The Founder
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6th October 2022
Literary Review: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold’s 2001 novel, The Lovely Bones, is a gripping fictional thriller that follows the aftermath of 14-year-old Susie Salmon’s murder from her perspective in the afterlife. Set in early 1970s Pennsylvania, the novel depicts the fear and apprehension that followed the upsurge in media coverage of serial killers at the time. Unlike most psychological murder thrillers that build up to the climax of murder, Sebold’s narrator, Susie, describes the day of her assault and murder at the hands of her neighbour, Mr Harvey, in the first few pages of the text. Both the reader and the protagonist thus become observers who watch over the other characters as they fail to spot the clues to Susie’s disappearance.
Sebold’s exploration of the family’s grief is gritty and raw as she exhibits characters ravaged by an unexpected loss, follows their journeys toward peace, and describes the coping mechanisms they construct along the way. Susie’s father, Jack, a devoted and sensitive man, dedicates himself to solving his daughter’s murder whilst Susie’s reserved mother, Abigail, struggles to cope with her grief, and leaves the family to seek comfort in an affair. Susie’s adolescent omniscient narrative voice provides an innocent perspective to the violence she experiences and demonstrates the powerlessness of a child subjected to adult evil, much like Emma Donoghue’s young narrator, Jack, in her novel Room.