The Lovely Bones: a Study in Writerly POV
by Stella Atrium
______________


The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold was published in 2002 and a Peter Jackson movie followed, so I’m not giving away secrets when I reveal that the narrator is a dead girl. This review includes specific plot details, though, so **spoiler alert**.

The story is about how family members work through grief, and a little about cosmic justice. If the reader recently lost a loved one, reading the novel may be heartrending.

Sebold managed multiple perspectives in each scene since the narrator spies from heaven and tells the story through the eyes of a suburban schoolgirl. The creative use of verb tense and simple sentence structure reinforces the deep but flat POV. Aspiring writers can take a lesson here about how to integrate “double voiced” sentences (see: Mikhail Bakhtin).

After she is murdered, Susie exists in “my own heaven” and frequently views family members, school chums, and the man who murdered her. For the first hundred pages, Sebold restricts the narration to the perspective of a 14-year-old girl who discovers secrets her parents hold dear and also how the world works. For example, she follows the rabbit that carries poison in the garden back to the burrow where the whole family dies.
Susie can spy on individual members of the family and school friends. Later she seems to view the whole town during a specific event (the escape of her murderer) for what each person is doing at that moment.

There are several stories (made into movies) about a return from heaven. http://www.moviecus.com/movie_search/heaven/relevance/1

Who can forget Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait? or A Pure Formality with Gérard Depardieu and Roman Polanski?

The Lovely Bones has a strong presence in this crowd, even though the Peter Jackson movie with Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, and Stanley Tucci did the novel no favors.
In her own heaven, Susie can call into existence comforting objects and the company of favorite dogs. She is guided to a tree where her heaven overlaps with the personal heavens of other murder victims, and later as spirits they ride along with the bad guy during his downward spiral.  I’m glad the dénouement didn’t offer a cliché ending, but rather a drawing away – like a boat receding from shore – so heaven is not restricted in scope.

Discovery by other characters for needed plot points is managed deftly. Susie is a passive observer, for example, when her sister Lindsey deduces by the presence of a red scarf that her mother slept with the detective assigned to Susie’s case.

As the months and years pass, Susie’s perspective matures and the insights grow world-weary. While she follows siblings and school chums into adulthood, her connections with them allow her to travel to areas she never knew in life, and see what they were and were to become in the same paragraph. This development feels rather like she has the help of the ghosts of Christmas past and future simultaneously. And much later she flies with her dead grandfather while they chase birds skimming treetops in several states.

Some of the events are sugar-sweet, and the double loss (sister and absent mother) experienced by an inarticulate younger brother is underdeveloped. The reanimation of Susie for sex with the high school sweetheart is silly. I had sex with my high school sweetheart when we were adults and it was not transformative, as she describes.

When the story ends, we have the same number of characters as in the beginning. Nobody commits to an outsider. Even when the sister and her fiancé want to refurbish a strange old house, the owner turns out to be the father of a school chum. Maybe that’s how life works in the suburbs. That feature, however, keeps the story in its own little world, tight and self-abusive.

Aspiring writers who struggle with managing a narrator’s voice or multiple views for the same scene can learn much craft from Alice Sebold.

The Appeal of Thelma & Louise; a buddy movie about two women on the run

Stella Atrium 11.11.11
__________________

The 20th anniversary of Thelma & Louise was in February 2011.

Critics claimed the movie directed by Ridley Scott broke stereotypes and allowed female characters to step out of a corseted past into liberated action.  Never mind the movie presents women acting like men would act.  Never mind that Thelma robs a store only after she receives instruction from a drifter.

Once again, the characters we love don't solve problems the way women solve them, but rather ape the actions of the men. Where are their mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, best friends, daughters?

Movies about women must appeal to men, even when the male characters are secondary, as with a sympathetic policeman played by Harvey Keitel and ex-boyfriend played by Michael Madsen. The movie audience was mostly men, and they liked the idea of women on a lark with 2% body fat and oversized handguns.  We still have the standard scenes for car chases, gun violence, fiery explosions, and a hero's ending.  The twist is that women get to blow up stuff.

Except are they liberated? Or... are they just acting like a guy would act in similar situation?  Maybe a woman would find other ways to hide by changing her looks and blending in, or entering a brothel where the police never investigate.

In Thelma & Louise a struggling waitress and repressed housewife take off one day while the husband is fishing.  They stop to cat-around at a dance hall, and Thelma (Geena Davis) is pressured by a drunken cowboy who Louise (Susan Sarandon) shoots with her Texas-purchased gun. Adventures on the run after the feminist statement include picking up a drifter, scaring a truck driver, packing a cop into his car trunk, calling home to bring down the police, and sprinting toward the Mexican border.

The 1974 movie Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges) depicted drifters in a similar socio-economic strata.
Lightfoot is beaten by bad guys who pursue them, and the tension between Lightfoot and Thunderbolt is tentative friendship built on a common need to escape jeopardy.  They end badly, too, when Lightfoot dies of injuries from the beating.  We expect less of this movie, though, and treasure it for the performances.

What social wrong was righted in Thelma & Louise?  Besides the eye-candy, what did we learn about ourselves? I'm reminded of the old adage that "she acted like a man because she was treated like a woman".

The scenes are well played, especially when Thelma says, "Something broke inside me," but Thelma & Louise is ultimately unsatisfying.

I object mostly to the ending when the pair drive over a cliff rather than return to society and face jail time.

Many have claimed this ending shows that there's no place in real life for rogue women; except Thelma and Louise aren't acting like women.  The pair is acting like they think the men would act, all the way to driving off into the sunset.  

Young women today mention Thelma & Louise as a shining example of liberated acts, of improvising, of getting a little of her own back.  I despair for our young girls who have few role models and must fit behavior into unnatural patterns to find acceptance among peers who believe that women should act like the guys.