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.