THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold's novel of transcendental kitsch, The Lovely Bones, teases and manipulates the reader with horror and death but never really engages with the reality of death, treating it as life by other means rather than the end of life, the full stop, finis. The novel thus leeches the true existential horror out of death in a way that can only be called 'religious.' As for Sebold's imagination, she's no Garcia Marquez (to put it mildly). Her otherworld is a Walt Disney Kitschland, an amalgam of recent films (Ghost and What Dreams May Come spring to mind), and its imagery is shopworn, secondhand stuff. Add to this the dud metaphors that plague Sebold's prose like so many stinkbombs, and we have a novel that need no longer detain us, an already dated artifact of the Bush years: faith-based fiction. Rather than confront the horrible reality of the rape-murder she has imagined, Sebold prefers to dissolve it in a saccharine solution of pop Christianity. (And her last name's similarity to that of a truly great writer, W.G. Sebald, annoys me too...)