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quietprofanity Jun. 19th, 2008 09:30 pm)
quietprofanity Jun. 19th, 2008 09:30 pm)(This isn't technically a backlog review. Backlog currently includes Autobiography of a Face and Dry, but this book pissed me off so much I need to take the pain away.)
Conventional wisdom states that memoir is the thing and the novel is dead. That's why James Frey had to go through a public shaming through NO FAULT OF HIS OWN, OH NO, because his genius literate novel of novel literature had to be packaged as a memoir, the golden ticket to Oprah. Bullshit. Conventional wisdom is a crock of shit, and Alice Sebold proves it. In 1999 she wrote Lucky, a clear, honest, wonderful, if-I-made-a-list-of-top-ten-memoirs-it-would-be-in-it memoir about her rape, trial of her rapist and the aftermath. It did ... Well, honestly, I have no clue, but it wasn't as good as her 2002 NOVEL, The Lovely Bones, which was a bestseller by book standards, despite the fact that it totally sucks. Sucks like conventional wisdom. The world would be a better place if everyone read Lucky, but they don't. They read The Lovely Bones And that's sad.
If you don't know the plot, here's a quick summary: 14-year-old Susie Salmon walks home, is raped and killed by the official neighborhood creepy, quiet guy (of COURSE), and her family, barely-boyfriend, police officer on her case and some random lesbian all spend 350 pages going "Wow, I can't believe Susie's dead" and screwing up their lives. And Susie watches this all from Heaven.
I'll get my pre-prejudices and justifications for why they don't really matter in the end out right now. I'm a believer in God, but I tend to disbelieve in the afterlife. Part of that comes from being a Jew, because Jews have never really seemed to come to a consensus on the whole life after death deal (If you really want to get confused, ask multiple Jews if they believe in Hell). Part of it comes from a personal, quasi-religious experience I seem to remember from my early life and part of it may just be that I don't want to be let down if there isn't one.
But that doesn't mean I'm against afterlife stories, even in literary fiction. Even in literary fiction with rough themes such as mutilation and rape. This book that nobody read, Flying in Place, integrated an account of incest with a ghost story and it was pretty good. Heck, if you're a good enough writer, by the time you're done you should make me believe/want to believe, anyway.
When I went into this story, I was skeptical but open to persuasion or, to put it another way, I thought it could be either very powerful or very, very, very silly. Well, the good news its not silly. The worse than bad news is that its inept.
You can look at this story two ways. Way No. 1: It's a story about a girl who has to live with watching her family go on without her after her death. Way No. 2: It's a story about a family (and, to a lesser extent, a community) falling apart after their daughter dies. Either way, this story is a failure.
If this story is about a girl struggling to cope with not being alive (which I'm guessing was Sebold's intention, given the (unsatisfying) climax of the story), Susie doesn't seem to do a lot of struggling. The story is told from her point of view but with her now able to have the ability to see into the lives of her families, friends and enemies (First Person Omniscient, if you will). However, with a few exceptions, she seems so passive and unresponsive about the whole thing that she might as well be watching strangers. Oh, sure, she got excited when her sister Lindsey got engaged and when her dad was about to get clobbered by a neighborhood kid (don't ask). But Susie really should be more involved, at least emotionally, in so much more that goes on. Who the hell watches their mother carry on an affair and admit she never wanted kids anyway and DOES NOT GET UPSET? Or watches their murderer kill more children? Yeah, you could explain it away with shit like, "Susie was a photographer, so she likes to just observe and can't do anything anyway" or "She's in Heaven, there should be no troubles" but it holds the audience at a distance from Susie and doesn't allow us to really get to know her.
The fact that most of her family, friends and enemies have either a barely-drawn or no personality makes it worse and makes Way No. 2 of looking at the story a failure. All of the characters have one defining trait: they are upset about Susie being dead. And that's pretty much it. It's so bad that other than Ruth Connors, Grandma Lynn and Ruana Singh, I wouldn't know how ANY of these characters would act if Susie hadn't died. Oh sure, we know Daddy Jack Salmon likes to build ships in bottles and Abigail Salmon likes to read French literature and Lindsey Salmon likes to work out and George Harvey likes to kill people but THOSE ARE NOT TRAITS! THOSE ARE HOBBIES! YOU HAVE NOT MADE A CHARACTER BECAUSE YOU GAVE THEM A HOBBY!
And those are the DECENT characters by this book's standards. (I actually kind of liked Lindsey and Ruth before she turned from a bohemian artist into starving Sylvia Browne). How about Samuel the bland and perfect boyfriend (ARCHITECTURE IS NOT A TRAIT!)? How about Buckley who grows from 3-years-old to 12-years-old without any noticeable character growth (GARDENING IS NOT A TRAIT!)? How about HAL? You could cut out all his appearances, paste them together and have the length of a decent short story and yet in all of his appearances he leaves no lasting impression or character (APTITUDE WITH CAR IS NOT A TRAIT!).
And the story itself just feels far too long and inconsequential. And not very original. It's like a remix of the most common plots of literary fiction. The family in the wake of a death. The broken man who goes crazy. The woman who feels confined by her family and the subsequent affair and finding oneself. The weird girl finding her place. The younger sibling struggling to overcome his/her older sibling. The child molester living among the community (okay, I don't know how common that is, but I saw it in Little Children by Tom Perrota and he did it much better so I'm counting it. He also did the confined woman storyline better, too). Oh, and [SPOILER] the family cut apart by tragedy being brought back together by ANOTHER tragedy.[/SPOILER] Yawn, yawn, yawn.
Oh, and the climax of the story is total bullshit. At least to me. [MORE SPOILER] Basically what happens is that Susie gets to take over Ruth Conners, a girl who is able to communicate with the dead after Susie touches her while leaving the earth, and have sex with her first and only love, Ray Singh. Maybe it would have meant more when I was 14 and at the threat of dying without nookie loomed large but I really was kind of disappointed by the whole thing because I was hoping that she would use her time on earth for useful things like ALERTING YOUR FAMILY TO THE LOCATION OF YOUR BODY! Also, if you're going to do a Ghost ripoff, it works better when it involves two people who had a sustained relationship and not some month-long almost-kissing that wouldn't have been significant if Susie hadn't died. Bah. Sucks. I really wanted them to just catch George Harvey already.[/SPOILER]
I hate to be a condescending snob, but since I can be perhaps it would be better not to deny it and just say what I think. I think people like this book because it's safe. Yeah, some Christians whined that the Heaven wasn't Jesus-filled enough, but other than that it's kind of blandly peaceful and inoffensive. You get everything you want. You get to hear whatever your loved ones say about you after you go. Yeah, in the beginning they make some references to how boring it is, but they seem to get over that pretty quickly.
Now, I'm not a total black-heart. I can be sentimental. I WAS sometimes sentimental: my favorite scenes in the otherwise bad book were when Susie met her dog, and then her grandfather, in Heaven. And that's more of a personal thing. I really loved my grandparents and my childhood dog and when I think about the prospect of no Heaven, the idea of never getting to see them again is rather depressing. (Of course, I try to hold on to as many memories as I can, but it's hard when I think about how all the new people in my life I'll know will never be able to know how special those lost were to me. I CAN keep them alive in my heart, but only for so long.) So the brief scenes where she reunites with her dog and also with her grandfather, dancing with him as a six-year-old, kind of struck something in me.
Maybe other people get struck the same way. Maybe they lost family members and have been broken and a book like this gives them a little bit of peace, but I can't help but think of South Park's episode on John Edward when Stan asks the studio audience crowd, "Is this what you really want? To just be floating around looking at people after you die?" I think a great book would have realized that, would have brought up moral question of whether her silent presence in their lives was helping or hindering her family. But the book really couldn't care less. And in about 400 pages it couldn't make me care either.
It's a shame that this book is so bad, because Lucky remains really, really good and you should all read it now before even thinking of LOOKING at The Lovely Bones. At the very least, if a crappy book has to sell well it can sell well for a writer who ONCE did publish something good. Maybe I can just think of this book like the last Marx Brothers films. They're not as funny and they're over-long and have insipid song, dance and romantic sequences but they gave three excellent comedians cash that they never would have had normally. (OK, so Chico gambled away most of it anyway. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!) I hope Alice Sebold enjoys her money. She deserves it. Not for this shit. But she deserves it.
Yes, I just promoted selling out. I don't give a shit. Nyaaah!
Conventional wisdom states that memoir is the thing and the novel is dead. That's why James Frey had to go through a public shaming through NO FAULT OF HIS OWN, OH NO, because his genius literate novel of novel literature had to be packaged as a memoir, the golden ticket to Oprah. Bullshit. Conventional wisdom is a crock of shit, and Alice Sebold proves it. In 1999 she wrote Lucky, a clear, honest, wonderful, if-I-made-a-list-of-top-ten-memoirs-it-would-be-in-it memoir about her rape, trial of her rapist and the aftermath. It did ... Well, honestly, I have no clue, but it wasn't as good as her 2002 NOVEL, The Lovely Bones, which was a bestseller by book standards, despite the fact that it totally sucks. Sucks like conventional wisdom. The world would be a better place if everyone read Lucky, but they don't. They read The Lovely Bones And that's sad.
If you don't know the plot, here's a quick summary: 14-year-old Susie Salmon walks home, is raped and killed by the official neighborhood creepy, quiet guy (of COURSE), and her family, barely-boyfriend, police officer on her case and some random lesbian all spend 350 pages going "Wow, I can't believe Susie's dead" and screwing up their lives. And Susie watches this all from Heaven.
I'll get my pre-prejudices and justifications for why they don't really matter in the end out right now. I'm a believer in God, but I tend to disbelieve in the afterlife. Part of that comes from being a Jew, because Jews have never really seemed to come to a consensus on the whole life after death deal (If you really want to get confused, ask multiple Jews if they believe in Hell). Part of it comes from a personal, quasi-religious experience I seem to remember from my early life and part of it may just be that I don't want to be let down if there isn't one.
But that doesn't mean I'm against afterlife stories, even in literary fiction. Even in literary fiction with rough themes such as mutilation and rape. This book that nobody read, Flying in Place, integrated an account of incest with a ghost story and it was pretty good. Heck, if you're a good enough writer, by the time you're done you should make me believe/want to believe, anyway.
When I went into this story, I was skeptical but open to persuasion or, to put it another way, I thought it could be either very powerful or very, very, very silly. Well, the good news its not silly. The worse than bad news is that its inept.
You can look at this story two ways. Way No. 1: It's a story about a girl who has to live with watching her family go on without her after her death. Way No. 2: It's a story about a family (and, to a lesser extent, a community) falling apart after their daughter dies. Either way, this story is a failure.
If this story is about a girl struggling to cope with not being alive (which I'm guessing was Sebold's intention, given the (unsatisfying) climax of the story), Susie doesn't seem to do a lot of struggling. The story is told from her point of view but with her now able to have the ability to see into the lives of her families, friends and enemies (First Person Omniscient, if you will). However, with a few exceptions, she seems so passive and unresponsive about the whole thing that she might as well be watching strangers. Oh, sure, she got excited when her sister Lindsey got engaged and when her dad was about to get clobbered by a neighborhood kid (don't ask). But Susie really should be more involved, at least emotionally, in so much more that goes on. Who the hell watches their mother carry on an affair and admit she never wanted kids anyway and DOES NOT GET UPSET? Or watches their murderer kill more children? Yeah, you could explain it away with shit like, "Susie was a photographer, so she likes to just observe and can't do anything anyway" or "She's in Heaven, there should be no troubles" but it holds the audience at a distance from Susie and doesn't allow us to really get to know her.
The fact that most of her family, friends and enemies have either a barely-drawn or no personality makes it worse and makes Way No. 2 of looking at the story a failure. All of the characters have one defining trait: they are upset about Susie being dead. And that's pretty much it. It's so bad that other than Ruth Connors, Grandma Lynn and Ruana Singh, I wouldn't know how ANY of these characters would act if Susie hadn't died. Oh sure, we know Daddy Jack Salmon likes to build ships in bottles and Abigail Salmon likes to read French literature and Lindsey Salmon likes to work out and George Harvey likes to kill people but THOSE ARE NOT TRAITS! THOSE ARE HOBBIES! YOU HAVE NOT MADE A CHARACTER BECAUSE YOU GAVE THEM A HOBBY!
And those are the DECENT characters by this book's standards. (I actually kind of liked Lindsey and Ruth before she turned from a bohemian artist into starving Sylvia Browne). How about Samuel the bland and perfect boyfriend (ARCHITECTURE IS NOT A TRAIT!)? How about Buckley who grows from 3-years-old to 12-years-old without any noticeable character growth (GARDENING IS NOT A TRAIT!)? How about HAL? You could cut out all his appearances, paste them together and have the length of a decent short story and yet in all of his appearances he leaves no lasting impression or character (APTITUDE WITH CAR IS NOT A TRAIT!).
And the story itself just feels far too long and inconsequential. And not very original. It's like a remix of the most common plots of literary fiction. The family in the wake of a death. The broken man who goes crazy. The woman who feels confined by her family and the subsequent affair and finding oneself. The weird girl finding her place. The younger sibling struggling to overcome his/her older sibling. The child molester living among the community (okay, I don't know how common that is, but I saw it in Little Children by Tom Perrota and he did it much better so I'm counting it. He also did the confined woman storyline better, too). Oh, and [SPOILER] the family cut apart by tragedy being brought back together by ANOTHER tragedy.[/SPOILER] Yawn, yawn, yawn.
Oh, and the climax of the story is total bullshit. At least to me. [MORE SPOILER] Basically what happens is that Susie gets to take over Ruth Conners, a girl who is able to communicate with the dead after Susie touches her while leaving the earth, and have sex with her first and only love, Ray Singh. Maybe it would have meant more when I was 14 and at the threat of dying without nookie loomed large but I really was kind of disappointed by the whole thing because I was hoping that she would use her time on earth for useful things like ALERTING YOUR FAMILY TO THE LOCATION OF YOUR BODY! Also, if you're going to do a Ghost ripoff, it works better when it involves two people who had a sustained relationship and not some month-long almost-kissing that wouldn't have been significant if Susie hadn't died. Bah. Sucks. I really wanted them to just catch George Harvey already.[/SPOILER]
I hate to be a condescending snob, but since I can be perhaps it would be better not to deny it and just say what I think. I think people like this book because it's safe. Yeah, some Christians whined that the Heaven wasn't Jesus-filled enough, but other than that it's kind of blandly peaceful and inoffensive. You get everything you want. You get to hear whatever your loved ones say about you after you go. Yeah, in the beginning they make some references to how boring it is, but they seem to get over that pretty quickly.
Now, I'm not a total black-heart. I can be sentimental. I WAS sometimes sentimental: my favorite scenes in the otherwise bad book were when Susie met her dog, and then her grandfather, in Heaven. And that's more of a personal thing. I really loved my grandparents and my childhood dog and when I think about the prospect of no Heaven, the idea of never getting to see them again is rather depressing. (Of course, I try to hold on to as many memories as I can, but it's hard when I think about how all the new people in my life I'll know will never be able to know how special those lost were to me. I CAN keep them alive in my heart, but only for so long.) So the brief scenes where she reunites with her dog and also with her grandfather, dancing with him as a six-year-old, kind of struck something in me.
Maybe other people get struck the same way. Maybe they lost family members and have been broken and a book like this gives them a little bit of peace, but I can't help but think of South Park's episode on John Edward when Stan asks the studio audience crowd, "Is this what you really want? To just be floating around looking at people after you die?" I think a great book would have realized that, would have brought up moral question of whether her silent presence in their lives was helping or hindering her family. But the book really couldn't care less. And in about 400 pages it couldn't make me care either.
It's a shame that this book is so bad, because Lucky remains really, really good and you should all read it now before even thinking of LOOKING at The Lovely Bones. At the very least, if a crappy book has to sell well it can sell well for a writer who ONCE did publish something good. Maybe I can just think of this book like the last Marx Brothers films. They're not as funny and they're over-long and have insipid song, dance and romantic sequences but they gave three excellent comedians cash that they never would have had normally. (OK, so Chico gambled away most of it anyway. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!) I hope Alice Sebold enjoys her money. She deserves it. Not for this shit. But she deserves it.
Yes, I just promoted selling out. I don't give a shit. Nyaaah!
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What do you think the author's point was? It seems to me that all the characters actions were for naught.
From:
[SPOILER-IFFIC!]
As for the author's point ... well, good question. It would be easy to assume that she looked at her own rape and went "What if?", especially considering that Lucky's title refers to an incident when a police officer told her after her rape, "Another girl in that spot was killed recently. You're lucky to be alive." Maybe she wanted to do a book where she wasn't so lucky, but she did say she wanted this book to be seen as separately from her rape.
I'm thinking that the point of the novel is basically Way No. 1 or Way No. 2 but I think Sebold either didn't decide definitively between the two or tried to do both and didn't do justice to either. I think you could maybe doctor the story into a better novel if you wanted to, but I have a feeling this story exists somewhere else and done better already.
From:
Re: [SPOILER-IFFIC!]
Your "way no. 1 or way no. 2" supposition works for me. Whether she denies it or not, it's a plausible reasoning. A lot of authors don't like to admit to connections-- subliminal or conscious ones-- especially when there's a personal issue involved. :]