and turns to Detective Fenerman for answers;
Buckley asks direct questions regarding Susie's absence; and Lindsey struggles with both her desire to claim
an identity separate from Susie, the dead daughter and sister, and her tremendous grief at the loss of that
sibling.
Detective Fenerman talks with Harvey after Jack suggests he might be involved. Harvey expresses his
sympathies regarding Susie's murder and explains to the detective that Jack helped him build a ceremonial
bridal tent in honor of his deceased wife. Although Detective Fenerman considers Harvey odd, he seems
satisfied with Harvey's explanations. Jack, however, is not.
On Christmas Day, Samuel Heckler stops by the Salmon house with a gift for Lindsey. While Samuel and
Lindsey talk in the kitchen and later exchange their first kiss, Buckley plays Monopoly with his father. During
the game, Jack explains to his young son that Susie is never coming home.
Chapters 6-10
Susie recalls the first time she and Ray Singh "almost" kissed. Two weeks before she died, Susie got to school
late and Ray, who cut his first period class, was sitting atop a scaffold in the auditorium. Susie joined him, and
as they talked, she realized that Ray was going to kiss her. However, voices from below interrupted them.
Susie and Ray watched as the principal and the art teacher chastised Ruth for her charcoal drawings of "real
women." When the adults left, Susie and Ray climbed down, and Susie asked to see Ruth's sketchbook.
Impressed by the drawings, Susie changed her perspective of Ruth, seeing her as special rather than strange.
The girls do not become friends, but after her murder, Susie grows to love the girl she touched as she left
earth. Ray and Susie kiss a week later by their lockers. After Susie's death, Ruth and Ray develop a deep
friendship, bonding over the death of Susie.
In his effort to make sense of Susie's death, Jack seeks out Ray. At the Singhs' house, Jack talks to Ray's
mother. When he confesses his suspicions about Harvey, Ruana Singh validates his theory and tells Jack that
given the same circumstances, she would kill her child's murderer.
Ruana's understanding contrasts with Abigail's lack of understanding, further highlighting the widening chasm
between Susie's parents. While Jack is at the Singhs' house, Detective Fenerman drops by the Salmons' home.
Susie watches as a subtle but discernable attraction develops between her mother and the detective.
Susie's maternal grandmother, Grandma Lynn, arrives to attend Susie's memorial. Lynn, an eccentric and
flamboyant personality, brings some vitality into the Salmon home. She begins a lively banter with Jack, gives
beauty lessons to Lindsey, and prods Abigail into laughter. She realizes, regardless of the family's tragedy,
Lindsey is moving into womanhood and helps her granddaughter by acknowledging this fact. She aids in
putting together an outfit for Lindsey to wear to the memorial. Grandma Lynn also answers Lindsey's
Chapters 3-5
5
questions regarding Jack's suspicions about Harvey, who, along with the family, school friends, teachers,
neighbors, and Detective Fenerman, attends the memorial. Grandma Lynn does something that Susie notes as
important: she identifies Harvey for Lindsey.
Lindsey spends a month of the summer at a statewide gifted symposium. Samuel and Ruth also attend the
camp. While they do not become friends, Ruth and Lindsey do share a conversation about Susie. Ruth tells
Lindsey she dreams about Susie, and Lindsey admits how much she misses her sister. She also confesses she
loves Samuel. As Lindsey and Samuel move toward sexual intimacy, Susie learns sex can be loving rather
than violent.
Chapters 11-12
Susie knows Harvey is a serial killer of little girls and, from her heaven, scrutinizes the interior of Harvey's
house, which has an identical floor plan to that of the Salmons. But while Susie's house contains markers of
family life, Harvey's holds the trophies of his killings as well as the presence of his victims.
Jack becomes more obsessed with finding Susie's killer. Detective Fenerman tells Jack he must stop phoning
the police about Harvey. According to the detective, no evidence exists connecting Harvey to Susie's murder.
Jack, however, refuses to accept the detective's explanation, as does Lindsey, who overhears the conversation
between her father and the detective.
One night, Jack sees a light moving toward the cornfield. Convinced the light belongs to Harvey, Jack grabs a
baseball bat and heads for the cornfield intent on vengeance. In fact, the light belongs to Clarissa, Susie's best
friend, as she heads to meet her boyfriend Brian. As Jack hollers at whom he believes is Harvey, he hears
Clarissa whimpering. Thinking another young girl is in danger, Jack loses all sense of reality. Jack's rage and
Clarissa's screams spur Brian, who arrives in the cornfield in time to witness what he believes is Jack's attack
on Clarissa, to beat Susie's father with the baseball bat. The beating sends Jack to the hospital for surgery on
his damaged knee.
Lindsey arrives at the hospital soon after the incident, expecting to see both her father and mother, but she
finds her father alone in his room. Abigail, unable to cope with her collapsing world, seeks out Fenerman.
When the detective arrives, he and Abigail go outside onto a small service balcony where physical intimacy
enters their relationship.
Chapters 13-16
As the first anniversary of Susie's death approaches, the effects of her death on the living become more
apparent, as do the changes involved with growing up. Lindsey becomes not only the sister of the murdered
girl but also the daughter of a crazy man. Buckley enters kindergarten and receives special attention because
of his sister's murder and grows closer to his father. He also looks to Lindsey for his needs rather than to his
mother. Abigail and Jack become further estranged, unable to find comfort in each other. Whereas Jack turns
to his living children, Lindsey and Buckley, to help assuage his grief, Abigail finds solace in her relationship
with Len and in private reverie.
Although he no longer talks about his certainty that Harvey killed Susie, Jack has not given up that belief, a
fact he shares with Lindsey. Lindsey wonders why Fenerman has not arrested him. Jack explains that the
police have found no real evidence linking their neighbor to the murder. Lindsey understands the importance
of finding something tangible of Susie's in Harvey's house.
Chapters 6-10
6
Grandma Lynn arrives for Thanksgiving. She quickly picks up on Abigail's affair with Fenerman and also
understands that Abigail wants to leave her family. Abigail and Lynn go for a walk and share a rare
mother-daughter conversation. Lynn seems to understand more clearly Abigail's desires and disappointments.
Lindsey decides to search Harvey's house. She watches and plans, and when she sees him leave, she breaks a
basement window, enters the house, and begins the search. As Susie watches Lindsey in the house, she sees
what Lindsey sees and also sees Harvey's previous victims. While Susie finds supernatural evidence of
Harvey's crimes, Lindsey finds tangible evidence linking him to Susie's murder—drawings of the hole in the
cornfield with "Stolfuz cornfield" written on one of them. Harvey arrives home while Lindsey continues her
search. Despite her caution, he hears her in the upstairs bedroom. Lindsey escapes through the window, but he
glimpses her leaving his yard—catching the number on her soccer jersey—and he knows it is Lindsey.
When Lindsey returns home, she finds her parents and Samuel frantic over her late arrival. She tells her father
about breaking into Harvey's house and shows him what she found. In heaven, Susie meets the other girls
Harvey has murdered.
Before calling the police, Harvey hides the knife he used to kill Susie and the charms he took from his other
victims. As the police talk with Harvey about the break-in, Jack phones Fenerman, but he is not there. At
Harvey's house, the officers seem satisfied with his account of events. Harvey does not, however, mention the
stolen drawings. When the officers bring them to his attention, Harvey offers the explanation that he was
trying to figure out how Susie's murder occurred.
While Jack tries to reach Fenerman and the police talk with Mr. Harvey, Abigail meets Fenerman for a
rendezvous, thus the detective misses the call that would have put him on Harvey's trail. Shaken by the
break-in and understanding the implications of the drawings Lindsey took of the hole in the cornfield, Harvey
packs up and leaves the area.
By the one-year anniversary of Susie's death, Ray and Ruth's friendship deepens, moving beyond a platonic
attachment to one that includes some degree of physical intimacy. The two friends decide to commemorate
Susie's death with a visit to the cornfield. When they arrive, they find Samuel and his brother Hal already
there. Shortly, neighbors gather at the site of Susie's murder. Some bring candles, lighting up the evening with
an impromptu memorial. When Lindsey notices the lights in the cornfield, she urges her mother to attend.
Abigail declines, and in the ensuing conversation with her mother, Lindsey realizes her mother plans to leave
the family. Lindsey, Buckley, and Jack join their friends and neighbors in the cornfield.
"Snapshots"
As time progresses, Susie watches the lives of those on earth unfold: Abigail leaves Pennsylvania, ultimately
for California; Grandma Lynn comes to stay; Lindsey learns of Abigail and Fenerman's relationship; Buckley
must now deal with the loss of his mother. Samuel's brother, Hal, using his biker connections, gets a lead on
Harvey, which he passes on to Fenerman. The police are finally able to prove Harvey's guilt, but he has
vanished and Fenerman feels tremendous guilt for not having listened to Jack. Ray goes to Penn State
University to study medicine, and Ruth moves to New York, taking up a bohemian life, certain that she
possess a psychic connection with murdered women and children.
Chapters 17-20
Lindsey and Samuel graduate from Temple University in Philadelphia. Caught in a rainstorm on their
motorcycle ride home from the ceremony, they find an abandoned house, where Samuel proposes to Lindsey.
Chapters 13-16
7
Buckley, now in seventh grade, uses old clothes he found in the basement to tie his tomato plants to their
stakes. As Jack watches, he recognizes the clothes as Susie's and forbids his son to use them. Buckley lashes
out at his father, accusing him of putting the dead Susie before both his living children. As father and son
argue, Jack suffers a heart attack.
Jack hovers between life and death, with Susie wishing him to join her in her heaven and Buckley holding
him to earth. As Susie turns from the events on earth, she meets her paternal grandfather in her heaven; they
dance together.
Abigail flies home to be with Jack in the hospital. Lindsey, Samuel, and Buckley meet her at the airport.
Having not seen her children for almost a decade, Abigail is apprehensive. The reunion is strained, with
Lindsey cautious and Buckley angry. Her reunion with Jack proves as tenuous as the first meeting with her
children.
Abigail struggles with the decision to return to California or to stay with her family. Her introspection reveals
that she left because of her inability to cope with the guilt generated by Susie's death. She realizes she does
indeed love Jack and her children and decides to stay. Jack begins to understand he must accept Abigail for
who she is. Finally able to talk about Susie, Jack and Abigail cry together.
Chapters 21-23
Ray and Ruth both return home and go to the sinkhole, which is scheduled to be filled and paved over. Harvey
also makes his way back to his old neighborhood, hoping to kill Lindsey. He, too, heads for the sinkhole.
While at the sinkhole, Susie's presence overwhelms Ruth, and Susie falls to earth and into Ruth's body. In the
meantime, police have recovered Susie's keystone charm at a Connecticut murder site; Fenerman returns the
charm to Jack and Abigail.
As Susie inhabits Ruth's body, Ruth leaves the earth. Ray senses a change in Ruth and comes to believe that
somehow Ruth has become Susie or vice versa. Susie, using Ruth's body, finally experiences the culmination
of a developing sexuality as she and Ray make love. Although Susie must once again leave the earth, this time
her leave-taking proves gentle and gradual instead of violent and abrupt. Ray and Ruth try to make sense of
the events that occur.
Susie finally lets go of her family, even though she will always watch over them. Jack leaves the hospital.
Individually, the Salmons have each confronted his or her grief, guilt, anger, and fear, thus making it possible
for them to reconstruct the family unit. Together and separately, they move beyond Susie's death.
"Bones"
The lives of the dead integrate into the lives of the living. Susie's family members cannot and do not forget
her, nor do they allow their memories of her to keep them from moving on. Harvey finally gets justice when
he is hit by a falling icicle and falls unconscious into a ravine, where falling snow covers his body.
Summary and Analysis
Preface, Chapters 1-5
Preface:
Summary
Chapters 17-20
8
This one paragraph summarizes one of Susie Salmon's memories of time spent with her father: him turning a
snow globe that had a penguin in it.
Analysis
Though readers don't know it on first reading, as the novel progresses this image becomes a metaphor for
Susie's life: her world is turned upside down by forces larger than herself, and she is trapped in a perfect world
(heaven), but still upset.
Chapter 1:
Summary
Susie Salmon is narrating the story of her own murder from beyond the grave. She was killed on December 6,
1973, by a neighbor named Mr. Harvey. Mr. Harvey rapes and kills Susie after luring her to a secret hiding
place—an underground shelter he built in a cornfield.
Analysis
The first lines establish the premise for the entire novel, and make a direct claim for the importance of an
individual life: this is going to be an anti-mystery. The question is not going to be who killed Susie Salmon, or
why, but the opposite. The Lovely Bones explains the emotional implications of this single act of violence, and
it starts by giving voice to the one person usually left out of mysteries, the victim.
Chapter 2:
Summary
Susie enters heaven. At first she thinks that everyone sees the same heaven, but after a few days she learns
that everyone's heaven is different. Everyone sees what they need to see. Susie meets her roommate Holly on
the third day in heaven. Susie has an "intake counselor" and guide to heaven named Franny. Franny guides the
girls as they get used to heaven, which expands and changes as they explore it.
Back on Earth, her father gets a phone call on December 9 telling him that a body part has been found. When
the police search the cornfield, they find a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Len Fenerman, the officer in charge
shows it to the neighbors. One neighbor, Mrs. Stead, recognizes it as a book the students in ninth grade were
reading, which indicates the elbow that was found was probably Susie's. The police investigate a boy named
Ray Singh, who had written a love note to Susie, but find him innocent. Eventually, the police find Susie's
pompom, which convinces them Susie is dead. The confirmation shatters the Salmon family emotionally.
Analysis
The description of heaven is very modern, very personal, and very psychological. It implies that the afterlife is
so vast and so specific that it is different for everyone, that heaven changes over time, and that the needs of
every individual human matter. This is very different from the heaven imagined in many religions, but very
merciful and comforting, especially for someone who was killed without any mercy.
Chapter 3:
Summary
When Susie's soul left her body, it brushed Ruth Connors, giving her a vision. Ruth becomes obsessed with
Susie, collecting pictures of her. Ruth also steals some pot and tries it, to deal with her new sense of reality.
Susie watches Ruth from heaven, and is comforted by Franny. She also watches her family, seeing her sister
Lindsay touch her (Susie's) clothes, her father smash the ships in bottles they built together, and her brother
sleep. As she watches, Susie remembers the first photos she took of her family.
Analysis
The Lovely Bones opened with a brief story about Susie's father's explanation of the perfection found within
Preface, Chapters 1-5
9
snow globes. Ships in a bottle are very like the penguin in snow globes; they are contained examples of
perfect worlds, completely under their makers' control. Jack Salmon smashes the ships he built with Susie,
acting out the way in which the perfect little family life he'd built was smashed by an outside hand.
Chapter 4:
Summary
Susie watches her killer, Mr. Harvey, moving back in time to review how he filled in the hole in the cornfield,
and forward in time to preview how the next owners will see but not recognize the bloodstain in the garage.
Susie watches Mr. Harvey remember his pleasures, and get rid of her remains by dumping them in a sinkhole
that serves the town as a dump, throwing one stray silver charm bracelet in a lake.
Susie's father sees Mr. Harvey building a ceremonial tent in his backyard. He helps Mr. Harvey, and intuits
that Harvey knows something about Susie's death. He asks Mr. Harvey, but Harvey says that he can't help
him.
Analysis
Mr. Salmon helps Mr. Harvey build a tent in much the same way that Susie helped Mr. Salmon. In that way,
they are alike, and Mr. Harvey indicates that because they have built something physical together, they have
built something emotional together. It should render him free of suspicion. It does not, and in fact, Mr.
Salmon sees something in Mr. Harvey that makes him suspect him all the more. This shows an immediate
intuition working beyond the surface details, much like Susie's observation from heaven does, but impotently
and frustratingly.
Chapter 5:
Summary
Susie wishes her father would turn violent and seek vengeance for her that way. Instead, he becomes
guilt-ridden and quietly obsessed. He tells the police that he suspects Mr. Harvey. Len Fenerman visits Mr.
Harvey and finds him strange, but he doesn't find any reason to suspect him.
At Christmas, the Salmon family tries to be happy, but isn't succeeding until Samuel Heckler comes over to
visit Lindsey and give her a gift. While he is giving Lindsey her gift—a necklace with half a heart on it—Mr.
Salmon explains to Buckley that Susie is dead. Samuel kisses Lindsey.
Analysis
Here the two potential roads to creating moral and emotional balance in the world are laid out in stark
contrast. There is the road of violence and vengeance. It should be a road of justice, but the police won't help,
and Mr. Salmon doesn't have it in him naturally. The other road is the road of love. Even though Samuel
Heckler follows a clichéd path with the necklace, it works.
Chapters 6-10
Chapter 6:
Summary
Susie remembers Ray Singh almost kissing her as they were both backstage at the school; they are interrupted
when teachers talk to Ruth Connors about improper art she's drawn (nude women).
Ruth goes walking in the cornfield where Susie was killed; she and Ray make a connection. Mr. Salmon goes
to talk to the Singhs. Mrs. Singh's beauty and silence makes him uncomfortable. She tells him to make sure
who killed his daughter, and then to kill the person.
Chapters 6-10
10
Analysis
This chapter shows an array of marvelous accidental connections. When Susie hides backstage, Ray Singh
does not just flirt with her, or stare at her. Instead, he speaks what most teenage girls wish to hear: he tells her
directly that she is beautiful. Likewise, Mrs. Ruana Singh tells Mr. Salmon what he wants and needs to hear:
to kill his daughter's killer.
Chapter 7:
Summary
Buckley shows his friend Nate Susie's room, and says that he has seen her since her death—that Susie came
into his room at night and kissed her on the cheek. As she watches this from heaven, Susie remembers playing
under the framed grave rubbings hanging in their home; their parents had learned to do grave rubbings on
their honeymoon.
Analysis
This brief chapter sums up a number of symbolic and emotionally intense connections and insights—and how
people are trapped and limited. Even in death, able to move through space and time at will, Susie can't tell
whether her beloved little brother really saw her. As she watches him with a friend, Susie remembers the
grave rubbing and the story of the knight, who is trapped in time. Finally, she remembers that her
grandmother predicted a long life for Susie because she saved Buckley's life. All of these are instances where
people are wrong, or where their experience stretches beyond their understanding.
Chapter 8:
Summary
Mr. Harvey dreams of buildings. Susie watches his dreams, and peers back in his memory, all the way back to
when he was a baby in his mother's arms. She watches him remember when Mr. Harvey's father forced his
mother out of the car, and out of their lives.
Analysis
This brief chapter explains a lot about Mr. Harvey. He dreams about buildings. Mr. Harvey does this in part
because his father was a builder and he is dreaming of being like his father. However, buildings also often
symbolize the psyche (the mind with all its levels), and Mr. Harvey dreams of them because his psyche is so
damaged.
Chapter 9:
Summary
Grandma Lynn, Mrs. Salmon's mother, comes to help out during the funeral. She helps her daughter Abigail,
and teaches Lindsey about makeup. Susie remembers Mrs. Bethel Uttermeyer, the only dead person she and
Lindsey had seen before Susie died. Grandma Lynn helps Lindsey dress for the funeral, taking an outfit from
Susie's closet that looks good on Lindsey. Samuel Heckler, Samuel's older brother Hal, and Ruth Connor all
attend the memorial service, as does Clarissa. (Clarissa had loaned Susie the outfit that Lindsey wore to the
funeral.) Ray Singh did not attend, but Len Fenerman did, and so did Mr. Harvey.
Analysis
A funeral is a symbolic demarcation, a time when the community lets go of the deceased and, ideally, the dead
person moves on. This funeral also marks other things specific to this family. Both the police and Susie's
killer attend the funeral, marking it as unfinished and unnatural. Grandma Lynn helping Lindsey with makeup
also marks Lindsey's transition into a new world: adult femininity.
Chapter 10:
Summary
While at the statewide summer symposium for the gifted, Ruth Connors and Lindsey Salmon have a bit more
Chapters 6-10
11
contact; when Ruth dreams about Susie, she shares it with Lindsey, who in turn admits how much she misses
her sister. Lindsey and Samuel become a serious couple there, spending a lot of time kissing and eventually
having sex. Susie watches them.
There is a competition at every gifted symposium. This one is how to commit a perfect murder.
Analysis
This chapter is all about unexpected connections, all of which are created or exposed through Susie's death.
Ruth and Lindsey connect at camp over how much they miss Susie. Lindsey and Samuel became a couple in
the wake of Susie's death. The competition theme directly relates to Susie's death because it seems to be the
world in which they're all living, in which a perfect murder's been created.
Chapters 11-16
Chapter 11:
Summary
Mr. Salmon regularly gets up very early and walks by Mr. Harvey's house. Susie watches Mr. Harvey's house
from the afterlife, exploring his house in detail so that she sees the elaborate plans he's made to appear normal,
such as setting a clock to remind him to pull the drapes. She also watches him remember his past killings and
attempted killings, and finds the crawlspace where Mr. Harvey had hidden the body of animals he'd killed.
In the first week of July, Len Fenerman, who has been made chief of police, comes to the Salmon house to tell
the Salmons there is no reason to continue investigating Mr. Harvey. This upsets Mr. Salmon, and that night
he stayed up late. He sees a light moving in the cornfield and goes to investigate with a baseball bat. However,
it isn't Mr. Harvey there, but Clarissa , who is meeting Brian Nelson. Brian thinks Clarissa is being threatened,
and clubs Mr. Salmon repeatedly as Susie watches helpless from heaven.
Analysis
Both Mr. Harvey and Mr. Salmon lead lives of unnatural regularity related to violence. Mr. Harvey must
regulate his behavior in order to cover the fact that he kills. Mr. Salmon tries to regulate his, to return to a
normal life, but cannot. Susie's death haunts him.
Chapter 12:
Summary
Mr. Salmon's knee was damaged so badly that it required surgery to replace the kneecap. The other Salmons
are awakened by the police sirens outside, and only then realize he's left the house. Lindsey calls Samuel to
get a ride to the hospital.
When Abigail Salmon gets to the hospital, Len Fenerman explains what happened. They go outside to smoke,
and Abigail kisses Len, beginning an affair with him. When Susie sees the kiss, she remembers how her
mother took care of Susie and Lindsey at bedtime and told them stories. Susie remembers the signs of her
mother losing contact with her inner self, and falling out of love with her father.
Analysis
This chapter develops two different ways that people can be damaged, ways that are parallel but not the same.
Jack Salmon is damaged physically by a baseball bat's impact. It is sudden and fierce. Abigail Salmon is
damaged emotionally by slowly losing contact with her innermost self.
Chapter 13:
Summary
Chapters 11-16
12
Lindsey goes back to junior high in the fall, where she is now known as the sister of the dead girl, and the
daughter of a crazy man due to her father's actions. Mr. Salmon slowly recovers from his knee surgery, and
returns to work in November. He grows apart from his wife emotionally, but grows closer to Lindsey and
Buckley in different ways, including teaching Lindsey to shave. Together they plan for Lindsey to break in to
Mr. Harvey's house.
Grandma Lynn visits for Thanksgiving. She recognizes that her daughter Abigail is having an affair, and asks
her to end it.
Analysis
This chapter tracks the emotional ripples spreading outward from Susie's death. It changes Lindsey's social
identity, not once but twice. It changes the emotional structure of the Salmon family, and Mr. Salmon must
step in to guide his daughter where his wife should. Finally, when Grandma Lynn visits, she sees that her
daughter is having an affair, which forces her to speak more bluntly than had been their custom.
Chapter 14:
Summary
Lindsey watches Mr. Harvey's house for a week, then breaks in. She gets away, but Mr. Harvey sees her.
When she leaves, she takes a drawing with her, which she gives to her father.
As Lindsey's searching the house, Susie reviews Mr. Harvey's past: how he went to public places to search for
victims, how he constructed his cover stories, etc. In heaven, Susie calls the names of all of Mr. Harvey's
victims, and gives the dates. One of them, Flora Hernandez, meets Susie in heaven, and tells her that the other
girls will be there soon.
Analysis
This chapter follows Lindsey's path after her sister's death: further away from the social norm, until she
becomes the only girl on a boys' soccer team—and someone who breaks into a killer's house. Susie's plunge
into Mr. Harvey's house and memories shows how intimately they have been linked by his violence, both
Susie and Mr. Harvey and Susie with the other victims.
Chapter 15:
Summary
Mr. Harvey remembers stealing things with his mother, something they enjoyed and shared. He also
remembers her advice about putting the past behind him, and a time when drunk men who wanted to rape his
mother trapped them in a truck and they had to flee.
In the present, Mr. Harvey reports his house has been broken in to. The officers search his house, and find it
weird, but accept his explanation as to why he was drawing the place where Susie was killed. Abigail Salmon
continues to meet with Len, to get some emotional release and escape from her situation.
Analysis
The past and the present are juxtaposed in this chapter to show Mr. Harvey's current cunning, and the origins
of it, and of his emotional upset. When he was young he was desperately upset by someone (the three men)
trying to break in to his private place. When Lindsey does so now, he is traumatized. His emotional construct
starts falling apart.
Chapter 16:
Summary
Ruth goes to see Ray Singh. They had begun kissing one another as an experiment, and are now involved
emotionally. It is December 6. The two go to the cornfield for a memorial. Others see them, and there is a
Chapters 11-16
13
spontaneous community gathering. The Salmon family arrives late. Mr. Salmon asks their neighbor Mr.
O'Dwyer to sing, and everyone joins in.
Susie remembers the summer nights that her father referred to when he asked Mr. O'Dwyer to sing, and how
her mother would see her standing in the rain and tell Susie that she looked invincible.
Analysis
In many ways, this chapter shows an ideal community response to tragedy. The memorial service is
spontaneous, and heartfelt, and works directly from those memories of those closest to Susie to refer to things
she loved, thereby keeping a real memory of her alive. However, Susie's memory also points out a deep and
painful irony, namely the times when her mother would say she was invincible. Clearly, she was not.
Snapshots, Chapters 17-20
Snapshots:
Summary
Susie remembers getting a camera, and how she took many pictures of her family. This chapter contains a
number of brief "snapshots" of different elements of her family and community:
In the summer of 1975, Mr. and Mrs. Salmon make love, then she leaves. Many neighborhood women leave
food for the Salmons. Grandmother Lynn comes to stay with them. Lindsey visits the police station to find out
how the investigation is going, but sees her mother's scarf and realizes Mrs. Salmon and Len Fenerman were
having an affair. Buckley builds forts and dreams of being a superhero. In the fall of 1976, Len Fenerman
visits the evidence room to try to get a clue about Mr. Harvey, but there's no trace. Despite this, he's sure Mr.
Harvey was the murderer. Mrs. Salmon passes one winter in New Hampshire, then moves to California and
gets work in a winery.
Each year a memorial is held in the cornfield, but it gets smaller over time. Ray Singh grows up to be
handsome. By June 1977, when Susie would have graduated, Ruth and Ray have already left their town. Ruth
moves to New York, where she walks around the city sensing traces of murder. Ray studies medicine and
sometimes thinks of Susie's death. Mr. Harvey is living in the wilds of the Northeast. In December 1981 Len
Fenerman gets a call from Delaware, where a detective investigating a girl's murder had found one of Susie's
charms. Samuel's brother Hal has been asking for information through the social network of bikers, and
finally gets a clue about a killer who built dollhouses, like Mr. Harvey. Years pass, and Susie watches them
pass from heaven.
Analysis
Susie's passion for taking pictures becomes a metaphor for several things in this chapter. It becomes one of the
many ways that people in The Lovely Bones attempt to freeze time. It is how the chapter is organized: all brief
flashes of things important to Susie. It also reminds readers that often the thing connecting photographs is not
their content, but their connection to the photographer.
Chapter 17:
Summary
Lindsey graduates college at age twenty-one. She and Samuel were driving home on his motorcycle when the
rain became too hard for them to keep going. They get off the bike and find an abandoned house in the woods,
where they make love and Samuel proposes. They run home on foot to share the news with the Salmon
family.
After watching this, Susie thinks about how she often "rode" trains in and out of Suburban Station in
Snapshots, Chapters 17-20
14
Philadelphia when she tired of watching her family. When she did this, she could feel the presence of other
dead people watching over their living loved ones.
Analysis
As Mr. Harvey dreams of houses, which symbolize his wish for a whole psyche, so Samuel and Lindsey find a
house the same day that he proposes. It needs work, but so does Lindsey. When fixed, it will be perfect for
them, as they are for each other; this serendipity indicates that there is meaning in everything, even accidents,
and that human emotion does affect the world around it.
Chapter 18:
Summary
From heaven, Susie watches Ruth walk the streets of New York, marking the places where a woman was
killed. This obsession makes Ruth a celebrity in heaven.
Buckley grows a wild garden mixing vegetables and flowers. When he raids Susie's closet for material to
stake his tomatoes, he and his father (Mr. Salmon) clash over Mr. Salmon's extended mourning over Susie. As
they argue, Mr. Salmon has a heart attack. Buckley prays to Susie to not let him die. As she watches this,
Susie remembers her father taking care of Buckley, especially tucking him into bed, and then is met in heaven
by her grandfather, who dances briefly with her and then vanishes.
Analysis
Buckley's garden is another of the many metaphors in The Lovely Bones. It is an attempt to start something
new, and the attempt nearly kills his father, who is still clinging hard to the past when Susie was alive.
However, the mix of food and beauty is also like their lives—all of their lives: disorganized, not standard, and
only to be understood by working through it, not from the outside.
Chapter 19:
Summary
At the winery, Abigail Salmon gets a phone message telling her that there's been an emergency at home. She
calls, but doesn't get details at first; when she calls the hospital, she learns it was her husband Jack. Abigail
has been away for eight years, but she comes back. She's met by Lindsey, Samuel, and Buckley, who is
furious at her. She then goes in to see Jack, who calls her "My girl." Grandmother Lynn intercepts a message
for Jack from Len Fenerman, folding the note and tucking it in her purse, to give the couple more time
together.
Analysis
This chapter brings Abigail Salmon home so that the story of the Salmon family can be completed. She must
pay a harsh emotional toll for being away so long, but she is welcomed back into love. Abigail realizes that
she'd been running away by having her affair with Len and going to California, and that she still wanted to do
so, but she stays anyway.
Chapter 20:
Summary
Mr. Harvey sleeps in a shack in Connecticut beside the empty grave of a woman he'd killed there. Susie
watches this, and thinks of how she's started keeping a list of the living, to balance the list of the dead that Mr.
Harvey keeps. Len Fenerman does this too.
Susie watches her mother keep her father company at the hospital. As Abigail sits with Jack, she realizes that
she's been wrong all these years and that she loves him. They talk, and partially bridge the emotional gap
between them, eventually crying together and kissing. They admit that they both still see Susie everywhere,
either literally or in the faces of living people.
Snapshots, Chapters 17-20
15
In his shack, Mr. Harvey's dream shifts from one of triumph—of the girl he killed—to one of threat: Lindsey
Salmon running from his house.
Analysis
While the shack in this chapter should be taken literally—that is where Mr. Harvey is sleeping—it is also a
symbol of how far he's fallen apart. He no longer has imaginary palaces in which to hide, or his dollhouses, or
even the fake home run on a time clock. Instead, he is sleeping in a shack, next to an open grave. This
symbolizes his state of mind as well as his literal situation. He is unable to successfully pretend that he's in
charge of his life. Neither can Mrs. Salmon pretend; she realizes she loves Jack.
Chapters 21-23, Bones
Chapter 21:
Summary
Susie goes to watch Ray Singh, remembering her fears about her first kiss and talking the subject over with
her grandmother. In the actual kiss, Ray surprised her in the hall at school, and it was over quickly. In
contemporary time, Susie watches Ray and Ruth go back to the area near their hometown to see the sinkhole,
where Susie's remains were thrown, that is going to be patched up. Susie watches them come back, watches
them pass familiar landmarks and see people they used to know, like Joe Ellis.
Susie then follows Len Fenerman as he goes to the hospital where he presents the Salmons with Susie's
charm, reviving their hope that Susie's killer might someday be found. After this, Susie follows Mr. Harvey,
who is driving a "patchwork car" back towards their town. As he drives, he remembers some of the girls he
killed, but they all blur together. She watches him come back into the old neighborhood, nearing their house
where Lindsey is home alone. As he gets close to the house, he is stopped by policemen, who received a call
about a suspicious vehicle. He drives away, to near the sinkhole, where he and Ruth pass one another. When
they do, Susie falls to Earth.
Analysis
Many elements of the past have been coming back together over the past few chapters, and they come
together here, literally and symbolically. Mr. Harvey's car is patchwork, like the stories he tells; he's coming
back to kill Lindsey and set his life right. Ray and Susie come back to see the sinkhole filled in (a known
emptiness filled in), but the earth is "burping," and at the chapter's end, Susie is "burped" back into the world
of the living.
Chapter 22:
Summary
Ruth collapses to the road, but it is Susie's soul that is inside her body. Ray helps Susie/Ruth back to her feet.
(Ruth's soul flees to heaven for a time, where she is greeted as a hero by women throwing rose petals.) While
Susie is in Ruth's body, she gets Ray to kiss her for real, and then to make love to her. As they do, Susie
shares details from things they experience, to prove that it is her (not Ruth), and tells Ray a little about
heaven. She tells him to read Ruth's journals. Susie tries to call her family on the phone, to talk to them, but
can't make noise. Susie realizes she's out of Ruth's body, and that Ruth is back in it. Susie goes back to
heaven.
Analysis
This chapter shows things working out as they should. This started in the previous chapter, when Mr. Harvey
was prevented from going all the way back to the Salmon house: in an ideal world, communities would
always spy suspicious individuals. Likewise, in an ideal world, heroes would be welcomed in heaven (as Ruth
is), and lovers would get another chance, as Susie does.
Chapters 21-23, Bones
16
Chapter 23:
Summary
Ray reads Ruth's journals. Jack leaves the hospital. Ruanna Singh makes many pies, and then drops one by the
Salmons' house. Hal gives Buckley a set of drums. Grandma Lynn gets water for everyone playing music, and
as she does, she spies a young girl "wearing the clothes of her youth" in the garden. Abigail comes home, and
says to her daughter Susie that she loves her.
Ruana and Ray Singh drop by to visit. While they are there, Samuel tells about the house that he and Lindsey
found the day he proposed. Ray tells him that Ruth's father owns it. Samuel says, "My God," and Susie
disappears from the house.
Analysis
The extended Salmon family continues to heal emotionally in this chapter. Buckley's drums are a way for him
to pound away his existing anger. Susie's mother tells her that she loves her, healing a long gaping wound.
Finally, the connection to Ruth will allow Lindsey and Samuel to have their dream house, and with it their
loving dream life. At that point, Susie vanishes; she is emotionally fulfilled and released by their happiness.
Bones:
Summary
Susie is now more distant from her family, but she does watch from time to time. She sees Samuel and
Lindsey restore the house, and Lindsey become pregnant. She sees Ray become a doctor, one who calls Ruth
when he needs to reconnect with his experiences of the supernatural. Ruth is trying to learn to write, to
capture her experiences.
Susie watches the world from heaven with her grandfather. She watches Mr. Harvey, now grown old. He tries
to capture a teenage girl at a bus station, but an icicle falls and he falls in a ravine and dies.
Susie watches her sister Lindsey grow a garden and name her new baby Abigail Suzanne, after her mother and
dead sister. A man finds Susie's charm bracelet after the sinkhole is bulldozed, and says, "This little girl's
grown up by now." Susie's last words are "Almost. Not quite. I wish you all a long and happy life."
Analysis
This chapter concludes the book with several final symbolic and/or meaningful moments. First, Lindsey and
Samuel name their daughter after Mrs. Salmon and Susie, ensuring that these loved ones will never be
forgotten. Second, Mr. Harvey is killed, but almost casually. He no longer matters. Third, Susie's charm
bracelet, lost when she was killed, is found, and this leads her to make the final statement: she is almost grown
up now, but will still be growing even in heaven. Even after death.
Quizzes
Preface, Chapters 1-5
Chapter 1:
Study Questions
1. Where is Susie Salmon killed?
2. Why does she go with him?
Answers
1. In a secret hiding place Mr. Harvey built in a cornfield near her home.
Quizzes
17
2. At first she is just being polite to a grownup who is a neighbor. Later, though, Susie is drawn in by the idea
of the secret hiding place.
Chapter 2:
Study Questions:
1. How did Fanny die?
2. What is heaven like in The Lovely Bones?
Answers
1. She was killed by a man who was looking for his wife, who shot her in the face.
2. Everyone's heaven is different. It changes and expands to match their needs and dreams.
Chapter 3:
Study Questions
1. What is the picture that Susie thinks of as "the picture," and why is it important?
2. What happened to the ships in bottles that Susie built with her father?
Answers
1. It is a picture of her mother looking strong and not tired—not the mother Susie knew, but an emotional and
spiritual stranger.
2. Mr. Salmon smashes them in his grief over her death.
Chapter 4:
Study Questions
1. What "souvenirs" does Mr. Harvey save from his killing of Susie?
2. What does he do with most of Susie's remains and effects?
Answers
1. He saves he bloody knife with which he killed her, and a book of sonnets.
2. He puts them in a safe and throws them in the community sinkhole.
Chapter 5:
Study Question
1. What piece did Susie usually play with when the family played Monopoly?
Answer
1. The shoe. When Mr. Salmon tells to Buckley that Susie is dead, he uses the pieces of the game to explain it.
Chapters 6-10
Chapter 6:
Study Questions
1. Why doesn't Ray Singh kiss Susie when they are hiding backstage?
Preface, Chapters 1-5
18
2. Why does Mr. Salmon find it hard to talk to Ruana Singh?
Answers
1. The stage door opens, startling them, and three people come in: two teachers and Ruth Connors.
2. Her beauty and self-possession put him off balance.
Chapter 7:
Study Questions
1. Where does the story of the knight come from?
2. When and how does Buckley almost die?
Answers
1. Susie and Lindsey tell it back and forth, developing it a bit at a time, in response to the grave rubbing that
hangs in their family's home.
2. He chokes on a twig when he is three, but Susie races him to the hospital and saves him.
Chapter 8:
Study Question
1. What is Mr. Harvey's favorite building to dream about?
Answer
2. The Church of the Transfiguration.
Chapter 9:
Study Questions
1. How does her family learn that Lindsey has a boyfriend?
2. Who was the first dead body Lindsey and Susie had seen?
Answers
1. Grandma Lynn sees it in the excitement of her eyes, when she's helping Lindsey put on makeup.
2. A neighbor named Bethel Utemeyer. She used to call Lindsey "Natalie." When Susie meets her again, in
heaven, she learns that this was Mrs. Utemeyer's daughter's name.
Chapter 10:
Study Questions
1. Who were the "Masters of Arcane Knowledge"?
2. What symbol does Ruth Connors have on her name tag, and why?
Answers
1. These were kids who were so smart they seemed to know things easily, much more quickly even than the
"gifted" kids. Samuel Heckler is one.
2. A fish (a salmon), to symbolize her connection to Susie.
Chapters 6-10
19
Chapters 11-16
Chapter 11:
Study Questions
1. Why does Mr. Harvey set alarms in his house?
2. What is in the crawlspace at Mr. Harvey's house?
Answers
1. To remind himself to do things like draw the blinds and turn the lights on and off, so his house will appear
normal.
2. Bones from many animals he's killed, in his attempt to keep himself from killing girls.
Chapter 12:
Study Question
1. How did Len Fenerman's wife die?
Answer
1. She committed suicide.
Chapter 13:
Study Question
1. Why do Lindsey and Mr. Salmon decide she should break into Mr. Harvey's house?
Answer
1. They decide he's guilty based on the weirdness Mr. Salmon sees in his movements, and the way their
family dog dislikes him. They decide Lindsey should break in, rather than Mr. Salmon, because the damage to
his knee limits his movement.
Chapter 14:
Study Question
1. What does Susie do while her sister is breaking in to Mr. Harvey's house?
Answer
1. She watches her. She also remembers the names of all the victims, and calls them out, in a kind of ritual
litany.
Chapter 15:
Study Question
1. What makes Mr. Harvey decide that it is terrible to be a woman or a child?
Answer
1. The sickening fear he feels when the three men try to get at his mother when they are trapped in their
pick-up truck.
Chapter 16:
Study Question
1. How do the Salmon family learn of the memorial in the cornfield?
Chapters 11-16
20
Answer
1. Lindsey hears the singing through a window.
Snapshots, Chapters 17-20
Snapshots:
Study Questions
1. Who is Sophie Cichetti?
2. Do dogs go to heaven?
Answers
1. She was the mother of a Hell's Angel, Ralph Cichetti, who shares the details of her death with Hal Heckler.
Her killer had built dollhouses: it was Mr. Harvey.
2. Holliday (the Salmons' dog) does. He's so happy to see Susie that he knocks her over.
Chapter 17:
Study Question
1. Why do Samuel and Lindsey end up running home?
Answer
1. Two reasons. First, they shift off the motorcycle they're riding because the rain gets too hard, and it
becomes dangerous to ride. Then, they run home because they are so excited to share the news of their
upcoming marriage.
Chapter 18:
Study Questions
1. How does Ruth know where girls have been killed?
2. What does "Let go" mean?
Answers
1. She gets flashes of intensely vivid images that burn themselves into her memory.
2. It is what Mr. Salmon hears a small voice inside him say when he has his heart attack. It could mean "let go
and die," but it could also mean "let Susie go."
Chapter 19:
Study Question
1. What does it mean when Mrs. Salmon says "I lied to you" to her daughter Lindsey?
Answer
1. It refers to her affair with Len Fenerman. She's admitting she had it, and, by implication, promising that
she'll be more truthful from now on.
Chapter 20:
Study Question
1. In what way does Susie see herself and Len Fenerman as being alike?
Snapshots, Chapters 17-20
21
Answer
1. She says that they both follow "the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to
comprehend." Though she should hate him for contributing to the troubles in her family, it is this emotional
connection with Fenerman that lets Susie respect him.
Chapters 21-23, Bones
Chapter 21:
Study Questions
1. Who was Grandman Lynn's first kiss?
2. When and how does Ray finally kiss Susie?
Answers
1. Mr. McGahern, a father of one of her friends.
2. At her locker, suddenly, as she's saying his name.
Chapter 22:
Study Question
1. How does Susie convince Ray that it is her in Ruth's body, not Ruth?
Answer
1. He suspects something because she's acting different, but the first real evidence is when she knows where
the key is hidden for Hal's bike shop. Later she shares details about the note Ray wrote that only Susie would
know.
Chapter 23:
Study Question
1. What does Grandma Lynn see out the window as she's getting water for the people playing the drums?
Answer
1. She sees "a young girl wearing the clothes of her youth." It isn’t clear if this is another ghost, come to visit,
or if this is a projection of Grandma Lynn's own younger self, but it is definitely another instance of the past
breaking through into the present.
Bones:
Study Questions
1. What does Ray Singh do when he doubts that there is an afterlife?
2. What is Mr. Harvey trying to do when he dies?
Answers
1. He calls Ruth, who has experienced it directly.
2. He's trying to kill another teenaged girl, but when he follows her out into the snow beyond the bus station,
an icicle falls on his neck and he falls into a snow-filled ravine.
Chapters 21-23, Bones
22
Characters>
Susie Salmon
The Lovely Bones is Susie Salmon's story. She was a normal fourteen-year-old girl when she was murdered in
the novel's opening pages. She narrates the rest of her story from heaven, often returning to Earth to watch
two interwoven groups of people: her loved ones—mostly family, some friends—and Mr. Harvey and the other
people he kills. Susie loves her family and her dog. Susie returns to Earth in the flesh briefly late in the novel,
taking over the body of Ruth Connors.
Mr. George Harvey
Mr. George Harvey, known through most of the novel simply as Mr. Harvey, killed Susie Salmon. He is a
serial killer who rapes and kills women and children. His father had been a builder. He and his mother had
stolen things together. His father eventually threw his mother out. Mr. Harvey kills animals to try to keep
from killing humans, lives his life on a time clock so that he might appear more normal, and builds
dollhouses. He is eventually killed as an old man by an icicle that falls on his head and knocks him into a
ravine.
Mr. Harvey's father
Mr. Harvey's father was a builder. He appears in The Lovely Bones only in brief memories. The most
important of these is when he forced his wife, Mr. Harvey's mother, out of the car in New Mexico.
Mr. Harvey's mother
Mr. Harvey's mother appears in The Lovely Bones only in brief memories, but her presence is felt more often
than that. Mr. Harvey loved his mother, and stole for her; one of his most intense memories is when a group of
men tried to get to her, most likely to rape her. Harvey uses details from his mother to give his cover story
solidity when hunting new victims.
Mr. Jack Salmon
Jack Salmon is Susie's father. When she was killed, he became obsessed with her death, and with the idea of
catching her killer. One night he follows a light out into the cornfield where Mr. Harvey killed her, thinking to
kill Mr. Harvey. Instead he surprises two teenagers, one of whom beats him with his own baseball bat,
crippling him. He recovers only slowly and is an emotional cripple for years. He has a heart attack late in the
novel.
Mrs. Abigail Salmon
Abigail Salmon is Jack Salmon's wife, and the mother of three children: Susie, Lindsey, and Buckley. Abigail
hadn't really ever wanted to be a mother. Having children cuts off her access to her innermost self. Abigail
thinks that her lack of desire for children is why Susie was killed. Abigail has an affair with Len Fenerman,
the police officer investigating Susie's murder, then goes away for years.
Lindsey Salmon
Lindsey is Susie's younger sister; she is intelligent and, especially after Susie's murder, very self-contained.
She attends a gifted symposium, plays soccer, and breaks into Mr. Harvey's house in search of evidence that
he's the killer. She falls in love with Samuel Heckler, and when they marry and have a baby, it completes
some of Susie's emotional needs that were interrupted by her murder.
Buckley Salmon
Buckley is the youngest of the three Salmon children. He is only four when Susie is killed. He grows up first
withdrawn, spending time hiding in forts, then angry.
Characters>
23
Ray Singh
Ray Singh is the only boy to kiss Susie Salmon while she was alive. He grows up handsome and intelligent,
and eventually becomes a doctor. In the years between, however, he forms a tight connection with Ruth
Connors over their emotional connection to Susie, and makes love to Susie in Ruth's body.
Ruth Connors
Ruth is an artist. When Susie's soul fled her dying body, it brushed Ruth Connors on its way to heaven. When
Susie had been alive, she and Ruth had known one another but not been close. This posthumous contact
creates an obsession and a sensitivity in Ruth, first with and to Susie's life, and then to any woman who was
killed. She walks the streets of New York, marking places where they were killed. When Susie takes over her
body, to briefly walk on Earth in the flesh again, Ruth goes to heaven, where the women give her a hero's
welcome.
Grandma Lynn
Grandma Lynn is Abigail Salmon's mother. Though they were never close emotionally, she comes to stay
with the Salmons after Susie's death to help them through tough times. She likes to drink, dresses well, and
appreciates the male body. She teaches Lindsey how to wear makeup, and helps her dress stylishly.
Ruanna Singh
Ray's mother, Mrs. Singh, is a former dancer whose beauty makes men uncomfortable. She's married to a
professor, and the outsider status produced by her academic affiliations, her ethnicity (the Singhs are Indian),
and her beauty allows her to speak uncomfortable truths directly.
Len Fenerman
Len Fenerman is the police officer in charge of the investigation into Susie's death. He eventually becomes
chief of police. A widower, he is a responsible and ethical man, who nonetheless has an affair with Abigail
Salmon.
Samuel Heckler
Samuel is Lindsey's boyfriend, her first kiss, her first sexual encounter, and, eventually, her husband and the
father of her child. When they are young, they attend the summer gifted symposium together.
Hal Heckler
Hal is Samuel's older brother. He owns the bike shop where Susie (in Ruth's body) and Ray Singh make love.
Brian Nelson
Brian is Clarissa's boyfriend. Mr. Salmon surprises them when they are meeting in the cornfield at night.
Brian thinks Clarissa is being threatened, and he beats Mr. Salmon with his own baseball bat.
Clarissa
Clarissa is Susie's friend and Brian Nelson's girlfriend. Mr. Salmon surprises Clarissa and Brian when they are
meeting in the cornfield at night. Brian thinks Clarissa is being threatened, and he beats Mr. Salmon with his
own baseball bat.
Holly
Holly is Susie's roommate in heaven. Holly is Asian-American.
Franny
Franny is Holly and Susie's "intake counselor" in heaven. She is in her mid-forties, and had been a social
worker while alive. She guides these dead girls as they make sense of heaven.
Characters>
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Mr. Caden
Mr. Caden is the principal. He attempts to counsel Lindsey on her loss.
The Flanagans
Mr. and Mrs. Flanagan own the land where the town sinkhole is found.
Characters
Clarissa
Clarissa is Susie's best friend. Her clandestine meeting in the cornfield with her boyfriend, Brian, leads to
Brian's attack on Jack.
Ruth Connors
Ruth, the girl Susie inadvertently brushes against as the she departs earth, is artistic and poetic with a feminist
sensibility, existing on the fringes of junior high and high school society. She moves to New York after
graduation, living a bohemian life of writing poetry, communing with Susie, and recording in her journal the
deaths of women and children, deaths that she sees in dreams and visions. Because of her psychic connection
to the spirit of murdered women and children, Ruth provides the means for Susie to revisit earth and
consummate her relationship with Ray. Ruth also develops and maintains a strong friendship with Ray.
Detective Len Fenerman
Len Fenerman is the lead detective on Susie's murder case. A small but tenacious man, Fenerman believes that
he will find Susie's killer. He understands the horror of unexplained death, as his wife committed suicide.
Fenerman carries Susie's picture, as well as the pictures of victims of unsolved murder cases, in his wallet.
Although he knows that he should not give in to his feelings for Abigail, he eventually begins an affair with
her. Because of his cautiousness regarding Harvey, Susie's killer, Fenerman fails to arrest him. This failure
haunts the detective, and he must bear the guilt of his decisions.
Franny
Franny, a social worker on earth, is Susie's intake counselor in heaven. She also serves as a surrogate mother.
George Harvey
George Harvey, a thirty-six-year-old single man, is a serial killer who rapes and murders Susie. Although
considered odd by his neighbors, Harvey does not draw attention to himself. He builds dollhouses and
possesses a fascination with buildings. Taught to steal by his mother and then abandoned by her, and raised by
a tyrannical father, Harvey lacks both a conscience and social skills. He fits the profile of a sociopath, reliving
the murders in his mind, deriving intense pleasure from the killings, and taking trophies from his victims.
When Lindsey breaks into his house and takes evidence linking him to Susie's murder, Mr. Harvey's ordered
world begins to disintegrate. He leaves town, eventually coming back determined to kill Lindsey, but a
combination of circumstances prevent him from doing so.
Characters
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Hal Heckler
Hal is Samuel's older brother. He rides and repairs motorcycles. After Harvey's disappearance, Hal uses his
network of biker friends to search for him. Hal eventually passes on some key information to Detective
Fenerman.
Samuel Heckler
Samuel is Lindsey's childhood sweetheart and eventually marries her. Samuel helps Lindsey cope with her
sister's death, her mother's abandonment, and her father's heart attack. Samuel, along with his brother, Hal,
becomes an integral part of the Salmon family. He and Hal treat Buckley, Lindsey's little brother, like their
own brother. Samuel loves carpentry and restoring old houses, a passion that he turns into a career. This
passion for fixing broken and battered things parallels his ability to alleviate Lindsey's pain, name Jack's
overprotectiveness, and deflect Buckley's anger.
Holly
Holly is Susie's roommate in heaven. Although she and Susie share much of their heaven, Holly also has a
heaven to which Susie has no access. Holly helps Susie understand heaven.
Grandma Lynn
Grandma Lynn, Susie's grandmother and Abigail's mother, is eccentric, colorful and drinks too much. Prior to
Susie's murder, her visits to the Salmon's upended routines and delighted her grandchildren. Not overly
motherly, Lynn has a strained relationship with her daughter. When Abigail leaves, Lynn provides the
stability that keeps the family together. She helps Lindsey grow into womanhood, and she helps Buckley
negotiate his anger and hurt.
Brian Nelson
Brian is Clarissa's boyfriend. He beats Mr. Salmon with a baseball bat when he mistakenly thinks that Susie's
father is attacking Clarissa in the cornfield.
Abigail Salmon
Abigail is Susie's mother. She is college educated, with a master's degree in literature and aspirations to teach.
In the early years of her marriage to Jack, Abigail possessed a passionate nature but found that the demands of
motherhood pulled her away from her husband and from her own dreams. As her family grew, Abigail
became less involved with her children and husband. Nevertheless, Susie's death unsettles her, and she finds
no outlet for her grief. She embarks on an affair with Detective Fenerman but does not love him. Her need to
find herself, reclaim her place in the world as an individual, and escape her intense grief propel her to relocate
to California. There she seems to find some solace, working in a vineyard and leaving motherhood and
wifehood behind. However, she comes to realize that she can leave neither of those things, and when she
returns to Pennsylvania, she also realizes that she viewed Susie's death as punishment for own failings as a
mother. This understanding allows her to rebuild her relationship with her husband and with her children.
These things do not prove easy, but Abigail does reclaim her position within the family, albeit a changed
family—reconfigured by Susie's absence as well as by Abigail's.
Hal Heckler
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Buckley Salmon
Buckley is the youngest of the three Salmon children. He is four years old at the time of Susie's murder and
seven years old when his mother leaves. These two events force Buckley to develop emotional defenses in
order to survive the pain of abandonment. He believes that he has supernatural encounters with Susie. Both
Grandma Lynn and Lindsey act as maternal surrogates, and Buckley develops a close relationship with his
father. As he matures, he becomes protective of his father and of Lindsey. When Abigail returns, Buckley is
hateful, sullen, and very angry.
Jack Salmon
Jack is Susie's father. In the aftermath of her murder, Jack deals not only with his own grief and anger but also
seeks to assuage Lindsey's emotions and protect Buckley from the hurt. Like Abigail, Jack must also work
through some guilt generated by his daughter's death. He questions his position as father and protector when
he realizes that he was not there to save his little girl. His frustration at this failure fuels his need to be active
in the police investigation. Jack cannot remain passive as the police fail to develop leads. He never wavers in
his conviction that Mr. Harvey murdered Susie, and once the police disregard his theories, Jack turns to
Lindsey, sharing his thoughts with her. Despite his closeness to Lindsey and Buckley, Jack retains a strong
connection to Susie, feeling her presence, talking to her, refusing to let her place in his family's life fade.
Whereas Abigail withdraws into almost a state of indifference, Jack builds ties that may bind too tightly.
Finally, Jack understands that in order to have a strong family, he must loosen the bonds, and he does what the
living must do in order to go on living—let go of the dead. In addition, Jack does what parents must do: let go
of their children. Jack can make these moves only after he turns inward and faces his own fears and
weaknesses.
Lindsey Salmon
Lindsey is the middle child of the three Salmon children. Bright, articulate, athletic, blonde, and pretty,
Lindsey, one year younger than Susie, is amazingly close to her sister, so Susie's death leaves a deep void in
Lindsey's life. However, she refuses to be the dead girl's sister, the living daughter, the reminder of the
missing girl. Lindsey struggles through the ordinary traumas of adolescence, but Susie's murder, Abigail's
distance, Jack's need to find the killer, and Buckley's dependence all complicate the process for her. With
Grandma Lynn's help, Samuel's devotion, and her own determination, Lindsey develops into a strong young
woman, and she risks her own safety in order to find proof of Harvey's guilt. Lindsey does not, however,
betray her dreams. Unlike her mother, she follows her aspirations. She graduates from college, gets an
advanced degree, and takes up a career. Although Lindsey never leaves Susie behind, she does move beyond
Susie's death.
Susie Salmon
Susie, the narrator, is a fourteen-year-old girl and the eldest of the three Salmon children. She is raped and
murdered by her neighbor, Mr. Harvey, as she walks home from junior high. Susie is spunky and curious, a
dreamer with a desire to be a wildlife photographer, and looks forward to high school and to growing up.
Susie shares a special relationship with her father—helping him to build ships in a bottle. She and sister
Lindsey are close, and she plays mother hen to little brother Buckley. Susie adores her mother and seems to
understand her mother's need for privacy.
Seldom is Susie a direct participant in the action; usually, she observes and reflects. Sometimes, however, she
makes her presence known to the living—in the shards of glass from her father's broken ships in a bottle, in a
dim appearance at a family gathering, in the body of Ruth Connors. She is with Lindsey as she searches Mr.
Buckley Salmon
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Harvey's house, leading her sister into the upstairs rooms. In addition, much of the action takes place because
of someone's longing for, search for, or love for Susie. So, indirectly, Susie influences individual decisions
and outcomes.
Just as Lindsey must figure out how to grow up—what it means to live, Susie must figure out what it means
not to grow up—what it means to be dead. She learns that like the living, she, too, must journey. Susie also
learns that the dead, like the living, must let go, not easy for a girl who wants so desperately to live.
Susie does return to earth. She falls into Ruth's body, initiated partly by Susie's longing to kiss Ray one more
time and see where that kiss would lead, and also by Ruth's desire to understand the dead, to see them. Ruth
desires to leave earth, and Susie desires to return. After this incident, Susie watches with love and pleasure as
her family reconfigures into a new family, one that does and does not include her.
Ray Singh
Ray is the boy with whom Susie shares her first kiss. Born in India and raised in England until his family
moved to the United States, Ray is dark skinned and well-spoken. He writes Susie a love letter that she never
gets to read. This letter, which the police find in the cornfield, initially leads them to suspect Ray of the
murder. Like Ruth, Ray inhabits the periphery of junior high society. He finds himself drawn to Ruth's
quirkiness, her love of art and literature, and her connection to Susie. Together, Ray and Ruth speculate about
Susie's murder. Ray maintains a close relationship with Ruth throughout high school as well as after
graduation, when he goes to Penn State and Ruth to New York. Susie longs for Ray as she watches him from
heaven. When she returns to earth in Ruth's body, Ray recognizes the change in Ruth, calling her Susie. He
makes love to her, and he asks her to tell him about heaven. This encounter affects Ray when he begins to
practice medicine; he refuses to consider only medical or scientific explanations regarding death.
Ruana Singh
Ruana is Ray's mother. She is an exotic personality, dignified and calm when the police question her son
about Susie's murder. Ruana possesses deep empathy for the Salmons, and she plays an important role in
Jack's determination to avenge Susie's death. Ruana listens to his theories regarding Mr. Harvey and
legitimizes Jack's desire for revenge. Before Abigail leaves, the two women share a moment together, and
Ruana understands Abigail's feeling of isolation. After Abigail leaves, Ruana often bakes apple pies for the
Salmons, which she has Ray deliver.
Themes
Loss and Grief
Loss of a loved one and the stages of mourning or grief manifest as overriding themes in The Lovely Bones.
Through the voice of Susie Salmon, the fourteen-year-old narrator of the novel, readers get an in-depth look at
the grieving process. Susie focuses more on the aftermath and effects of her murder and rape on her family
rather than on the event itself. She watches her parents and sister move through the five stages of grief: denial,
anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, Alice Sebold makes clear that these categories do
not necessarily remain rigid and that individuals deal with grief in various ways. For example, Abigail, Susie's
mother, withdraws from her living children, Lindsey and Buckley, whereas Jack, her husband, draws closer to
them. Lindsey, Susie's sister, vacillates between denial and acceptance, sometimes exhibiting both elements
simultaneously. In addition, Sebold expands the definitions of both loss and grief by including Susie herself in
the process. If readers limit their understanding of grief to losing and coping with the death of a loved one,
Susie Salmon
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then they have trouble accounting for Susie's emotions. She mourns her own death and the missed opportunity
of getting to grow up, but more significantly, Susie grieves over the loss of living people. In other words, the
novel extends the grieving process to include the dead themselves.
By including Susie in this process and having Abigail leave the family, Sebold investigates the nature of loss
and its relationship to grief. The novel suggests change equals loss, which in turn initiates grief. While Susie's
death emerges as the most blatant change in the lives of the Salmons, other significant changes also occur.
Lindsey changes from adolescent to adult; Buckley changes from child to adolescent; Jack changes from a
man secure in his place in the family to one questioning his ability to hold the family together; and Abigail
changes from a woman questioning her position as wife and mother to one who redefines and then embraces
that position. While each of these changes generates a sense of loss, ultimately each character moves on from
the loss and grief. In The Lovely Bones, both the living and dead learn letting go opens up possibilities.
Life and Death
On some level, all literature investigates the nature of human experience or the human condition. Certainly
life and death constitute the two most significant experiences of being human, and as such, much literature
deals with these two issues. The Lovely Bones pointedly asks two questions: "What does it mean to be alive?"
and "What does it mean to be dead?"
As Susie learns what being dead means, she must deal with what being alive means as well. The fact she can
no longer experience the physical world—that she can no longer experience living—emerges as her biggest
disappointment. The novel then offers experiencing the physical as an attribute of living. Although denied this
aspect of living, the dead Susie can engage in the human condition of wanting, wishing, and desiring. Thus
Sebold blurs the lines between what constitutes life and death. Susie clearly understands she is dead. She
knows she inhabits a realm different from earth, but in many ways, not completely separate from it. After all,
Susie's heaven looks earthly, not celestial, and she participates in activities that associate much more closely
with earth than heaven: eating ice cream, romping with dogs, living in a duplex.
The novel presents life as a series of changes, all of which involve the body and the physical
environment—physicality seems the defining characteristic of life. The event that allows Susie to move on in
her heaven, or to move on in death, is her return to earth. Although she has "returned" in a disembodied form,
when she inhabits Ruth's body, Susie "realize[s] that the marvelous weight weighing [her] down was the
weight of the human body." Yet Susie understands the temporariness of this corporality, but perhaps that
realization is precisely one of Sebold's points.
Coming of Age and Rites of Passage
The coming-of-age novel involves the initiation of the protagonist into adulthood. This initiation usually
occurs through the acquisition of knowledge and experience. In many of these novels, the move into
adulthood includes a loss of innocence or the destruction of a false sense of security. The protagonist often
experiences a shift from ignorance to knowledge, innocence to experience, idealism to realism, or immaturity
to maturity. In addition, coming of age involves rituals or rites of passage. The Lovely Bones focuses on these
issues as the author explores the process of growing up.
The novel begins when Lindsey Salmon is thirteen years old and ends almost ten years later, with Lindsey as
wife and mother. It traces her move through the routines and events of female adolescence—first kisses,
shaving of legs, makeup, summer camp, love, friendship, college. The novel, however, also traces Susie's
coming of age. By presenting the development of a dead girl along with a living one, Sebold imbues the
experiences of growing up with enhanced significance. Susie cannot move on in death until she finishes
Loss and Grief
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"growing up."
Susie's rape and murder hastens the process of moving from innocence to experience for both girls. Susie
learns her suburban and rather ordinary world is not safe—men murder children in this world. She moves
swiftly and violently from innocence to experience, and from idealism to realism. Yet this shift does not
culminate in her "coming of age;" rather, it initiates a need for her to experience these things more slowly and
more naturally. While Susie's death also hastens Lindsey's loss of innocence, it does so less dramatically.
Although Lindsey understands that her world is not particularly safe, that bad people exist and that these
people do bad things, she still participates in the normal rituals of growing up.
Like many teenage girls, Lindsey experiments with makeup and with finding a style that suits her. She
experiences a tender first kiss with Samuel, and they move slowly through the rituals of courtship. She grows
into her sexuality, developing a relationship based on trust, gentleness, and understanding. However, Susie's
murder, combined with her mother's absence, pushes Lindsey into adult roles early in her life. So while
acknowledging the naturalness of growing up, Sebold also contextualizes that experience. In The Lovely
Bones, moving from a place of innocence to one of knowledge can occur violently and abruptly. Coming of
age can happen in circumstances that circumvent the normal, perhaps suggesting a need to rethink normal.
Additional discussion on themes:
1. Pain and violence distort everything.
The existence of the story told within The Lovely Bones is itself the most emphatic emphasis for this theme:
Susie Salmon should not have to tell her life story in bits and pieces, from above, and after she's been killed.
She should be able to live it, but instead, Mr. Harvey's terrible rape and slaughter of this innocent girl
transforms her. It kills her, of course, but it also rips her innocence from her and hurls her into heaven long
before her time.
But Susie is not the only one transformed through violence. Her murder twists her family until it is barely
recognizable. It separates her sister Lindsey from the other kids at school. It drives Buckley into hiding in the
forts he makes. Susie's murder drives a wedge between her parents, causing her mother to flee into the arms of
another man for comfort and her father to seek justice on his own late at night—and get crippled by accident.
Later still, Buckley's anger over how his father can't release his sister's death causes his father to have a heart
attack.
The character of Ruth Connors is a good metaphor for how even casual contact with true violence changes
things. Susie's soul accidentally brushes her as it flies from her dying body to heaven; this brief contact
changes Ruth's life forever. She becomes obsessed with Susie, but also acutely sensitive to the violence
women suffer in the world. She walks the streets of New York, sensing and commemorating their pain.
Eventually, she and Susie swap bodies, and Ruth goes briefly to heaven ahead of her time as a result of this
one fleeting encounter.
But it is not just the likeable characters who are shaped by violence. Mr. Harvey, too, is distorted by the pain
he's suffered. He is driven to be not a woman, and not a child, by the painful memories of his own family life,
and of the loss of his own mother.
2. Tremendous implications ripple outwards from individual events.
In The Lovely Bones, each and every small individual action or event might have tremendous implications.
The neighbors identify the body parts found early in the book by the specific book found with them, for
example, and Lindsey realizes that her mother is having an affair through the scarf she sees in the police
station. Likewise, Mr. Harvey takes care to "manage" the details of the life he leads to maximize his
appearance of reality; he runs his home by a time clock to make sure he "hits" each of his targets. It is the
Coming of Age and Rites of Passage
30
detail of his making dollhouses that reopens the investigation late in the novel, and it isn't a heroic police
action that finally brings Mr. Harvey down. It is the random fall of an icicle.
However, it is in the emotional area that these individual events matter most in The Lovely Bones. Susie's
death puts her entire family under a magnifying lens. Their pain allows readers to see how important the
smallest choices in life are. Susie's choice of the shoe when playing Monopoly, the snapshots she takes of her
family, the songs to which she and her grandfather had danced, the grave rubbings her parents had completed:
each event that makes up a human life is shown to have tremendous meaning, and a weight that can be felt,
quite literally, beyond the grave.
3. Stories have a power and a logic beyond mere words.
Rather than being simply words—mere entertainment—in The Lovely Bones, stories have a tremendous power,
and a logic all their own. Their power comes from their emotional and ethical resonance. It matters that Len
Fenerman will not allow cases to be closed; it is a way of paying homage to them. Likewise, Susie starts her
own list of the living, to balance Mr. Harvey's list of the dead. Mr. Harvey himself survives by the quality of
his stories. When he's out hunting, he fabricates convincing stories of his wife to cover his evil intentions;
when he's questioned by the police, the level of detail he provides convinces them that he is weird, but not
guilty.
Stories are so important that dead women greet Ruth Conner in heaven as a hero when she visits them. The
records of their pain and death matter to them, even after they are dead and in heaven, and having someone
remember them in the right way is intensely important to them.
Finally, stories have their own logic in The Lovely Bones. In a just universe, Susie Salmon should have gotten
more than the one kiss from Ray Singh; in this universe, she does. She gets to come back to complete their
interrupted love affair, and in a more general sense, Susie watches her family until their story reaches a happy
ending.
4. Love is the only real answer to loss.
Jack Salmon tries to balance his daughter's death through vengeance: he goes out into the night with a
baseball bat to kill her killer. He fails, and is crippled as a result. What does work to help the world recover
from loss is love. When Samuel Heckler and Lindsey Salmon kiss for the first time, Susie thinks that "it was
glorious. I was almost alive again." After that, the key moments of restored balance in The Lovely Bones are
when Jack and Abigail Salmon get back together, when Susie gets to borrow Ruth's body to make love to Ray
Singh, when Abigail Salmon tells her dead daughter that she loves her, when Susie's grandfather dances
lovingly with her in heaven, and, finally, when Samuel and Lindsey get the house they want, and marry. Love
is the only real answer to loss in The Lovely Bones.
Style
Point of View
In The Lovely Bones, point of view, the perspective from which the story is told, plays a crucial role in the
narrative. Generally, a novel's point of view consists of one of four traditional stances: first person, second
person, third person, and third person omniscient. First person point of view presents the events of the story
from the perception of a single character. Second person point of view involves the author telling the story as
if it is happening to the reader. With third person point of view, the reader has no insight into the character's
minds; therefore, he or she must make sense of the action as it takes place. Third person omniscient offers a
"godlike" perspective, transcending time or place, allowing the reader to see the actions and to look into the
minds of the characters to know their thoughts, feelings and motives.
Style
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Alice Sebold presents a story told from an omniscient first person point of view, the perspective of Susie
Salmon, who is dead. Susie, from her vantage point in heaven, sees everything—actions, motivations,
thoughts—so her narration functions like third person omniscient, except that she tells the story in first person.
Susie's access to the minds of other characters provides readers with this same access. In addition, as an
omniscient first person narrator telling the story from beyond the limitations of earthly time, she also can and
does experience many of the characters' memories. For example, she sees and relates incidents from her killer,
Mr. Harvey's, childhood and his past killings. Because of her omniscience, Susie often glimpses intensely
personal thoughts and actions, such as her mother's first tryst with Detective Fenerman, or her mother's
internal thoughts about motherhood.
This combination of third person omniscient and first person points of view proves an innovative move on
Sebold's part. Few novels offer the perspective of a dead protagonist—especially one who has been brutally
raped and murdered. However, this new point of view makes the disturbing subject matter bearable and also
allows Sebold to inject some humor and lightness into a rather horrifying story. Because she sees everything
and because she relates what she sees, Susie provides the reader with opportunities to sympathize and or
identify with various characters. In addition, because this omniscient viewpoint filters through a first person or
personal voice, it also emerges as a specific perspective: sometimes angry, sometimes confused, sometimes
spunky, and sometimes humorous, which carries with it a distinctive personality.
Setting
Setting includes the time, place, and culture in which the action of the narrative takes place. Time and place
emerge as crucial elements in understanding the setting in The Lovely Bones. Traditionally, time can involve
three elements: historical period, duration, and the perception of time by the characters. Sebold uses dates at
various points throughout the narrative; in fact, the novel opens with a specific date, December 6, 1973.
Immediately, the reader understands the historical time—the early 1970s—as well as the seasonal time—winter.
However, as the story progresses, the historical periods shift as Susie takes the reader into the past and alludes
to the future. For example, after giving us the date of her death, she offers a contemporary reference to the
pictures of missing children on milk cartons and in the daily mail. This reference raises questions regarding
the time period from which Susie is telling the story. Sebold's use of time shifts—the narration slides among
past, present, and future—ties very closely to elements of place.
Like the shifts in time, the location of the story shifts between heaven and earth. Most of the action itself
occurs on earth with the telling occurring in heaven. Some action does, however, take place in heaven: Susie
meets Mr. Harvey's other victims in heaven; she and her roommate, Holly, explore; she dances with her
grandfather. However, these actions do not necessarily propel the plot (the pattern of carefully selected
events), but they do expand the story (all the events which are to be depicted). Both place and time closely
relate to the coming-of-age element in the book, as well as to the themes of loss and grief.
Foreshadowing and Flashback
For the most part, Sebold's novel follows the traditional structure of plot. However, the events do not
necessarily unfold in chronological fashion. For instance, the novel opens with Susie's murder, and as events
unfold, establishes a relationship between events. To understand the causality, the reader needs background
information, which Sebold presents through the use of flashback, a device that offers actions that occurred
before the beginning of the story. Once Sebold establishes the murder, she has Susie look backward to how
the murder occurred. As with point of view and setting, Sebold also complicates the traditional idea of plot.
For example, in chapter one, Susie discusses her murder and includes a detail about a neighborhood dog
finding her elbow and bringing it home. However, the actual incident of the dog finding the elbow and the
police telling her parents about it occurs weeks after the murder. These occurrences in the story are moments
Point of View
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of foreshadowing, which create expectation. Through the use of flashback and foreshadowing, Sebold veers
away from a strictly chronological unfolding of events; rather, plot becomes more circular even while the
narrative progressive chronologically through the 1970s.
Additional discussion on style:
Point of View
Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones, is narrated by the main character after her death. This use of
first-person omniscient narration allows Sebold the option of exploring the characters in the novel from a
unique perspective. With this method, the narrator is able not only to observe the behavior of the characters,
but also to delve into their thoughts and emotions. This allows for a deeper development of the context in
which each character evolves. When Susie witnesses her sister’s despair over her death, the narration of
Lindsey’s simple act of crying in the shower with the lights out allows the reader to gain an understanding of
how Lindsey is coping with the tragedy that would otherwise be impossible.
The use of omniscient narration also allows the story to unfold in a way that is not completely linear. As the
main character observes her family and friends, she is reminded of past experiences and recollects those
experiences in great detail. Her memories are described from a first-person point of view, while her
observations of the present are provided through her omniscient narration of everything she observes.
Jumping from the present to the past is achieved more easily through the use of the omniscient narration than
it would be without this technique because this point of view gives the narrator an all-access pass to the life of
each character and, therefore, greater power to manipulate the way the story is told.
Susie’s omniscient narration establishes two forms of suspense in the novel. The first form of suspense is
based on the limited knowledge possessed by each of the secondary characters in the novel. Although Susie is
knowledgeable about everything going on in the lives of the other characters, these characters do not benefit
from this knowledge. Suspense is created by the observation of characters that are unaware they are being
watched. Providing the reader with access to this observation is achieved uniquely through first-person
omniscient narration. For example, Susie observes her father talking with her murderer and narrates the
interaction as it happens, but her father is unaware that the man with whom he is interacting is his daughter's
murderer.
The second form of suspense created by the omniscient narration of the main character follows from the first.
Although readers have access to the narrator’s unlimited knowledge about the characters’ behavior and
thoughts, the narrator does not possess the ability to predict the future. The anticipation of what will happen
next is intensified by the knowledge gathered through the omniscient narration. When the main character’s
father is interacting with his daughter’s murderer, the anticipation on the part of the reader is built up by the
knowledge of who each of the characters is and how each relates to the others. If the reader did not know that
the main character’s father was interacting with his daughter’s murderer, the interaction itself would seem
uninteresting and irrelevant to the development of the story.
Historical Context
Alice Sebold wrote The Lovely Bones in the late 1990s; the book first appeared in print in June 2002; and the
story takes place in the 1970s. All of these dates prove significant. At the time of the writing, America was
facing both a new decade and a new millennium. By the late 1990s, Americans saw the creation of the World
Wide Web; engaged in debates over health care, social security reform, gun control; watched national sex
scandals unfold (the Tailhook affair and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski affair); sat riveted to the O. J.
Simpson murder trial; and were stunned by the violence of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in
Colorado. Sebold penned her story amid a growing awareness of, and concern with, issues of domestic,
Foreshadowing and Flashback
33
sexual, and teen violence. In many ways, her novel reflects these concerns as it reflects the cultural climate of
the 1990s.
Its publication date, however, carries added significance. The novel, released less than a year after the
September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.,
speaks directly to a nation's need for comfort. The Lovely Bones made its debut in an America forever stripped
of its belief that terrorism and random violence happens elsewhere. The social and cultural atmosphere at this
time radiated fear, distrust, sadness, anger, and grief. Although Sebold wrote this novel before the attacks, the
subject matter echoes the contemporaneous concerns of America.
The novel also draws on the historical, cultural, social, and political issues of the 1970s. In many ways,
America "came of age" in the 1970s as social change, discontent with the government, advances in civil rights
for minorities and women, environmental concerns, and space exploration defined the decade. The Vietnam
War, which sparked antiwar protests and student demonstrations, and the Watergate Scandal, which resulted
in the resignation of a president, shattered the last vestiges of a naive America. Other changes arose in the
1970s that added to America's cultural and social climate, including the women's movement. Women's places
in American life expanded into political and professional areas, and people began to question the traditional
gender roles of women and men.
The changes of the 1970s figure into The Lovely Bones in several ways: first, through Sebold's female
characters. Ruth Connors embodies the feminism of the 1970s with her avant-garde approach to her drawings,
poetry, and reading. She refuses the constraints of the status quo in these areas as well as in the arena of
acceptably feminine behavior and attire. However, whereas Ruth overtly embraces feminism, Susie's mother,
Abigail, struggles to name her discontent. Abigail illustrates many of the women in the 1970s who did not
publicly espouse feminism, yet whose desire to transcend the constraints of motherhood and wifehood drew
on feminist principles. Secondly, the novel reflects the 1970s concern with the environment through the
encroachment of building and industry into the Salmons' suburban neighborhood. Finally, the disturbing
subject matter of a child's rape and murder, and Susie's refusal to sanitize the images of her death reflect the
horrific pictures of the dead and dismembered of the Vietnam War. During the 1970s, images of violence
entered the homes of suburban Americans through the television, and for the first time, Americans watched a
war—complete with all of its horrors—from their living rooms. In The Lovely Bones, the tangible marks of
violence that enter suburbia are not media images of war dead; rather, those marks are the objects of a raped
and murdered girl.
Additional discussion on historical context:
Child Kidnappings
The publication of The Lovely Bones and its ascent to bestseller status came as much of the nation was
gripped by the story of Elizabeth Smart, a fourteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped from her home in Salt
Lake City, Utah, in June, 2002. Pictures of Smart filled newspapers, television, and the Internet, in a repetition
of a trend dating back to the 1980s of wall-to-wall coverage of the kidnappings of prepubescent and early
adolescent girls for weeks, and sometimes months. Although the murder in Sebold’s novel takes place in
1973, its publication in the same month as the Smart kidnapping and its subsequent success as the Smart
kidnapping continued to fill the media were both a coincidence and a sign of the increasing cultural interest in
such stories.
New Age Religious Movements
Sebold’s novel is set in a nonreligious heaven where neither God nor Christ are apparently present, though
this heaven clearly contains human souls that have the power to observe actions on Earth and can visit Earth
and intervene in human affairs. These features may be inspired by the New Age movement, which began in
the 1970s and steadily became more popular in the subsequent decades. The New Age does not advance a
Historical Context
34
specific orthodox set of beliefs. Instead, it has as some of its common features a belief that angels and
deceased humans can intervene in human life, an emphasis on the benevolent and nonjudgmental aspects of
spirituality, and, typically, the belief in a diffused divine force emanating throughout the world, rather than the
belief in a single, specific God who resides in heaven. A wave of spiritualism at least partially inspired by the
New Age swept much of the nation in the decade leading up to the book's publication. This wave included
many books that asserted that the dead could maintain relationships with living people. Deepak Chopra, one
of the leaders of the New Age movement, sold millions of copies of his more than twenty-five books
beginning in the late 1980s. He claimed that it was impossible for anyone to objectively determine if
experiences such as channeling, alien encounters, and angelic visits were either true or false. This emphasis on
the validity of one’s experiences, no matter how fantastic, and their immunity from any outside investigation,
is another feature prominent in much of the New Age. The channeling of souls, ghostly visitations, and
paranormal phenomena also became a staple feature of television shows such as The X-Files and Unsolved
Mysteries. The idea of communing with the dead has a long history in America, where Ouija boards, séances,
and ghost stories are all well-established in the national culture. However, the ease with which Susie
transitions from life on Earth to life in heaven, as well as her unassuming ability to affect the living and
remain in contact with Earth, are in sync with the New Age notions that the supernatural realm constantly
affects humanity and that after death the soul is not permanently removed from Earth.
Critical Overview
The Lovely Bones enjoyed immediate popular success from the time of its publication. The novel, published in
June 2002, topped the New York Times bestseller list that summer. Prior its publication, as Charlotte Abbot
notes in Publishers Weekly, bestselling author Anna Quindlen told viewers of the Today Show, "If you read
one book this summer, it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's destined to be a classic along the
lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's one of the best books I've read in years." For the most part, the novel
garnered excellent reviews after its publications, with critics praising the first person omniscient point of view
and the stunning opening pages.
In a review for Christian Century, Stephen H. Webb argues that Sebold's reworked point of view "is the only
way to fully comprehend such an intolerable tragedy [the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl]."
Writing for the London Review of Books, Rebecca Mead deems Susie "a bright and ironical observer," and
Michiko Kakutani, in her front-page review of The Lovely Bones in the New York Times, points out that the
narrator possesses a "matter-of-fact charm." Finally, in his review in the Christian Science Monitor, Ron
Charles writes, "The power of The Lovely Bones flows from this voice, a voice at once charmingly adolescent
and tragically mature." Most reviewers identify Susie's voice as one of the novel's strong points.
Critics also agree on another of the novel's strengths: the opening pages. Even unfavorable reviews praised
Sebold's compelling opening. In Daniel Mendelsohn's review in the New York Review of Books, he likens the
novel to TV movies of the week—artificial, contrived, and lightweight. However, Mendelsohn also writes,
"The novel begins strikingly…. The few pages that follow … are the best in the book," and he praises the
authenticity of these pages. Writing for the Guardian, Ali Smith slams The Lovely Bones for its timidity and
sentimentality, but finds "the opening chapters … shattering and dazzling in their mix of horror and normality."
Despite a handful of negative reviews, the novel has been the "breakout fiction debut of the year" that Lev
Grossman predicted in the book section of the July 1, 2002, edition of Time magazine.
Critical Overview
35
Icicles on a cabin © Nik Wheeler/Corbis
Sebold's novel does, however, exhibit some weaknesses, and even her most ardent admirers recognize them.
Kakutani comments that Sebold stumbles in the "highly abstract musing on Susie belonging to a historical
continuum of murdered girls and women," and this critic finds the scenes dealing with Susie's classmate, Ruth
Connor's, "belief that she can … channel Susie's feelings" unconvincing. Other critics find troubling Susie's
return to earth, which Sarah Churchwell of the Times Literary Supplement calls "a false move that violates the
contract of willingly suspended disbelief."
Overall, critics believe that the novel's strengths outshine its weak moments. In her Washington Post review,
Maria Russo considers The Lovely Bones "utterly original and deeply affecting," and she asserts that Sebold
"manages to put her readers into contact with a throbbing pulse of life." Sebold, says Russo, "has an unusual
flair for both owning and transforming dark material." Katherine Bouton of the New York Times Book Review
concurs. Sebold, she writes, "deals with almost unthinkable subjects with humor and intelligence and a kind of
mysterious grace."
Additional commentary:
The Lovely Bones ascended U.S. bestseller lists in the second half of 2002, and stayed on the lists until late
2003. The paperback version of the novel remained a bestseller for many months afterward, and to date more
than five million have been sold in the United States. Several reviewers of The Lovely Bones prominently
mentioned the broader cultural and religious atmosphere in which it appeared, and the implications of the
basic scenario of the novel. The Christian Science Monitor noted that “it's no coincidence that the novel has
been embraced during a period of high anxiety about child abductions,” while Publishers Weekly added that it
discusses “a grim, media-exploited subject.” Both of these reviewers, however, believed that Sebold’s novel
transcends the sensationalistic and repetitive ways in which child rapes and kidnappings are treated by the
media. The Monitor said it explored the “mechanics of rape and murder and grief in a way no news report
ever could,” while Publisher Weekly said that Susie’s narrative is animated by the “reminder that life is
sweet and funny and surprising” and by the “lithe, resilient prose that by itself delights.”
In commenting on the spiritual element of a novel primarily set in heaven, the Monitor noted that while
spiritualism pervades The Lovely Bones, “none of the characters finds solace in anything as dusty as prayer or
a sacred text. And as pleasant as Susie's heaven is, there's no God there, and certainly no Jesus. This is
spirituality for an age that's ecumenical to a fault.”
The Boston Globe reiterated the Monitor’s praise of Susie’s both “charmingly adolescent and tragically
mature” voice by noting that her common and petty teenage concerns help diminish the reader’s awareness
of the brutality of her rape and murder. Indeed, the Globe said that Susie’s place in heaven not only
Critical Overview
36
compensates for the crimes committed against her, it lets her “live the universal fantasy of finding out what
happens after she's gone.” The Globe’s review goes on to say that Sebold offers “an ode to the living as well
as a requiem for the dead,” just as the Monitor had said that “this is as much a story about the dead as about
the living.” And, indeed, USA Today declared that Sebold makes “readers feel what her characters feel—in
life and death.”
Reviewers did not uniformly praise The Lovely Bones. The New York Times cited “a couple of faltering
moments” in the novel, and USA Today added that it “builds a theologically challenging view of heaven, then
abandons it for the supernatural.” Michiko Kakutani, writing a second New York Times review, said, “In the
latter portions of the novel, Ms. Sebold's assured narration takes a few stumbles,” including some “portentous
and highly abstract musings on Susie belonging to a historical continuum of murdered girls and women.”
Nonetheless, a column in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, written after the novel had become a bestseller,
seemed to summarize the general critical response in saying that although it could have “used rigorous
editing,” The Lovely Bones was “something so resonant and poignant about our humanity that I cannot get it
out of my mind.”
Criticism
Catherine Cucinella
Catherine Cucinella, a freelance writer, has edited a reference volume on contemporary American poets and
has published articles on poetry and film. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of California,
Riverside. In this essay, Cucinella analyzes the effects of domestic ideologies on the mother-daughter
relationships in The Lovely Bones.
Although The Lovely Bones has garnered many reviews, critical work on the novel proves scarce. Most
reviewers and critics comment on Sebold's innovative use of point of view, the omniscient first person
narrator, Susie Salmon. These same critics point to Sebold's mastery in presenting a disturbing subject—the
rape and murder of a young girl. More often than not, however, the unsettling elements in the text involve
issues of motherhood and mothering. Through her depiction of mothers and daughters, Sebold examines the
effects of patriarchy and domesticity on women. The Lovely Bones questions the roles and demands placed on
women by society as it presents the consequences that arise for mothers and daughters if these roles and
demands remain unexamined.
Sebold examines the dictates of patriarchy, the social system in which the father is the head of the family and
men govern women and children; and domesticity, the devotion to home life. This examination of the place of
women unfolds primarily through the first person omniscient narration, characterization, and through the
motif (recurring images in a literary work) of confined spaces. Although the restrictive systems under which
each woman must live come to light in The Lovely Bones, the novel makes clear that recognizing these
restrictions begins the process of loosening them.
Susie's omniscient perspective affords the reader the opportunity to watch as the Salmon women work through
that process. From her heaven, Susie provides insight into the internal thoughts of all the characters. Susie's
insights work within the narrative itself, offering Susie the opportunity to experience the move from girlhood
to womanhood. Significantly, the internal musings to which Susie is privy involve her mother's struggle with
feelings of discontent, a discontent that feminist Betty Friedan labeled "the feminine mystique." According to
Friedan, "a strange discrepancy [exists] between the reality of [women's] lives as women and the image to
which [women are] trying to conform." Abigail Salmon, Susie's mother, provides the clearest example of this
"schizophrenic split" and its consequences.
Criticism
37
On the morning of her eleventh birthday, Susie, awake before the rest of the family, discovers her unwrapped
birthday present, an Instamatic camera. Eager to use it she, she hurries to the back of the house and finds the
back door open. There in the backyard, Susie comes upon her mother, unaware of her daughter's presence.
Susie narrates:
I had never seen her sitting so still, so not there somehow…. That morning there were no
lipstick marks because there was no lipstick until she put it on for … who? I had never thought
to ask that question. My father? Us?
Because Susie retells this incident from her heavenly vantage point, she can now read significance into it. Her
status as omniscient first person narrator allows her insight that she may or may not have possessed when the
incident first occurred. After all, Susie's narration unfolds after all events have taken place. Significantly,
however, Susie makes clear the split between the private, unencumbered Abigail and the woman who assumes
a face for the world.
Susie's camera captures this moment, and the picture glaringly reveals the split to which Freidan refers:
When the roll came back from the Kodak plant … I could see the difference immediately.
There was only one picture in which my mother was Abigail. It was that first one, the one
taken of her unawares, the one captured before the click startled her into the mother of the
birthday girl, owner of the happy dog, wife to a loving man, and mother again to another girl
and a cherished boy. Homemaker. Gardner. Sunny neighbor.
Thus, Susie catches her mother in the moment before Abigail conforms to an image. This passage further
delineates the roles expected of women as it makes clear that Abigail held part of herself apart from those
roles.
As the narrative progresses, Susie watches and narrates her mother's struggle to reconcile the need for
autonomy with the demands of motherhood and wifehood. Susie's murder initiates much of Abigail's unrest.
Her grief and unacknowledged guilt over her daughter's death seem to suffocate Abigail, causing her to
withdraw from her husband and children. However, this feeling of confinement predates the murder. As a
young wife and new mother, Abigail saw the withering of her dreams: "the stack of books on [the] beside
table changed from catalogs for local colleges, encyclopedias of mythology, novels by James, Eliot, and
Dickens, to the works of Dr. Spock." The birth of her third child, Buckley, pushes Abigail further away from
the woman who earned a master's degree in literature, who read philosophy, and who aspired to teach at the
college level. She found that she could not "have it all;" she could not even remain in love with her husband.
Susie observes poignantly that her parents "had been deeply, separately, wholly in love—apart from her
children [her] mother could reclaim this love, but with them she began to drift."
The narrative time in The Lovely Bones spans the 1970s; however, Abigail herself came of age in earlier
decades, and she took on the role of new wife and mother in the late 1950s. Therefore, she carries within
herself the constrictions of 1950s domestic ideology, an ideology that, according to Nancy Woloch in Women
and the American Experience, "posited fulfillment within the family as a goal to which women of all classes
and backgrounds might aspire." In addition, the rise of the suburbs extended the demands of domesticity, an
extension clearly visible in The Lovely Bones. Woloch explains, "The domestic passion of the 1950s coincided
with a massive exodus to the suburbs, the ideal place for raising families," and federal policies such as
low-interest mortgages and veteran benefits, as well as federally funded programs for highway construction,
contributed to the suburban growth. These polices, according to Woloch, "promoted domestic ideals, since
suburban life, for women, meant commitment to home and family, to house care and child care." In addition,
advertising throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s further promoted a domestic ideology. The message:
domesticity equals happiness and contentment. However, as Abigail demonstrates and Freidan's study
Catherine Cucinella
38
confirms, not all women enjoyed these feelings. Instead, this domesticity pushed them into spaces of
confinement and restriction.
Abigail, then, fails to embrace the dictates of domestic ideology. Even before Susie's murder, she grows
distant from her children, and after the murder, she distances herself physically, as well as emotionally, from
her family: avoiding Jack; eating macaroons in a downstairs bathroom hidden away from Jack, Lindsey, and
Buckley; having an affair with Len Fenerman, the lead detective on Susie's case; and finally, leaving the
family. However, for Abigail, the repressive aspects of 1950s and 1960s domesticity combine with the
changing position of women in the 1970s—changes brought about by second wave feminism—and with the
overwhelming grief and guilt attached to Susie's death. This grief proves just as stifling to Abigail as does her
wifehood and motherhood. In California, whenever Abigail "walked inside a gift shop or café the four walls
around her would begin to breathe like a lung. She would feel it then, creeping up the sides of her calves and
into her gut, the onslaught, the grief coming." The image of the shop breathing like a lung evokes earlier
images of confinement in The Lovely Bones: the hole in the cornfield where Mr. Harvey rapes and murders
Susie, the small hospital balcony where Abigail and Len first kiss, the fort where Buckley shuts himself off
from the world, the closet like room in which Ruth Connors lives, the narrow hospital bed in which Abigail
and Jack finally cry about Susie. The spaces of confinement that Abigail inhabits simultaneously restrict her
and free her. In these places, she confronts her discontent and disappointment, in them she identifies her
oppressions and weakness, and within these small spaces, she often comes to understandings. The two most
significant instances of resolution occur in an airplane and in a hospital room. Susie listens to her mother's
thoughts as she flies to Pennsylvania after Jack's heart attack,
[s]he could not help but think of how, if she were a mother traveling, there would be two seats
filled beside her. One for Lindsey. One for Buckley. But though she was, by definition, a
mother, she had at some point ceased to be one too. She couldn't claim that right and privilege
after missing more than half a decade of their lives. She now knew that being a mother was a
calling, something plenty of young girls had dreamed of being. But my mother had never had
that dream, and she had been punished in the most horrible and unimaginable way for never
having wanted me.
In order for Abigail to reunite with her family, she must honestly confront her feelings about motherhood, and
she must come to realize that she can love her children, living and dead, without sacrificing herself. Maternal
love, in and of itself, does not demand the elimination of a woman's sense of self. As Sebold makes clear in
The Lovely Bones, domesticity as constructed within patriarchy makes this demand.
Abigail occupies the positions of both mother and daughter, and just as she must work through her feelings
about her own mothering, she must also confront the way she was mothered. Like her daughters, Abigail felt
closer to her father than to her mother, Grandma Lynn. Lynn and Abigail, though in many ways polar
opposites—Lynn flamboyant and frivolous, Abigail vulnerable and serious—exhibit the same ambivalence
toward motherhood. Susie provides insight into her mother and grandmother's relationship:
Grandma Lynn embarrassed my mother by insisting on wearing her used furs on walks
around the block and by once attending a block party in high makeup. She would ask my
mother questions until she knew who everyone was, whether or not my mother had seen the
inside of their house, what the husband did for a living, what cars they drove. She made a
solid catalog of the neighbors. It was a way, I now realized, to try to understand her daughter
better. A misguided circling, a sad, partnerless dance.
Much later, after Susie's death, after her almost ten-year absence from the family, after her return to
Pennsylvania, Abigail accepts Lynn as Lynn: "[Abigail] was beginning to wonder how useful her
scorched-earth policy had been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was
Catherine Cucinella
39
vain." This thought process and the realization to which it leads upend the dictates of an idealized
motherhood, one generating from the limitations of a domestic ideology constructed in the 1950s and 1960s.
Lynn, however, possesses little of the accepted maternal attributes. Her cooking skills run to frozen dinners,
and she breezes in and out of her grandchildren's lives, staying long enough only to upset routines. However,
after Susie's death, she comes to understand her daughter's needs much more clearly. In a rare
mother-daughter moment, Abigail confesses to Lynn the terrible loneliness she felt as a child, and Lynn
realizes that Susie's death took Abigail "inside the middle of a ground zero to which" nothing in the older
woman's experience "could offer her insight." This realization provides the first glimmer of connection
between mother and daughter. When Abigail leaves the family, Lynn moves in and assumes the maternal role.
This assumption, similar to Abigail's eventual return, succeeds because Lynn assumes the maternal role by
choice, not because society demands that she does so. Unlike her earlier experience as mother, Lynn
understands her motivations; thus she can mother Lindsey and Buckley without risk to her own position as an
eccentric and independent woman.
Just as Abigail, by understanding her feelings about her own mother, herself as mother, and motherhood in
general, can take her place within the family, Susie comes to understand the connection that she shared with
her mother in life. By seeing her mother's internal conflicts and watching Abigail seek ways to erase her
loneliness, disappointments, grief, and guilt, Susie realizes that she wants and needs her mother. She "hears"
her mother calling her for dinner as Mr. Harvey rapes her; she repeatedly describes her mother's "ocean eyes;"
she recalls her mother's stories; she names her mother's loneliness and need. Referring to Franny, her intake
counselor in heaven, Susie says, "Franny was old enough to be our mother—mid-forties—and it took Holly and
me a while to figure out that this had been something we wanted: our mothers." Letting go of the living and
accepting herself as dead emerges as Susie's major quest throughout the story; however, the need to accept her
mother for who she was proves another significant task for Susie.
The reconciliation between Susie's parents makes clear the nature of acceptance. Reconciliation depends upon
an unconditional acceptance. In the hospital after his heart attack, Jack wakes in the early morning hours to
find Abigail sleeping, her hand in his. Susie's omniscient position reveals her father's thoughts: "She was here,
and this time, despite all, he was going to let her be who she was." Susie comes to this acceptance along with
her father. Watching Abigail's flight from and return home, Susie learns to see her relationship with her
mother from outside the confining parameters of socially mandated motherhood. When Abigail can finally say
aloud, "I love you, Susie," Susie acknowledges, "I had heard these words so many times from my father that it
shocked me now; I had been waiting, unknowingly, to hear it from my mother." Susie continues, "She had
needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time."
Susie's sister, Lindsey, inhabits the middle ground in these mother-daughter configurations. Susie's death
moves Lindsey from middle child and younger daughter to older child and only living daughter. Gradually,
she also moves into the position vacated by her mother. In the chaos that ensues when Jack is rushed to the
hospital after being beaten in the cornfield, Abigail sees Buckley turn to his sister rather than to his mother.
The maternal role falls on Lindsey. Susie observes, "My sister felt more alone than she had ever been but also
more responsible. Buckley couldn't be left by himself," and after her mother leaves, Lindsey's maternal role
expands.
However, unlike her mother, Lindsey does not push aside her own aspirations for family. Admittedly, Lindsey
is not Buckley's mother, but that fact does not lessen the responsibility that Lindsey bears. Whereas Abigail
illustrates 1950s and 60s domestic ideology, Lindsey embodies the promises of 1970s feminism. Bright and
ambitious, she takes an active role in both her home and in the investigation of her sister's murder. When the
police fail to find evidence linking Mr. Harvey to the crime, Lindsey breaks into his house and steals drawings
that he made of the underground room where he killed Susie. Lindsey participates in gifted symposiums,
graduates from Temple University, earns a master's degree in counseling, and starts a career with that degree.
Catherine Cucinella
40
She also marries her high school sweetheart, Samuel.
Lindsey accomplishes most of these things during her mother's absence, an absence that Lindsey saw coming.
On the first anniversary of Susie's death, Lindsey asks her mother, "Are you going to leave us?" As Susie
narrates, "'Come here baby,' my mother said, and Lindsey did. She leaned back into my mother's chest, and
my mother rocked her awkwardly on the rug. 'You are doing so well, Lindsey; you are keeping your father
alive."' Lindsey does not have the benefit of Susie's all-encompassing perspective; Lindsey does not know her
mother's thoughts, but she does understand that her mother will not stay, and somehow, Lindsey seems to
accept her mother's need to go. When Abigail returns, Lindsey poses yet another question. Referring to
Buckley, she asks, "Are you going to hurt him again?" Abigail hears a challenge in the question, a challenge
glaring from her daughter's eyes. "I know what you did," Lindsey tells her mother. This mother-daughter
relationship, Abigail and Lindsey, perhaps the most tenuous of all those depicted in the book, manifests as the
most honest. Lindsey has always accepted Abigail for who she was, and she seems able to accept their
relationship for what it is—desiring nothing more.
The Lovely Bones holds motherhood, along with mothers and daughters, up to scrutiny, and in the end the
narrative offers a new understanding of those bonds by demonstrating the importance of examining the
ideologies behind them. The novel reinforces the connection of generations through women with the closing
image of a strong and confident young mother, Lindsey, with her daughter, Abigail Suzanne.
Source: Catherine Cucinella, Critical Essay on The Lovely Bones, in Literary Newsmakers for Students,
Thomson Gale, 2006.
Daniel Mendelsohn
In the following excerpt, Mendelsohn argues that the general failure to recognize the book's weaknesses says
something about the cultural climate in which it was first published.
On May 22 of this year, six weeks before the official publication date of Alice Sebold's debut novel [The
Lovely Bones], which is narrated from Heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who's been raped and murdered, the
novelist and former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen appeared of the Today show and declared that
if people had one book to read during the summer, "it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's
destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's one of the best books I've read in
years." Viewers did what they were told and seemed to agree. Within days of Quindlen's appearance, Sebold's
novel had reached the number-one position on Amazon.com, and her publisher, Little, Brown, decided to
increase the size of the first printing from 35,000—already healthily optimistic for a "literary" first novel by an
author whose only other book, a memoir of her rape, was a critical but not commercial success—to 50,000
copies; a week before the book's official publication date, it was in its sixth printing, with nearly a
quarter-million copies in print.
In an interview with Publishers Weekly at the end of July, when the true extent of the book's success was just
coming into focus, Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, suggested that thebook's appeal lies in its
fearless and ultimately redemptive portrayal of "dark material": "grief, the most horrible thing that can happen
in alife."
And yet darkness, grief, and heartbreak is what The Lovely Bones scrupulously avoids. This is the real heart of
its appeal.
Sebold's decision to have the dead girl narrate her story—a device familiar from Our Town, a sentimental story
with which this one has more than a little in common—suggests an admirable desire to confront murder and
Daniel Mendelsohn
41
violence, grief and guilt in a bold, even raw new way. And yet after its attention-getting opening, The Lovely
Bones shows little real interest in examining ugly things. Indeed, the ultimate horror that Susie undergoes is
one for which the author has no words, and chooses not to represent. In the first of what turns out to be many
evasive gestures, the author tastefully avoids the murder itself, to say nothing of the dismemberment. "The
end came anyway," she writes, and there is a discreet dissolve to the next chapter.
I use the word "dissolve" advisedly: it is hard to read what follows in The Lovely Bones 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.
Equally soft-focus are the novel's sketchy attempts to confront the face of evil that Susie, and Susie alone of
all these characters, has looked on directly: the killer himself, Mr. Harvey. Sebold perfunctorily provides
some sketchy information that never quite adds up to a persuasive portrait of a sociopath. Harvey's father
abused and eventually chased away his wild, rebellious mother, whom the boy sees for the last time, dressed
in white capri pants, being pushed out of a car in a town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He
sometimes kills animals as a means of avoiding homicide. And Sebold grapples with punish ment—with, that
is, the moral meaning and consequences of the crime at the heart of her book—as weakly as she does with the
crime itself. At the end of the novel, in what is apparently meant to be a high irony, Harvey, who has managed
for years to elude Susie's increasingly suspicious family and the police, is killed accidentally: as he stands at
the edge of a ravine, plotting to attack yet another girl one winter day, he falls when an icicle drops onto him.
So having the murder victim be the protagonist offers no special view of evil, or guilt. I asked myself, as I
read The Lovely Bones, what could be the point of having the dead girl narrate the aftermath of
herdeath—what, in other words, this voice could achieve that a standard omniscient narrator couldn't—and it
occurred to me that the answer is that Susie is there to provide comfort: not to those who survive her, to whom
she can't really make herself known or felt, but to the audience. 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.
This is most evident in theauthor's vision of the "healing process" that takes place after the murder, a process
that furnishes the book with the bulk of its matter. Susie herself must undergo it, we learn: she has to be
weaned of her desire to linger in the world and "change the lives of those I loved on Earth"in order to progress
from "her" heaven to Heaven itself. (The cosmology is vague—more shades of Our Town here—but that's the
gist of it.) But The Lovely Bones is devoted even more to the aftermath (which is to say healing and closure) of
her death as it is experienced by her friends and family.
That a novel with the pretensions to moral, emotional, and social seriousness of this one should end up
seeking, and finding, the ultimate salvation and redemption in a recuperative teenage fantasy of idyllic sex
suggests that cinema, or television, is the wrong thing to be comparing it to. Sebold's final narrative gesture
reminds you, indeed, of nothing so much as pop love songs, with their aromatherapeutic vision of adult
relationships as nothing but yearnings endlessly, blissfully fulfilled—or of breakups inevitably smoothed over
and healed with a kiss. Just after Ray and Susie/Ruth make love, Susie's estranged parents are reunited on her
father's hospital bed, weeping and kissing each other.
That Sebold's book does so little to show us a complex or textured portrait of the evil that sets its action in
motion, or to suggest that the aftermath of horrible violence within families is, ultimately, anything but
feel-good redemption, suggests that its huge popularity has very little, in fact, to do with the timeliness of its
publication just months after a series of abductions and murders of girls had transfixed a nation already
traumatized by the events of September 11. It is, rather, the latter catastrophe that surely accounts for
thenovel's gigantic appeal.
Confidence and grief management are what The Lovely Bones offers, too: it, too, is bent on convincing us that
everything is OK—whatever, indeed, its author and promoters keep telling us about how unflinchingly it
Daniel Mendelsohn
42
examines bad things. "We're here," Susie's ghost says, in the final pages of the novel."All the time. You can
talk to us and think about us. It doesn't have to be sad or scary." The problem, of course, is that it does have to
be sad and scary; that you need to experience the badness and fear—as Sebold's characters, none more than
Susie herself, never quite manage to do—in order to get to the place that Sebold wants to take you, the locus of
healing, and closure: in short, Heaven. And yet what a Heaven it is. 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 postmortem favors of numerous virgins in Paradise. But how much more
sophisticated, or morally textured, is Sebold's climactic vision of Heaven,
Snow covering a field of corn stubble Richard Hamilton Smith/Corbisor
indeed of death, as the place, or state, that allows you to indulge a recuperative fantasy or great sex?
That for Sebold and her readers Heaven can't, in fact, wait is symptomatic of a larger cultural dysfunction, one
implicit in our ongoing handling of the September 11 disaster. The Lovely Bones appeared just as the first
anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was looming; but by then, we'd already
commemorated the terrible day. September 11, 2002—the first anniversary of the attacks, a day that ought to
have marked (as is supposed to be the case with such anniversary rituals)some symbolic coming to terms with
what had happened—was not a date for which the American people and its press could patiently wait. Instead
we rushed to celebrate, with all due pomp and gravitas, on March 11, something called a six-month
"anniversary." In its proleptic yearning for relief, and indeed in its emphasis on the bathetic appeal of victim
hood, its pseudo-therapeutic lingo of healing and insistence that everything is really OK, that we needn't really
be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary, Sebold's book is indeed timely—isindeed "the novel of the
year"—although in ways that none of those now caught up in the glamour of its unprecedentedly high approval
ratings might be prepared to imagine.
Source: Daniel Mendelsohn, "Novel of the Year," in New York Review of Books, Vol. 50,No. 1, January 16,
2003, pp. 4-8.
Beth Blair
In this essay, Beth Blair argues that omniscient narration gives a glimpse into the minds of characters and,
thus, a unique perspective on how individuals cope with grief and loss.
In The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold uses the omniscient narration of her main character, Susie Salmon, to
explore both the living’s response to the death of a family member and the dead’s response to the same
tragedy. Susie observes her family from heaven after her brutal rape and murder. Sebold’s use of omniscient
narration through Susie as she observes her family allows Susie herself to become the leading character in the
novel, and to be affected by the aftermath of her own death.
Beth Blair
43
Each of Susie’s family members experiences the aftermath of her initial disappearance and, later, her
confirmed murder differently. As Michiko Kakutani summarizes in her New York Times review of the novel,
“For the members of Susie's family and their neighbors in a small suburban development, her murder rumbles
through their lives like an avalanche: for some, it moves with breathtaking violence and speed, shattering old
notions of safety and faith; for others, it moves in slow motion, catching them when they least expect it and
tipping them off balance.” Susie’s mother, Abigail, avoids dealing with the reality of the loss and is
incapable of acknowledging her surviving family and her maternal role. Susie’s father, Jack, is so
overwhelmed with guilt and helplessness that he allows the unknown aspects of his daughter’s murder to take
over his thoughts and render him incapable of nurturing or providing parental guidance to his surviving
children. Susie’s sister, Lindsey, is able to wade through the initial horror of her sister’s murder and slowly
move on with her life while serving as a surrogate parent for her brother, Buckley, who is too young to
comprehend the tragedy. All of these reactions are observed and narrated by Susie, from her perch in heaven.
During Susie’s narration, she advances through her own stages of grief and recovery. Mourning the loss of
her family and friends, Susie vicariously experiences happiness through her sister, as Lindsey undergoes the
stages of adolescence that Susie will never herself have the opportunity to experience.
Before Susie’s death is confirmed, Abigail Salmon responds to her daughter’s disappearance with denial that
the loss is permanent. Abigail repeatedly appeals to the false hope provided by the stock response of the
police that “anything is possible” whenever other family members insinuate that Susie’s absence is
permanent. Once the confirmation of Susie’s death and probable murder is received, Abigail avoids motherly
interactions with her family and recedes into a daydream world consisting of memories of herself as a young
college student with big plans to move to a foreign country and study feminist literature. In the shadow of her
daughter’s brutal death, Abigail sees herself as a victim of her own failure to follow her dreams, and she
spends a considerable amount of time contemplating what her life would have been like without her children
and husband—and the present tragedy. Abigail eventually has an affair with a police officer and then moves
away from her family in an attempt to avoid having to confront the reality of losing a child. This escapism via
emotional and physical removal from the surviving members of her family renders Abigail helpless to
confront her daughter’s death and move forward in her life.
Upon the realization that his daughter has been murdered, Jack Salmon experiences a sense of helplessness at
the knowledge that he was not there at the time of his daughter’s murder, when she needed help. This
helplessness, coupled with the mystery surrounding his daughter’s death, takes over and precludes all
thoughts concerning Jack’s living children and his wife. When Jack allows himself the realization that his
wife and remaining children are very much alive and need his affection and attention, he is immediately
afflicted by his own comparison between his relationships with them and what his relationship with his dead
daughter might have been. Jack is incapable of interacting with his young son, Buckley, without feeling that
he is in some way betraying the daughter with whom he can no longer interact. Jack also feels guilty for being
unable to avoid thinking about how Lindsey reminds him of Susie. As he observes Lindsey’s development
from adolescence to maturity, Jack recognizes that his dead daughter will never experience similar growth.
His feelings of despair continue to drive him away from his family until the one-year anniversary of Susie’s
death, when he attends an impromptu memorial for his daughter. At the memorial, Jack realizes that Susie’s
memory is alive in the community of people around him, including his family. This realization empowers
Jack and helps him slowly reintegrate himself back into the lives of his living children, who have already
begun their own recovery from the loss and grief associated with their sister’s death.
The death of her older sister propels Lindsey Salmon into a guarded state of existence. The initial shock of
finding out that Susie was murdered results in Lindsey’s withdrawal from her friends, classmates, and
teachers. This withdrawal happens in part because Lindsey feels constrained by the natural tendency of
everyone, including her family, to compare her to her dead sister. As Susie observes from heaven, “When
people looked at Lindsey, even my father and mother, they saw me. Even Lindsey was not immune. She
avoided mirrors. She now took showers in the dark.” Lindsey quickly realizes that the strain experienced by
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her parents over her sister’s death has changed the dynamic of the family, and she demands that her family
allow her to deal with the death of her sister alone. Neither Abigail nor Jack is capable of escaping their own
emotional despair enough to provide comfort to her or adequately help her younger brother, Buckley,
understand why Susie is not at home. Lindsey increasingly hardens herself to the sympathy offered by
strangers and independently finds her own way of coping with the loss of her sister. As Lindsey slowly
regains her life, she allows herself to experience the growth typical of adolescent girls. This growth includes
experiencing her first kiss with her first boyfriend, going away to summer camp, and losing her virginity. The
momentous occasion of having her first kiss goes unnoticed by Jack and Abigail, who have abandoned their
roles as nurturing parents. Lindsey responds to this abandonment by unconsciously taking on a maternal role
for her brother. She continues to evolve into her own person throughout the novel—for example, we see her
going to college and becoming engaged—and does so while avoiding the pressure to flail into despair.
As her family responds to her death, Susie Salmon observes everything from her place in heaven. Initially, she
experiences an intense desire to interfere with the lives of her parents and sister as she witnesses their
downward spiral into despair and grief. This desire is intensified by the futility inherent in her position on a
heavenly perch. Upon Susie’s arrival in heaven, an intake worker helps her acclimate to her new
surroundings and provides her with advice concerning the attachment of the dead to the living. Although
Susie desires to observe every moment in her family members’ lives, the aide insists that Susie must also
allow herself time to move away from her attachment to the living and find a way to accept her status as a
dead person. This advice enables Susie to slowly evolve as she realizes that the lives of her family members
must be allowed to continue without constant reminders of her brutal death. The growth experienced by the
living does not mean that her memory is lost, but rather that those for whom she cares most are healing and
moving forward in life. Once she makes this important realization, Susie is able vicariously to enjoy the
experiences had by her sister, Lindsey, as she makes her way through adolescence into young adulthood.
Although Susie is frustrated by her murder, she avoids feeling rage toward her murderer, and instead observes
his behavior with genuine curiosity. By shunning rage, Susie avoids the consumption by despair that her
family experiences after her death. Through the omniscient narration provided by Susie from heaven, Sebold
is able to provide readers with examples of how people cope with tragedy. The unique viewpoint offered by
Susie’s narration gives the novel depth and provides a context through which each character’s suffering and
recovery is made available to readers of the story.
Source: Beth Blair, “A Dead Protagonist? Omniscient Narration in The Lovely Bones,” an essay for
eNotes.com, 2005. Beth Blair is a freelance writer and artist based in Seattle.
Lara Ramsey
In this essay, Lara Ramsey argues that The Lovely Bones redefines the classic coming-of-age story, whereas
growth and change occur throughout life and death, not simply from childhood to adulthood.
Set in 1970s suburbia, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones tells the story of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon’s
abduction, rape, and murder. Uniquely, past and present events surrounding Susie’s death are narrated by
Susie herself, as she sits watching Earth from a gazebo in heaven. Although this approach may seem an odd
choice, Susie’s omnipresent, omniscient first-person narration endows The Lovely Bones with a great power:
readers gain intimate insight into not only Susie’s perceptions, but also the interior lives and histories of
family, friends, community members, and even Susie’s deranged killer. Arriving on bookshelves during a
period of high-profile child abductions, and amid the ongoing fight against violence toward women and
children, The Lovely Bones is an important text in that it boldly brings these difficult issues to light.
While some critics, such as Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, praise Sebold for her skill in leading
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readers through such a “deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be
redeemed,” others bash The Lovely Bones for becoming too much of a self-help text at some moments, and
leaning too far toward the implausible at others. Most intriguing, however, is the fact that many critics touch
on, but don’t fully key into, the significance of The Lovely Bones as a coming-of-age story. Maria Russo of
the Washington Post, for example, hints at The Lovely Bones as a coming-of-age story by titling her review
“Girl, Interrupted” (referring to another popular coming-of-age text). On the other hand, Ali Smith of the
Guardian writes in response to comparisons between The Lovely Bones and Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird, a classic coming-of-age novel, that the two are “hardly comparable.” If the two novels are truly
incomparable, this is so only because Sebold redefines the coming-of-age story. Via her narrative choices,
Sebold reshapes the coming-of-age story to include not only human beings, but heavenly beings as well.
Most people have read at least one coming-of-age story in their long or short career as a student. In middle or
high school it might have been Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye; in college, it may have been Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, or perhaps Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. These stories usually
focus on a young person making the transition to adulthood. He or she undergoes adventures and inner turmoil
which serve as a rite of passage. The adventures can be physically, mentally, emotionally, and/or sexually
challenging. In the end, the character reaches a new stage of life; via experience, he or she has gained new
knowledge and matured.
The last passage of The Lovely Bones draws the reader’s attention to the fact that Susie was never allowed to
come of age:
And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet
out to his wife.…
His wife poured him some water from the sink as he fingered the tiny bike and the ballet
shoes, the flower basket and the thimble. He held out the muddy bracelet as she set down his
glass.
“This little girl’s grown up by now,” she said.
The couple assumes that the found object belongs to the usual little girl, who is grown up by now and is busy
enjoying life, her own career, or a family. As both the reader and Susie know, the true scenario is not so
pleasant, but rather exceptionally gruesome. Thus, one might argue that The Lovely Bones is not a
coming-of-age story; that it cannot be, as the main character dies before reaching maturity. However, Susie’s
response to the woman’s statement is “Almost.” Ironically, though robbed of her own earthly rites of
passage, Susie has experienced them through watching her sister and others, and with the help of an earthly
medium, Ruth.
Though the lessons Susie learns by watching family and friends struggle through the aftermath of her death
are crucial, helping her begin to understand the secrets of life, the most important people who assist her in
coming of age are her sister, Lindsey; and Ruth, a school acquaintance. While Lindsey toughs out the
development of her individuality amid the clouds of others’ pity, so does Susie. When Lindsey falls into her
first crush and experiences her first kiss, Susie, too, feels the thrill of first love. And as Lindsey experiences
the sweetness and anxiety of her first time having sexual intercourse with a loved one, so does Susie, sort of:
Under a rowboat that was too old and worn to float, Lindsey lay down on the earth with
Samuel Heckler, and he held her.…
Lara Ramsey
46
Their breath began to heat the small space beneath the boat, and he could not stop it—his penis
stiffened inside his jeans.…
“I’m sorry…” he began.
“I’m ready,” my sister said.
At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my
sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.
In this moment, Susie recognizes that her first-hand knowledge of first sex is very different from her sister’s.
Though she can witness Lindsey’s positive sexual experience, her being is still clouded with the brutality of
her own experience. Regardless, Susie still enjoys observing this and many other landmark moments. Years
later, Lindsey fulfills a dream the two sisters shared as she plans to wed her “one and only.” And yet another
rite is achieved when Susie experiences motherhood via the birth of Lindsey’s daughter.
There are myriad other moments in The Lovely Bones in which Susie experiences other aspects of coming of
age. In addition to experiencing Lindsey’s transitions, Susie also witnesses her mother and father transition
into a new adulthood. She watches her broken father come to terms with her murder and the escape of her
murderer. She sees her mother grapple with the desire to fulfill the old dreams that she gave up when she
married and became “Mom.” She watches her infant brother struggle to become a young boy. Nevertheless, it
is easy to see that Lindsey’s trials and tribulations, with their proximity to what Susie would have
experienced, are the experiences Susie prizes most:
I watched my sister and marveled. She was becoming everything all at once. A woman. A
spy. A jock. The Ostracized: One Man Alone.
And slightly later:
I could never have imagined a blessing greater to me than the physical safety of my sister that
day. As I walked back from the gazebo I shivered with the fear that had held me, the
possibility of her loss on Earth not just to my father, my mother, Buckley, and Samuel, but,
selfishly, the loss of her on Earth to me.
While Susie’s observations allow her to experience many of her missed rites of passage to a certain extent, it
is through Ruth that she is able to fully experience the particularly significant rite of sex. In this startling
passage, Ruth, who has developed a sensitivity that allows her to note where violent crimes against women
and children have occurred, is able to channel Susie. As Susie comes to life in Ruth’s flesh, rather than tell
the nearest person, who happens to be Ray Singh (her childhood sweetheart), who her murderer is and where
her remains can be found, she asks Ray to make love to her.
I touched every part of him and held it in my hands. I cupped his elbow in my palm. I dragged
his pubic hair out straight between my fingers. I held that part of him that Mr. Harvey had
forced inside me. Inside my head I said the word gentle, and then I said the word man.
While a number of reviewers have criticized Sebold for including such a hokey scenario, this moment is
crucial to Susie’s “almost” coming of age. Though she is dead, and cannot ever truly experience all the
crucial moments she enjoys through her sister, she is granted this one grace. Alive in Ruth’s body, Susie gets
to experience the sensation of inhabiting a mature body with hips and breasts. She gets to experience the thrill
of stowing away in a secret place to engage in the forbidden. And in stark contrast to her brutal rape and
murder, making love with Ray Singh both allows her the solace of two bodies coming together in love rather
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than violence, and takes her across one of the thresholds into adulthood.
Yet another crucial scene in this section is the casual conversation between Susie and Ray. Again, Susie could
be divulging information to help recover her bones so that they can be laid to rest in a proper site; or she might
use this time to communicate messages for Ray to take to her family. Instead, Susie simply asks Ray what his
plans for his future are:
“Will you stay here,” I asked, “after you’re done with school?”
“No one does,” Ray said. “You know that.”
I was almost blinded by it, this choice; the idea that if I’d remained on Earth I could have left
this place to claim another, that I could go anywhere I wanted to. And I wondered then, was it
the same in heaven as on Earth? What I’d been missing was a wanderlust that came from
letting go?
In this scene, Susie is simultaneously coming of age as an earthly being and as a heavenly being. While she
reclaims one of Earth’s physical rites, she encounters yet another valuable bit of knowledge: the importance
of letting go and moving beyond. Once she realizes that as a human being she would have had the opportunity
to shed the old and move on to the new, chosen solely by her, Susie is lead to a new understanding of her
heaven. If she can let go, if she can loosen her grip on the past, she can make room for whatever comes next in
heaven. Thus, letting go becomes an important lesson for anyone coming of age into any new phase of being.
In The Lovely Bones, while Susie is robbed of the opportunity to participate in earthly rites of passage, she
manages to experience many of them through those she left behind. Her heavenly endowment of omniscience
is what ultimately reveals to readers the fact that it is not only in the transition from childhood to adulthood,
but eternally, that we come of age. Susie’s lessons are learned from all the people she observes, from her
seventy-year-old grandmother down to her five-year-old brother. However, The Lovely Bones ultimately
pushes the notion of the coming-of-age process into the afterlife, as Susie’s vicarious earthly coming of age
coincides with her heavenly coming of age. Thus, comparisons between Sebold’s highly popular
contemporary novel and classic coming-of-age tales like To Kill a Mockingbird are far from baseless.
Source: Lara Ramsey, “Coming of Age in The Lovely Bones,” an essay for eNotes.com, 2005. Ramsey is a
college instructor and freelance writer and editor.
Selected Quotes
Preface, Chapter 1-5
Preface
1. "'Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.'"
Susie's father says this to her about the penguin when she worries about him. It turns out that she is right;
small creatures, like herself, do get hurt when their world is turned upside down.
Chapter 1
1. "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December
6, 1973."
Selected Quotes
48
This line communicates several things, both literally and by implications. On the literal level, it tells readers
who the narrator is, and how premature her death was. On the symbolic level, salmon are fish who swim
upstream to spawn. Susie's entire story is going to be "upstream" and "against the current" of normal events.
2. "I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an animal already dying."
This line gives readers a hint of the pure tragedy of Susie's existence. Before she went with Mr. Harvey into
the cornfield, she was not just alive, she was human. At a certain point, though, she was reduced to a dying
animal, a horrific fate.
Chapter 2
1. "When I first entered heaven I thought everyone saw what I saw."
On the most basic level, this statement guides readers, cueing them that this is heaven and acknowledging that
the story is being told from the afterlife, but indicating that Susie's—and the reader's—expectations of what
heaven was going to be like are wrong. On a more ambitious level, it sums up the idea that each person's
heaven, like each person's happiness, will be a little different.
2. "These were my dreams on earth."
What shapes heaven? Heaven takes on specialized individual layouts and populations according to the dreams
the dead had dreamt on earth. Heaven is a place where people are reassured, where their desires are all okay,
and, most importantly, where the desires people had felt on earth get a final chance to work out. In many
ways, the story told in The Lovely Bones is one in which all the characters form an extension of this sort of
heaven: Susie sees her sister married, her parents happy, her murderer dead, etc.
Chapter 3
1. "On my way out of Earth, I touched a girl named Ruth. She went to my school but we'd never been close.
She was standing in my path that night when my soul shrieked out of Earth. I could not help but graze her.
Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn't calculate my steps. I didn't have time for
contemplation. In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on."
This is an prime example of the effects of violence. It causes such pain that even the soul leaving the body
can't control itself. Pain overwhelms calculation. However, it also brings people closer together, or it can.
Susie and Ruth had not been close in life, but they are joined through Susie's pain.
2. "The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was that the line between the living
and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred."
Susie's thoughts here are at once something to be wished, as a great good, and a terrible fear. On one hand, it
means that those we've loved aren't ever really gone, and indeed, there are many instances in the novel of the
dead watching over the living, lingering over love. On the other hand, it means that there is no clean break,
and that people can be haunted, as Mr. Harvey is by his past.
Chapter 4
1. "In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened."
This is one of the times when there is a great division between life and afterlife, and one of the ways that
heaven is still painful. Susie wants desperately to contact her father, and in her heaven, the petals respond to
her wishes. Down on Earth, matter is more stubborn, and the tragedy is that it doesn't automatically do what
people want, no matter how intensely important it is.
Preface, Chapter 1-5
49
2. "'We've just built a tent,' Mr. Harvey said. 'The neighbors saw us. We're friends now.'"
Mr. Harvey builds and draws models of places where people live. He builds dollhouses, and draws
architectural constructs from around the world. The tent he is setting up here is a mat tent, and Mr. Harvey
thinks of how a "virgin bride" would be brought to the husband by a member of the Imezzureg. Harvey
dreams of these alien places to live because he cannot fully live in his own; no virgin brides come to him.
Instead, he rapes virgins, and kills them. Mr. Harvey knows on some level that building such a tent should be
a sign of community, and hopes to use it to keep Mr. Salmon from investigating him further. It is as if they are
now on the same side, horrific as that sounds.
Chapter 5
1. "But then only movement could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being
enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not
there when your daughter needed you."
This passage sums up the literally weight of guilt. Jack Salmon feels judged, by himself, by the expectations
society places upon him, and even by God. He feels the need to move, and he can't. This will become even
more clear as a metaphor in Chapters 11 and 12; when he tries to resolve the issue through violence, Mr.
Salmon is crippled, and can never move freely again.
2. "She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again."
Susie's thoughts here sum up both her pure heart (how happy she is for her sister), and how important love is
in The Lovely Bones: for the dead, it is almost like being alive again.
Chapter 6-10
Chapter 6 Quotes:
1. "'When I was sure,' she said, 'I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.'"
As an outsider in the community, Ruana Singh can speak what others cannot. Here she sums exactly what Mr.
Salmon wants to.
2. "If the case was open—in his mind if not in the official files of the police—it was blank. There was nothing
on the back of mine. There was nothing on his wife's."
Here Susie's thoughts trace the character of Len Fenerman, and how he preservers the memory of the dead by
keeping their case files alive (blank). It is a way of giving them respect. It also relates to the theme of stories;
their stories are not finished, and so can't be written yet.
Chapter 7
1. "Lindsay would tell the dead knight that a wife had to move on, that she couldn't be tapped for the rest of
her life by a man who was frozen in time."
This is one of many instances in The Lovely Bones when a small domestic detail accumulates tremendous
significance. The Salmons had learned to do grave rubbings on their honeymoon, so the family literally had
death at its origins. The children tell a story about this knight in the rubbing, but it eventually becomes true
about their father. With Susie's death, he is trapped in time, and his wife moves on, emotionally and literally.
2. "Had my brother really seen me somehow, or was he merely a little boy telling beautiful lies?"
Chapter 6-10
50
This question haunts Susie. Is she really contacting the living at any point in the book? Or is their need to see
her again conjuring up phantoms?
Chapter 8
1. "She had run without stopping, her white body thin and fragile and disappearing, while her son clung on to
the amber necklace she had torn from her neck to hand to him. His father had watched the road. 'She's gone
now, son,' he said. 'She won't be coming back.'"
Amber is a gem that was made by living sap placed under great pressure. Often insects or other formerly
living things like leaves are trapped inside for many years. Mr. Harvey's memory of his mother works like
this: in these precious memories are preserved moments of intense pain that he'd felt when he was himself part
of a living family.
Chapter 9
1. "I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow, to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo
or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either."
Here Susie watches Ray struggle with several issues. He wants to keep Susie alive in his memory, because
they did share something special and he wanted her. On the other hand, he wants to move on, and not to be
stuck like the knight in the Salmon family story.
Chapter 10
1. "Lonely, I thought, on Earth as it is in heaven."
Susie makes this observation about Artie, one of the kids at the summer gifted symposium. He's lonely in part
because he is obsessed with death. Susie, of course, is lonely because she is dead.
2. "At fourteen my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was
horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows."
Lindsey's first experience of sex contrasts with Susie's first experience to show how great the distance is
between what should be the case (Lindsey's experience), and what sometimes is the case (Susie's experience).
The "walls" refer to how Susie's experience contains her, putting her literally in the grave, while Lindsey's
experience gives her a vision of a larger world, as a window does.
Chapter 11-16
Chapter 11
1. "What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed
animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child."
This is one of the most surprising and emotionally brave moments in The Lovely Bones. Susie's thoughts don't
apologize for Mr. Harvey's actions, or make his killing okay in any way. However, they do show an
unexpected side: how hard he tries not to kill. This allows a reader to pity him without liking or approving of
him.
Chapter 12
1. "My mother was, in her need, irresistible."
Susie's thoughts about her mother are childlike in many ways. She speaks of her mother in absolute terms. In
Chapter 11-16
51
truth, no one is irresistible, but Mrs. Salmon might seem that way because of the intensity of her need.
2. "He pushed her back into the stucco surface of the wall as they kissed, and my mother held onto him as if
on the other side of his kiss there could be a new life."
A kiss can lead to a new life, in the sense that it can lead to sex, which can lead to pregnancy. Symbolically,
though, Mrs. Salmon is trying to tap that energy for herself, so that she can live that new life, rather than
giving birth to it.
Chapter 13
1. "They had never been close. They both knew it, but it wasn't something they acknowledged very much."
Susie's observation here refers to her mother and her mother's mother (Grandma Lynn). It is a good example
of her honesty, and the novel's honesty about families. It also shows Grandma Lynn trying to do her duty
despite the emotional closeness being gone.
2. "She dreamed of the country of India, where she had never been. There were orange traffic cones and
beautiful lapis lazuli insects with mandibles of gold. A young girl was being led through the streets. She was
taken to a pyre where she was wound in a sheet and placed up on a platform built from sticks. The bright fire
that consumed her brought my mother into that deep, light dreamlike bliss. The girl was being burned a live,
but, first, there had been her body, clean and whole."
Mrs. Salmon's dream points out one of the specific pains of Susie's death. Without a whole (and clean) body
to bury, there is no way to say a clean goodbye.
Chapter 14
1. "He fashioned a wife out of whichever victim he'd recently been taking pleasure in in his memory, and to
flesh her out there was always his mother."
This observation about Mr. Harvey's method of constructing cover stories indicates how he functions
mentally; his mother is always blended with the women he killed in his mind. This indicates how he loved
them (in his own sick way), but also how he hated his mother.
2. "Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was the day that I knew I wanted to tell
the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it
cannot be contained."
This is one of the most direct statements about the power of stories in the novel. Telling a painful story
diminishes the pain. Therefore, painful stories must be told, and retold.
Chapter 15
1. "He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the
two worst things to be."
Mr. Harvey's youthful insight lays the foundation for his future sickness. He has seen vulnerability, and it
becomes so hateful to him that he kills it, again and again, to prove he has no part in it.
2. "Mr. Harvey left his house for the final time while my mother was granted her most temporal wish. To find
a doorway out of her ruined heart, in merciful adultery."
Chapter 11-16
52
Mrs. Salmon's "doorway" is like her daughter Lindsey's window. For both of them, sex becomes a way to
escape from the pain of the present into a different world. However, labeling it a "temporal" wish indicates it
is both urgent and time-bound (of this earth). It is not a heavenly desire.
Chapter 16
1. "Our house looked the same as every other one on the block, but it was not the same. Murder had a blood
red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone."
Susie's symbolic observation resonates with the Biblical killing of the first born, but inverts it: when the Jews
were held in Egypt, one of the curses sent was an angel of death. If a door was marked with blood, he would
pass it by. If not, he would kill the first born, which was Susie. This sums up one of the terrible tragedies of
The Lovely Bones: this is a world in which "curses" happen, but unlike the Biblical curse, there is no way to
avoid them. Things like Mr. Harvey just happen, and they stain a house (family) forever.
2. "'You look invincible,' my mother said one night.
I loved those times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and
said:
'I am.'"
This is deeply ironic. Anyone reading this knows that Susie is not invincible—she was killed, and killed easily.
But it is what every parent wishes for his or her children.
Snapshots, Chapter 17-20
Snapshots
1. "I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it.
No one could take that image away from me because I owned it."
Taking pictures is one of the many ways time is stopped in The Lovely Bones. It is tragic because one can't
stop time, and it is ironic because Mr. Harvey also tries to freeze time and hold on to it, with his memories of
women.
2. "I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could
trace how one thing—my death—connected these images to a single source."
Susie's observation spells out the theme of many effects rippling outward from a single causal event.
Chapter 17
1. "'Samuel Heckler,' my sister said, 'fixer of broken things.'"
While Lindsey is being somewhat ironic here, turning Samuel's role in her life into a title, she should also be
taken quite literally. In this world, the only way to "fix" people who have been broken is to love them.
2. "The room was silent for a moment. What Samuel had said was true, of course, but it also pointed too
clearly to a certain fact—that Lindsay and Buckley had come to live their lives in direct proportion to what
effect it would have on a fragile father."
One of the challenges in this novel, and in the lives all people live alongside people that they care about, is
how to speak the truth without speaking it too nakedly, and hurting those involved.
Snapshots, Chapter 17-20
53
Chapter 18
1. "She had an expression of someone who was constantly on the lookout for something or someone who
hadn't yet arrived."
This description of Ruth indicates her ongoing focus on another world than this one. It also foreshadows
something that will happen soon thereafter in the novel: the person/thing who hasn't yet arrived at this time is
Susie, who will inhabit Ruth's body.
2. "His feet had grown unbelievably cold in the damp grass. His chest felt hollow, bugs flying around an
excavated cavity. There was an echo in there, and it drummed into his ears. Let go."
While this description vividly captures what Mr. Salmon was feeling at the moment of his heart attack, it also
refers symbolically to Susie's death: his heart was broken long ago in another "excavated cavity."
Chapter 19
1. She held on to two sides of an hourglass and wondered how this could be possible. The time she'd had
alone had been gravitationally circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back. And they had
pulled now—double-fisted. A marriage. A heart attack."
Both of these events pull on Abigail Salmon's heart. They anchor her, and define her, and time is what runs
between them. She'd tried to escape from these anchors for awhile, but one thing The Lovely Bones makes
clear is that people cannot escape the fates established for them.
2. "But though she was, by definition, a mother, she had at some point ceased to be one too. She couldn't
claim that right and privilege after missing more than half a decade of their lives. She now knew that being a
mother was a calling, something plenty of young girls dreamed of being. But my mother had never had that
dream, and she had been punished in the most horrible and unimaginable way for never having wanted me."
Here is another of the terrible truths that families can't always voice: some mothers don't want to be mothers.
Abigail Salmon believes that because she lacks this dream—isn't what she should be—her daughter was killed.
Chapter 20
1. "I was the dead knight gone to heaven with my faithful dog and she was the live wire of a wife. 'How can I
be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?'"
Susie thinks this about herself, explicitly linking that childhood story to her own fate. However, while she
thinks this while watching her father, this question applies even more fully to another man: Mr. Harvey.
2. "It had been in the flash of her soccer shirt that his life had begun to spin out of control."
Here again readers see small individual events having tremendous implications. The sight of Lindsey
Salmon's shirt is the place where Mr. Harvey's life starts to fall apart.
Chapter 21-23, Bones
Chapter 21
1. "'Apparently,' he said, 'the earth's throat burps.'"
A burp happens when something that has been put into the digestive process returns briefly to the outer world,
in a way that makes a surprising noise. While this statement is being made about the sinkhole, it also refers to
Chapter 21-23, Bones
54
all the details of Susie's existence after death: the world "burps" her back up briefly.
2. "And I thought of the mix of air that was our front yard, which was daylight, a queasy mother and a cop—it
was a convergence of luck that had kept my sister safe so far. Every day was a question mark."
In the same way that many results flow from a single cause, so this observation indicates that many causes
come together for a single effect: keeping Lindsey Salmon safe. It also indicates how fragile and precious this
safety is.
Chapter 22
1. "Ray's eyes bid me forward while the watching streamed out of me and gave way to a pitiful desire. To be
alive again on this Earth. Not to watch from above but to be—the sweetest thing—beside."
Here Susie sums up the poignant bittersweet quality of this miracle. With all that she knows in heaven, it is
still much better to be alive. She gets a second chance to be alive, but it is painfully brief.
2. "I was still as I came to realize that the marvelous weight weighing me down was the weight of the human
body."
Susie's observation here is a balance to the weight that pressed down upon her father just after she was killed.
He was weighed down by guilt and unable to move. She is weighed down by a body, which gives her access
to love.
Chapter 23
1. "These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous,
sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone."
Susie's observation here explains the meaning of the title. This book is not about the horrible bones like the
elbow that was found indicating her death. Instead, it is about "the lovely bones"—the invisible structures of
emotion that connect and support those who love her.
2. "She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do.
Ruth had been a girl haunted and now would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of
it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time."
Here Susie forecasts Ruth's future life. It is another version of Susie's life, in that the story of the most
important thing in Ruth's life must be told again. However, the difference is crucial: now it is by choice, rather
than by accident. It is a life she takes up, as a kind of heroic quest.
Bones
1. "I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will be, forever safe. But this heaven is
not about safety just as, in graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun."
Susie's observation sums up the nature of her heaven, which she is coming to know more and more fully over
time. As her pain throughout the novel has shown, it isn't all sweetness and light. However, it is a place of
completion, where the dead can escape the pain of "gritty reality."
2. "And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be."
This is almost the end of the novel, and this sequence spells out the way things should be. In the normal
course of things, when things work as they should, people who died remain as beloved memories. In the
Chapter 21-23, Bones
55
unnatural course of things, which Mr. Harvey forced the Salmons to live, the dead haunt us, and their presence
distorts us.
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
• Recorded Books published an unabridged edition of The Lovely Bones on audio CD in August 2002.
• The movie adaptation of The Lovely Bones is being directed by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of
the Rings trilogy. Jackson is producing the movie, which is scheduled for release in 2007, with his
own financing. The screenplay is being co-written by Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh.
Topics For Further Study
• Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., developed the five-stage grief model, which outlines and defines the
stages that a grieving person goes through while healing. Research this model, list and define the five
terms, then write an essay explaining how Jack Salmon, Abigail Salmon, and Susie Salmon in Alice
Sebold's The Lovely Bones progress through each stage.
• What would have happened if Susie were never killed by Mr. Harvey? Knowing what you do about
her desires, interests, and goals, do you think Susie's life would have turned out more like Abigail's or
Lindsey's? Would Susie have married Ray, or lived a bohemian life in the city like Ruth? Write a
short biography of Susie's life, including her family, that addresses who Susie might have been if she
had not been murdered at age fourteen.
• Using some historical research on the Women's Movement in the 1970s, explain how Abigail Salmon,
Lindsey Salmon, Ruth Connors, and Ruana Singh in Sebold's The Lovely Bones exemplify elements
of that movement. In other words, what aspect of the Women's Movement does each of these women
illustrate? Write an essay incorporating your research into your explanation.
• One can easily read Sebold's The Lovely Bones as a coming-of-age story. Identify which characters
"come of age" and why. What does the novel offer as the rites of passage for growing up? Do these
rites seem bound by the time frame of the novel? In an essay, compare the rites and rituals of
adolescence presented in The Lovely Bones with those of today's teenagers. Try to account for any
differences by addressing relevant cultural, political, or social issues.
What Do I Read Next?
• Lucky (1999) is Sebold's memoir of her 1981 rape. In it, she details the rape itself and chronicles the
arrest, trial, and conviction of the rapist. She also addresses the emotional aftermath and consequences
of the attack.
• Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees (2003) is a coming-of-age story. Set in the 1960s, The
Secret Life of Bees deals with tragedy, the absence of a mother, and the protagonist's need to look
backward and then to let go in order to move on.
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003), by Mitch Albom, follows the protagonist, Eddie,
through his last moments on earth, his funeral, and the days after his death. Then the story shifts to
Eddie's arrival at and experiences in heaven.
• Aimee Bender's first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), is about a girl named Mona who
deals with her father's mysterious illness by withdrawing from the things she likes to do: eating
dessert, playing piano, spending time with her boyfriend. She grows up to become a second-grade
math teacher, and must use her own experiences with illness to help a student through her mother's
cancer.
• Family (1991), by J. California Cooper, is narrated by a dead main character. Clora, a pre-Civil War
slave, escapes slavery through suicide. After her death, her spirit narrates the story of her children and
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
56
grandchildren as they live through slavery and the Civil War.
• The Afterlife (2003), by Gary Soto, is the story of Chuy, a murdered seventeen-year-old boy. Now
deceased, Chuy must solve the mystery of his murder and come to terms with his new identity in
death.
Sources
Abbott, Charlotte, "How About Them Bones?" in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 249, No. 30, July 29, 2002, pp.
22-23.
Bouton, Katherine, "What Remains," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the New York Times, July 14, 2002,
Final edition, Section 7, Column 3, p. 14.
Charles, Ron, "'If I Die Before I Wake, I Pray the Lord My Soul to Take': In Alice Sebold's Debut Novel, the
Dead Must Learn to Let Go, Too," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Christian Science Monitor, July 25,
2002, p. 15.
Churchwell, Sarah, "A Neato Heaven," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Times Literary Supplement, No.
5186, August 23, 2002, p. 19.
Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, W.W. Norton, 1997, p. 9.
Grossman, Lev, "Murdered, She Wrote," Review of The Lovely Bones,in Time, Vol. 160, No. 4, July 1, 2002,
p. 62.
Kakutani, Michiko, "The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death," Review of The Lovely Bones, in
the New York Times, June 18, 2002, Section E, Column 4, p. 1.
Mead, Rebecca, "Immortally Cute," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the London Review of Books, Vol. 24,
No. 20, October 17, 2002, p. 18.
Mendelsohn, Daniel, "Novel of the Year," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the New York Review of Books,
Vol. 50, No. 1, January 16, 2003, pp. 4-5.
Russo, Maria, "Girl, Interrupted," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Washington Post, August 11, 2002, p.
BWO7.
Sebold, Alice, The Lovely Bones, Little Brown, 2004.
------, "The Oddity of Suburbia," in The Lovely Bones, Little Brown, 2004, pp. 2-3.
Smith, Ali, "A Perfect Afterlife," Review of The Lovely Bones, in the Guardian, August 17, 2002, Guardian
Unlimited, www.books.guardian.co.uk. (August 17, 2002).
Webb, Stephen H., Earth from Above,? in Christian Century, Vol. 119, No. 21, October 9-22, 2002, p. 20.
Woloch, Nancy, Women and the American Experience, 3d ed., McGraw-Hill, pp. 508-09.
What Do I Read Next?
57
Further Reading
Baily, Beth L., and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies, University Press of Kansas, 2004.
America in the Seventies is a collection of essays by leading scholars in the field. These
essays address such issues as the cultural despair of the decade; analyze elements of seventies'
culture such as film, music, and advertising; and discuss the attempt by Americans to redefine
themselves in the 1970s.
Douglas, Susan, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, Three Rivers Press, 1995.
This book focuses on media images of women in the last fifty years of the twentieth century.
Douglas's discussions regarding the 1970s help in contextualizing the cultural atmosphere of
Sebold's The Lovely Bones.
Evans, Sarah, Born for Liberty, Simon & Schuster, 1997.
This one-volume history of American women examines the changing role of women in this
country. The later chapters, particularly chapters 11-12, prove helpful in understanding
Abigail Salmon and Ruth Connors in Sebold's novel.
Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, Norton, 1963.
The Feminine Mystique, a foundational feminist text, examines the discontent of white,
educated, suburban wives and mothers. Although published in the early 1960s, Friedan's
study seems relevant to Abigail Salmon's conflicting feelings in The Lovely Bones.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying, Scribner, 1969, reprint, 1997.
This book, written in plain, understandable language, introduces and explains the five stages
of grief. It remains a classic in understanding both the dying and grieving processes.
Further Reading
58