Lovely Bones - Learning To Let Go


A 14-year-old girl is raped and murdered, and then becomes the narrator of this story of healing, both for her shattered family and for herself...

A 14-year-old girl is raped and murdered, and then becomes the narrator of this story of healing, both for her shattered family and for herself. Author Alice Sebold in Lovely Bones creates a great way for readers to enter this horrific story that we hear too often in the news. And she creates a compelling character in Susie Salmon. It’s hard to imagine this story being told with wit and humour, yet Sebold pulls it off. Never heavy-handed, but with the nuances steeped in sensuality and compassion, Susie takes on a journey of observing life through family, school, first love, loneliness, depravity and justice without revenge. You get the sense that even though Susie is looking on from heaven, that she is fixated on earth and is holding back her own development in the new world she finds herself. But thinking of stories of ghosts haunting violent crimes gives plausibility to this. Not only that but Susie's yearning to be back on earth is actually part of the energy that almost destroys her remaining family. Mixing dysfunction with terrible pain, and a haunting, Sebold paints these dynamics realistically and poignantly. The healing that slowly emerges in the story is a testament to love in the here and now, a love that stays with you even as you walk in the shadow of death.

While there is no God mentioned in Susie's heaven, the compassion that suffuses the whole story, both in the characters in heaven and those fumbling fools on earth, gives the strongest hint of faith. Not faith as in belief, but faith as experience of something beyond your ego, that nevertheless approaches you with love. I found myself thinking that Susie is a good teacher for compassion, pointing the way towards being present to everything that happens, even the ugliness we encounter. It’s also a pointer, at least to me, that letting go is such a necessary thing to learn if we are to live life fully. I found that Susie had begun to idealize and perhaps idolize her family. As tragic as a life cut short is, she needed to move on. Of course that is my own life speaking back to me as well. It’s so easy to rank our life as "best of" or "worst times". It’s so easy to hang on to mistakes like a tongue worrying about the gap of a missing tooth. It’s so difficult to open our hands and be open again to the future, and yet only then can we really feel love and beauty. And yet letting go doesn't mean denial or repression either. What we encounter needs to be fully experienced. A phrase in the novel's heaven comes up a lot: "I guess you're ready for that now." The pace of grace is the timing that our souls know, even when we don't.

I would recommend this novel for anyone who likes character stories, or even as a fictional meditation on compassion.

Posted: Tue - September 21, 2004 at 07:56 PM        

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