Two bites at the cherry
Claudia FitzHerbert
LUCKY by Alice Sebold Picador, 0.99. pp. 254, ISBN 033041836X THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold Picador, £6.99, pp. 328. ISBN 0330485385 Alice Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University when she was brutally raped by a stranger in a park in 1981. Several months later she recognised her attacker in the street. He was arrested, prosecuted and jailed. Sebold, a virgin at the time of the attack, was a wise-cracking clown with literary ambitions from a bookish family in Philadelphia. She was praised by a detective involved in the case as 'the best rape witness' he had ever seen. A year later her student house was broken into and her best friend raped. Sebold's celebrity as a successful rape victim was in the end too much for her room-mate, who cut loose from the friendship when she decided not to proceed with a prosecution.
Lucky is Sebold's memoir of her ordeal. It is a precise and unforgiving book, which charts the mainly inadequate responses of family and friends to the rape, as well as praising those who gave her permission to rage and to hate. In a postscript she sketches her private descent into drink and drugs after dropping out of graduate school. Outwardly her life continued on a successful track: she held down teaching jobs, published an article about rape in the New York Times and appeared on Oprah as 'the victim who fought back'. It was only after she found herself cited in the first half of a book called Trauma and Recovery that she began to listen to her therapist's hints of post-traumatic stress disorder, to take stock and to start over.
Lucky's title comes from a policeman telling her that she was lucky compared to another girl, who had been murdered and dismembered in the same tunnel where Sebold was merely raped. It is impossible not to wonder at the relation between that murdered girl and Susie Salmon, the 14year-old girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered at the beginning of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's first novel. Profound unease about the dead being able to witness the mess which the living make of life is a standard reason for unbelief. In The Lovely Bones Sebold turns this unease to ingenious account: the novel is narrated from heaven by the murdered girl, who keeps a mawkishly fond and adolescently baleful eye on her mourning family as first they fall apart and then regroup in the years following her death.
The Lovely Bones has enjoyed huge critical acclaim as well as commercial success in America, where it appeared last year. When it was published in Britain a few months later it was broadly dismissed as saccharine whimsy. Its success, kinder critics intimated, was only explicable in terms of America's post-twin-tower trauma. But still it sold, and now Sebold's British publishers have packaged Lucky, which first appeared in America three years ago, as a companion volume.
To read the books in succession is to be persuaded of Sebold's sure-footedness as a writer, if nothing else. Having set up the conceit of the novel, she makes no mistakes. Her vision of a godless heaven, where the simplest dreams of the inhabitants are made real, is for instance only a backdrop, but still it is painstakingly realised. So too is the gimmick of having the narrator stuck forever at the age of 14. Susie Salmon's voice remains the same, even as her thoughts mature. She learns to move on, although she will never grow up. The other characters in the novel are, more or less, from stock, but the ingenuity of Sebold's narrative device prevents boredom as we flit with Susie from detached mother to obsessive father to dipsomaniac grandmother to psychopathic killer, never spending too long in the company of any one of them.
As for the memoir, it is a better book for the fact that Sebold's recovery is left to the postscript. Much of the interest of the story lies in its rawness, in the writer's attempts to make sense of a shattered world. I did not want to be one of a group or compared with others. It somehow blindsided my sense that I was going to survive,' she writes of an unsatisfactory encounter with a rape crisis centre counsellor. And while Sebold does not herself make any explicit connection between this feeling and her friend's subsequent determination to escape from Sebold, it is there to be made. The impossibility of sisterhood is one of the book's unhammered, underlying themes.
While both books touch on healing, and neither on forgiveness, in many ways The Lovely Bones is an obvious attempt to improve on Lucky, to make an easier, happier story out of the bare bones of a violent act. In the memoir the rapist is black, provoking a vicious random attack on some loitering black men by a policeman accompanying Sebold on a search for her attacker. The author, bravely and disturbingly, describes her instinct that the brutal policeman 'lived on my planet'. Later, in the courtroom, Sebold was 'made to feel guilty for the race of my rapist'. It was, she adds, not 'the first time, nor the last, that I wished my rapist had been white'. In the novel, surprise surprise, the girl's attacker is white, the police are hopeless and the father figure, loving but inadequate in the memoir, emerges as the golden-hearted vigilante with all the right instincts about his daughter's killer.
If the charge against The Lovely Bones is that it takes a troubling landscape and bathes it in a sugary mist, then the defence may he that the mist lures rather than conceals. And although there is, arguably, one reconciliation too many at the novel's end, this does not detract from the power of the central image of the lovely bones, which the narrator characterises as 'the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone'. Lucky, by contrast, deals in images of irreversible damage. At home Sebold was compelled to say the word rape out loud when neighbours came to call. 'But I felt also that saying it was an act of vandalism. As if I had thrown a bucket of blood out across the living room at the blue couch.' Blood and sugar. What will follow?
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