Problems With The Lovely Bones.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for The Lovely Bones.

I saw The Lovely Bones last night. I have a lot to say about it that I can't quite formulate, but I found a reviewer who seems to have a take similar to mine:

Peter Jackson and his usual screenwriting collaborators, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have simplified and amplified Sebold’s text, turning it from a meditation on the interiorpolitics of family into a supernatural revenge story. While there are a lot of things Jackson does right - chief among them the perfect casting of the young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan in the central role of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered in 1973 - the movie seems to miss the point of the novel.

I think this is dead-on. Alice Sebold's novel is about grief, and how it is a long aching process in which absolution only comes with age. In the book the protagonist's narration from the afterlife is more of a device for Sebold to explore the way a family deals with loss. And although Sebold does dabble in some bitter-sweet metaphysics in which the girl's ghost occasionally breaks back into living world, it is done very sparingly. The overwhelming feeling of the novel is not that of a supernatural story, but a serious family drama where the ghost is mostly a narrative device to examine real living human pain. I found the book incredibly moving, precisely because it refused to offer any easy answers or absolutions to a family paralyzed by sadness.

There is a happy ending of sorts in the novel, but it only arrives after years of dull agony, in which we watch the family grow and change. The father's obsession to catch the killer is there, but it's not the center of the story. Neither is the killer, really. The detective bits of the novel existed, I felt, to illustrate the dangers of obsession, to show that absolution has to come from somewhere else.

When I remember the novel, the main narrative and emotional arc to me has nothing to do with the killer. It has to do with the Susie's younger sister gradually growing out of her shadow, of having the adolescence she didn't and the rest of her family finally recognizing and appreciating this. In my memory the climax of the book is when her younger sister and her boyfriend, now in their late teens, spend the night in an old house and decide to get married, which feels like a big cathartic moment. Either that or when Susie--in the novel's only overt moment of supernatural shenanigans--borrows the body of another girl to have sex with the boy she liked. While I thought that was maybe going too far when I read the book, it makes some sense when you consider that the novel was inspired by the author's own experience of being raped as a teenager. The ghost-sex near the end was, I thought, a sort of healing antidote to Susie's rape, like she refused to move on while her only sexual experience remained a horrific one. Given that the book was written by someone who experienced rape but was not murdered, the notion of reclaiming sex as an act of love and not of violence has obvious therapeutic connotations.

None of this is in the movie, which makes me wonder what Jackson, Boyens, and Walsh felt the point was. I read a quote by Jackson where he explained why he wanted to adapt the novel in the first place, saying "like all the best fantasy, it has a solid grounding in the real world". Why did he think it was fantasy, I wonder? Because it involves ghosts and heaven? 'Fantasy' is the last word I'd use to describe Sebold's novel, because there is nothing fantastic about the feelings and situations it explores.

Reading the book I was reminded of the horrible accounts I've read from time to time about surviving families of real murder victims. I read once about two parents dealing with the loss of their daughter, who was raped and murdered with a tree branch. Years afterward the father, still living with the grief and rage every hour, got a serious tooth infection. He refused to go to the dentist, choosing to spend days on end in agony. When his wife asked him why he refused to get help he said he was trying to absorb their daughter's pain, as if by taking pain upon himself he was retroactively shielding his daughter from the pain she went through. It made no sense at all, and this is perhaps what makes it such a heartbreaking example of how the mind attempts to deal with grief, especially a parent's grief.

There was no easy absolution for that family, no heartwarming moment where the ghost of their daughter appeared and said everything was okay. That's why grief is so hard: because it's not a Hollywood movie where people get to say goodbye one last time. This is a view Sebold seemed to share in her novel, in spite of a few carefully placed instances of the supernatural. The ghost-sex in the novel is more for Susie's piece of mind than for her friends', which I feel is the big (if subtle) difference between the book and the film. The film is all about how she's not really dead, and how that helps heal her family. The novel is about how she is dead, and how her family manages to heal themselves anyway.