What a gorgeous novel! But structurally, it was a bowl of pudding. Worse, the novel starts with a completely unnecessary rape scene. Honestly, we don’t see the murder and dismemberment and we are plenty horrified by that, so why do we need to see the rape? We absolutely don’t. People need to stop writing gratuitous rape scenes, I am serious. Cut it out! The point of Susie’s character is that she’s dead, not that she was raped. In fact, her grieving family *has no idea that she was raped,* nobody ever knows, nobody ever finds her body--so why is that even part of the story? Writers really need to get a grip on this and only write rape when it’s actually part of the story. Jeebus. Reader rage!
The only thing that ever ties back to the rape is the unintentionally horrifying scene near the end when Susie somehow comes down from heaven and takes over the body of her lesbian friend in order to have sex with the boy she used to like when she was alive. Her lesbian friend! What on earth is going on here? That reads like rape all over again to me. I get that it’s supposed to be nice good loving sex to make up for the rape, but did she ask her friend if she could borrow her body for sex with a man? Does her friend know about it? What the hell is going on in this book? Who would think that is okay? Why write Ruth’s character as a lesbian if not to make this invasion double extra awful and rapey?
Otherwise, it’s a lovely story about a family and their friends putting their lives back together after Susie gets murdered at the age of fourteen. They found only her elbow, which did not make sense to me just on an anatomical level, unless the murderer diced her up randomly. Not to be graphic, but arms bend, and bodies come apart best at the joints. I realize that the elbow sounds funniest, and carries the least burden of imagery (less than a foot, or a hand, for example) but there’s just something impractical about the whole thing. The police found all the blood, so they knew Susie was dead, but did not find the underground lair? Where did she get carved up, then? I’m not squeamish about this at all—I’m halfway through rewatching eleven seasons of Bones, which positively relishes blood and goop and dismemberment—so maybe that’s why the practicalities are bothering me so much. Why on earth wouldn’t the murderer just leave Susie’s body in the underground lair and fill it in? It’s already a grave.
The author really lost me with the gratuitous rape, and then lost me even more with the whimsical elbow. But the book was gorgeous otherwise, full of wonderful character development. As far as the structure that drives the story, we have both something we want, in that we want the family to be okay, and something we don’t want, in that we really don’t want the murderer, George Harvey, to hurt anyone else, particularly not Lindsey or Ruth or any of the other characters we come to know. As I’m studying structure, the things we push for and push against seem to be tremendously powerful, like the accelerator and the brake pedal in a car. I wouldn’t want to go without either. (Maybe transitions are the clutch, in that case.) When we care about a character, we want them to get what they want, and we dread seeing bad things happen to them, specific bad things, the very bad things that are in the air around them.
The frustrating thing about the novel is that these things we hope for and hope against are a broken promise. Susie says early on, “I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn’t perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth” (20). The thing is, though, she can’t. She doesn’t change a thing. She simply watches. I wonder whether the author intended this but then did not carry it out, or simply set up this impossibility that mirrors the way we read, where we can hope and want things for the characters, but can never change what’s written on the pages to come. Susie feels like someone written out of a story, and in fact the story is really not about her at all, but about her murder, her loss, her absence. Susie is nowhere in the story once she’s dead, can’t even tell anyone where to look or move a leaf. The best she can do is appear as a wisp of a figure to those who choose to believe she’s there. Even her appearance changes nothing, though. Susie is pure observer, until she takes over Ruth for a night with Ray.
Sebold’s genius lies in evoking all of the moments of life. She got every detail of 1970s Pennsylvania exactly right, jolting me with each new mention of Wanamaker’s or a cornfield that of course would be named for a Stoltzfus, because central and southeastern Pennsylvania is solid with Amish Stoltzfus families. I must know three or four dozen Stoltzfeet myself. Sebold takes me right back there, the smells and the sounds and the feed corn and the handknitted acrylic hats.
In a lot of ways, the structure of the novel is a pond with a pebble dropped in the middle. We watch all the ripples through the community through the eyes of the most omniscient of all narrators, who knows what everyone is thinking and can see anything she wants. Although I found myself constantly wanting there to be a plot of some kind, more than just wanting everyone to be okay, and hoping the murderer wouldn’t hurt anyone else, the ultimate goal of the pebble in the pond story is to watch until all of the ripples cease. Susie’s father has the hardest time letting go, but even he gradually comes to grips with his loss. Our narrator wants everyone to be okay. When they all really are okay, in the end, the story is over. Inserting herself back into the narrative like a bolt from heaven makes not the slightest bit of narrative sense, unfortunately.
How odd to read two books in a row with that same bizarre body swap right near the end. In The Walls Around Us, Violet and Ori switch lives somehow so that the innocent person gets to have the life that the guilty one had stolen from her. It’s nonsensical, because Ori died, but then she gets to wake up with Violet’s life. This jump from heaven of Susie’s is just as nonsensical. I kind of can’t get over the fact that two otherwise wonderful novels fell into such a terrible narrative trap, giving their characters some kind of closure and justice that could not happen in the novels up to that point. In other words, they created these worlds, they laid out all the rules, they set the limits, and then in order to get what the authors wanted—because both instances absolutely reek of writer—they threw all that away. I think the moral of the story is to plan for a satisfying ending to a story so that you don’t have to make one up at the last minute that contradicts absolutely everything that came before. Oh, boy, does that ever make me mad as a reader. As writers, we’re in charge of everything! Go back and make it so that these things actually fit! Add in whatever you need to build these things into the story organically!
But the most important thing I learned from this book is the gas pedal and brake pedal analogy, driving a narrative with the things we want to happen and the things we don’t want to happen. That is a tremendously powerful way to think about writing a story. It reminds me of the Hitchcock movie opening where someone puts a bomb in the trunk of a car, and then someone else unwittingly drives the car through a lot of crowded city spaces. It’s the classic illustration of tension in film. Another image that keeps coming to mind lately is one that a friend told me about, where she was visiting the Empire State Building and this father put his toddler up on the railing between the bars, where she could easily have slipped and fallen the entire way to the ground below. Both my friend and I practically get panic attacks every time we think about this scene. She had to take a Xanax last time we talked about it. It’s just like the bomb in the trunk of the car. We can imagine so clearly and vividly just how wrong things could go and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. That’s a powerful tool in writing, something I have to remember to use.
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