The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

Erik Nagels, You Girls

(September 29) I thought The Lovely Bones started out really strong -- Sebold seemed to have the same gift for combining cheerfulness and repulsiveness that Jeffrey Eugenides demonstrated in The Virgin Suicides, and I liked that book a lot, partly because of that weird combination.

But about halfway through, I thought The Lovely Bones got a little distracted from its original mission and wanted to be Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping or Ann Patchett's Patron Saint of Liars -- in other words, a book about a woman who takes road trips through America and can't quite focus, who's supposed to be charismatic and heroic but who's really a kind of a deadbeat.

So that was strange. And then all of a sudden that sidetrack wrapped up, and the original story was quickly dispatched, and it was like, "Oh, yeah, here's why I named it The Lovely Bones, a-a-a-and we're outta here in 3, 2, ...."

To me it seemed the author had never experienced losing a family member too soon, so I went and looked Sebold up to see if she actually had. There was nothing to suggest she'd had that misfortune, but I was shocked to discover that she had suffered a brutal rape and beating in real life... which ...should have given more edge and credibility to the murder scene in The Lovely Bones... but... didn't.

A puzzlement.

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

Curious Expeditions, Oldest surviving figurehead from a Maine vessel, Maine Maritime Museum, Bath, Maine

(September 11) A collection of short stories about people who live in a small town in Maine, linked by the presence of Olive Kitteridge in each story. Sometimes the story is principally about Olive; other times she is a secondary character; other times she is mentioned only in passing. The stories are gentle and subtle, and, other than the setting and various degrees of Olive, have only the question "Why are people the way they are?" in common. The private trials and tribulations of all the characters in this town are themselves very different.

But even though they're short stories, the effect of the whole thing is of reading a novel. You feel like you've had a full meal, not just a series of appetizers. It's just that the book doesn't have a novel's usual building-to-a-crisis-that-is-eventually-resolved format. There's no real crisis, no real resolution to anything, no definitive answer to the question of why people are certain ways.

So the book is more like real life than a regular novel, and is such a subtle comment on real life itself, on how we are all secondary or tertiary characters in someone else's story and they are the same in ours.