Ocean Eyes

I’m back from a lovely two week road trip through the American Southwest. Actually, I’ve been back for a few days, but it’s taken some effort to get back on board with writing. Not that I’ve slowed in my summer reading adventures; I finished A Separate Peace while staying at my brother-in-law’s house in El Paso, and I’m about three quarters of the way through Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. We also listened to about twenty hours of Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, on audio as we drove cross country- plus I’m midway through the second season of HBO’s The Wire, and I'm listening to the new Mates of State album over and over. All of this input has made it difficult for me to go back and say what I liked about The Lovely Bones.

Here: I liked all of it. Loved it. I’m engaged to it, and we’ve set the wedding for sometime in the Fall.

Most of all, I was struck by the time that Sebold took to fully develop almost all of her characters- male and female. In an interesting twist of convention, the dead narrator of The Lovely Bones is able, from her perch in a personalized Heaven, to see into the hearts and minds of everyone she left behind on Earth, making the point of view a sort of mix between first person and third person omniscient: first person omniscient. Usually, with first person narration, we get a complete picture of the narrator- maybe, if we’re lucky, another larger-than-life character (I think of Finny in A Separate Peace, or Dean Moriarty in On The Road). But Susie, the narrator of Bones, invites us not only into her own world, but that of her surviving family, her friends, and the man responsible for her death. As the novel progresses, the story become less about her murder and more about how those around her go on with their lives.

Most powerful for me are the descriptions of Susie’s mother, Abigail, a woman trapped- even before Susie’s death- in a life she never meant for herself. Early in the novel, Susie recalls a photograph she took of her mother once when she wasn’t looking:

When the roll came back from the Kodak plant in a special heavy envelope, I could see the difference immediately. There was only one picture in which my mother was Abigail. It was that first one, the one taken of her unawares, the one captured before the click startled her into the mother of the birthday girl, owner of the happy dog, wife to the loving man, and mother again to another girl and a cherished boy. Homemaker. Gardener. Sunny neighbor. My mother’s eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss. I thought I had my whole life to understand them, but that was the only day I had. Once upon earth I saw her as Abigail, and then I let it slip effortlessly back- my fascination held in check by wanting her to be that mother and envelop me as that mother (43).

I've had revelations like this about my own mother- it comes up more now that I'm an adult; I see a longing in her eyes when she talks about her life before the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, and I wonder if she's thinking of that loss, of the infinite other ways her life could have turned out. I don't know what the specific dream may have been that she turned her back on in order to build a family, and like Susie, my need for her to be my mother overshadows any real desire to find out. In Abigail's case, the dream is of furthering her education, of teaching literature at the the college level- all of which she abandons with the unexpected arrival of a third child:

If I had paid attention, I would have noticed signs. Now I see the shifting, how the stack of books on my parents’ bedside table changed from catalogs for local colleges, encyclopedias of mythology, novels by James, Eliot, and Dickens, to the works of Dr. Spock. Then came gardening books and cookbooks until for her birthday two months before I died, I thought the perfect gift was Better Homes and Gardens Guide to Entertaining. When she realized she was pregnant the third time, she sealed the more mysterious mother off. (151)

Good characterization, to me, makes you think of someone you know: the punk rock boys in King Dork were familiar and real; I could see half a dozen of my freshman girls in Melinda's lack of expression in Speak. Great characterization makes you think about yourself. Reading the part of Abigail, I found myself examining the domestic trap she'd wandered into and wondering if I helped construct such traps in my own life. In my role as a son, as a brother, as a husband, as a teacher, how do I facilitate the dreams of the people close to me? Am I an opener or a closer of doors? Even if my mom's only dream ever was to be a mom, do I at least validate that? Or do I take it for granted? This final passage, in particular, made me more conscious of how I pitch in around the house:

She had become aware of what she did. She cut carrots and celery into edible lengths. She washed out thermoses and lunchboxes, and when Lindsey decided she was too old for a lunchbox, my mother caught herself actually happy when she found wax-lined bags that would keep her daughter’s lunch from seeping through and staining her clothes. Which she washed. Which she folded. Which she ironed when necessary and which she straightened on hangers. Which she picked up from the floor or retrieved from the car or untangled from the wet towel left on the bed that she made every morning, tucking the corners in, and fluffing the pillows, and propping up stuffed animals, and opening the blinds to let the light in. (158)

It's so easy, even in what I consider a fairly progressive marriage, to fall into the gender-specific patterns of household labor that have dominated for centuries: he mows the lawn and comes in to watch baseball, she cooks dinner and serves it to him on the couch, picks up his dishes, rinses them, puts them in the dishwasher, cleans the kitchen and unloads the dishwasher...

It's rare that I feel this convicted while reading a novel- it also happened a few times while I was reading Speak: how many times during the 2007-2008 school year did I simply pass by students who didn't speak up during class? How much did I miss out on by not taking time to ask a few simple questions? Great literature (and film, and television, and music) strives not only to entertain us, but to promt us to somehow improve ourselves. Keep reading.