Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.
When Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” was published in 2002, it became a kind of national hearthside vigil — a million-copy bestseller in its first year, a Peter Jackson film, a book club fixture passed between girls and their mothers. Since then, today’s women have lived through the #MeToo movement and the slow public reckoning with how routinely women are disbelieved. Sebold herself has lived through the overturned conviction of Anthony Broadwater, wrongfully believed responsible for her rape — exposing how the institutions claiming to protect women are themselves deeply flawed and capable of catastrophic harm.
Today, “The Lovely Bones” sits under that altered light, and a feminist rereading reveals this book may be more concerned with romanticizing trauma’s aftermath than paying attention to women’s raw suffering while they live. What did Sebold accomplish in this book, and what does it cost when we find it beautiful?
The premise of the book is infamous. Susie Salmon, 14, is raped and murdered in a Pennsylvania cornfield by her neighbor George Harvey, and narrates the aftermath from a personalized heaven. The animating line of the novel — “Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. That’s the most frightening thing about them” — is a sentence I wish more readers would carry out of the book and into the world. Mr. Harvey is not a creature from a horror film. He builds dollhouses. He keeps his lawn tidy. His ordinariness is the threat. Sebold understood this two decades ago before our culture learned to articulate it at scale, before “He was such a nice guy.” The horror, Sebold reminds us, is real and daily.
“The Lovely Bones” also sits with the women left in the wake, observed by Susie from the afterlife. Abigail, Susie’s mother, does not transverse her grief into sainthood. Instead, she has an affair with the detective investigating her daughter’s murder, abandons her surviving children and flees to California to pour wine for tourists. Lindsey, the surviving sister, grieves by becoming impenetrable — she is the girl who refuses to be the next dead girl, and Sebold respects her armor without sentimentalizing it.
The book’s title is its own argument, and I am not sure I trust it. The “lovely bones” Sebold names are the new connections that form between the living after Susie is gone. The concept is meant to be redeeming, and is, at times, very beautiful.
But it is also part of a long literary tradition in which a dead girl becomes the soil in which other people’s growth is planted. And the prettiness of Sebold’s prose occasionally risks aestheticizing violence against women rather than confronting it directly — take Susie’s poetic observation that “loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman.” A heaven that fulfills Susie’s desires keeps her present and articulate, but it also keeps her intact. Real 14-year-old victims do not get to narrate or forgive. The consolation flows in one direction; it is for us.
Sebold has a hard-eyed sense of power imbalances between men and women — how, in any pairing, there is usually one who is stronger and one who loves them anyway. She names the asymmetry, but naming is not the same as undoing, and the book sometimes settles for elegy. The patriarchal structure that produces Mr. Harvey — the suburb that lets him pass, the police who circle without arresting, the cultural and societal script in which a girl walking home alone is already half-blamed — appears in Sebold’s book, but it is not the frame itself. Susie’s death is more of a private tragedy than public.
This is, I think, the central tension of rereading the book through a feminist lens. Sebold knows male violence is ordinary and that horror is daily and prevalent. But she then offers heaven, healing, the sense that the bones grow back lovelier. I do not want to be the reader who refuses comfort to you — I have watched friends use this book to metabolize their own assaults. I have used it that way myself. But the book asks us to sit with a dead girl’s grace as opposed to her rage and heartbreak.
Read it again. Read it for Abigail’s flight, for Susie’s narration, for the chillingly ordinary Mr. Harvey. Read it for the sentences that name our condition. But read it, too, with one eye open — alert to the way even our most sympathetic novels can take a girl’s suffering and teach us to find it lovely.