‘Bones’ a powerful book right out of the headlines

Helen Holzer

Friday, July 26, 2002 | 9:04 a.m.

Title: "The Lovely Bones." x

Author: Alice Sebold.

Pages: 328.

Publisher: Little, Brown.

Price: $21.95.

Grade: A-

You may have bought this best selling novel because its storyline comes straight from the headlines, but you'll remember it because of its emotional wallop.

"The Lovely Bones" relates a parent's worst nightmare.

Author Alice Sebold's first book "Lucky," was a memoir telling of her own rape at age 18. This book, her first novel, is told through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl who was raped and murdered, and is now looking down from heaven.

On a cold December afternoon in 1973, as Susie Salmon is walking home from school in Norristown, Penn., she encounters a weird neighbor who invites her over to see something.

Three days later Susie's frantic family falls apart when the police bring them some of her belongings found in a nearby cornfield. Then a neighbor's dog turns up with more evidence.

"My father was the one who took the phone call on December ninth. It was the beginning of the end. He gave the police my blood type, had to describe the lightness of my skin. They asked him if there were any identifying features. He began to describe my face in detail, getting lost in it. Detective Fenerman let him go on, the next news too horrible to interrupt with. But then he said it: 'Mr. Salmon, we have only found a body part.' "

Still hoping against hope, Susie's parents draw comfort from one another.

"After Len's phone call, my father reached out his hand and the two of them sat in bed together, staring in front of them. My mother numbly clinging to this list of things, my father feeling as if he were entering a dark tunnel. At some point, it began to rain. I could feel them thinking the same thing then, but neither of them said it. That I was out there somewhere, in the rain."

Susie's father knows, just knows, that it is the quiet but weird neighbor who has killed his child. But he can't prove it, and slipshod police work allows the murderer -- who turns out to be a serial killer -- to escape.

When Susie's father tells his suspicions to a neighbor, she replies, "When I was sure," she said, "I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him."

This is a coming-of-age novel for a little girl who will never come of age. Instead, she watches her younger sister have all the experiences she should have had. She watches helplessly as her parents' marriage disintegrates, and her own boyfriend finds another girl.

Susie is now a spirit who lives in her own version of heaven. She can see everything that happens to the people she loves. But she can't communicate to them what has happened to her or who killed her. Her spirit is strong, and over the coming years she can see the impact her short life had on the people she touched.

"The Lovely Bones" asks many questions.

How can one event, with its ripple effects, change so many other events in the future?

How can some people cope with tragedy, while others run away or are destroyed by it?

And how could anyone hurt a child?

This novel is an emotional roller coaster that lifts your spirits one moment, and drops you to the depths in the next. It illuminates the best of humanity, and the worst. It looks at the disintegration of a family, and at its final reconciliation.

Alice Sebold does not paint a totally black landscape. Susie's heaven gives us hope that problems can work themselves out if we are only patient and loving.

And, it offers us the hope that when a breeze touches our face, or a candle flickers, that it's a loved one trying to tell us everything will be OK.