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The Lovely Bones is why I don’t have a girlfriend right now.

Well… we’ll get to that eventually.

I finished reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold yesterday, and then tonight I went ahead and watched the movie that Peter Jackson made out of it. I don’t know whether anyone else who visits this site has read or watched it as well, but for no better reason than to kill a little time I will break down my particular opinions of them both for you.

On my most recent flight into Vegas I was seated next to a woman who I noticed to be reading the final few pages of The Lovely Bones. At the time, I knew of the book only because of the movie trailers that seemed to run during every single commercial break around Christmas. The trailers made the movie look pretty interesting and when I asked this woman if she liked the book she gave me a short, but extremely enthusiastic dose of praise. I think her exact words may have been, “Oh my God! I LOVE IT!”

Having just been given a Kindle for Christmas (thanks!) I decided to hop onto Amazon’s 3G network and download the book while waiting for our plane to takeoff.

Ok, I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who still plan on reading the book or watching the movie. Come back when you are done and let me know your thoughts, but for everyone else you can click on the following link to read the rest of this post…

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I breezed through the first 70% of the book in my first two nights. When he noticed what I was reading Jim told me that Lizzie had hated the book, but while only halfway into it, I definitely disagreed. But by the 75% mark I hated it too.

While the first seventy percent took me only two days to dominate, the final thirty lasted nearly two weeks. I honestly can’t remember ever reading a book where my opinion changed so dramatically partway through. The first hundred pages of Lord of the Rings was a massive chore for me, but the next thousand were amazing. Aside from that, though, I usually have a pretty solid grasp of a book after the first few chapters. Weirdly, The Lovely Bones completely fell apart in the second half. What started as an interesting, enjoyable read quickly devolved into an eye-rolling sack of girly nonsense. I literally used the final few chapters to practice speed reading.

When the book was finally over I really didn’t even feel like watching the movie anymore, despite having been so eager for so long. Of course, I sat down and watched it anyways, but mostly out of a sense of obligation. I could only hope that Peter Jackson had somehow saved the story from itself.

He didn’t.

For those that don’t know, The Lovely Bones is a story written from the point of view of a 14-year-old girl named Susie who gets murdered. That’s only the setup, actually, since she gets raped and killed in the book’s first chapter. The rest of the novel follows Susie as she watches her family from Heaven. The book tells a tale of the heartache of a senseless tragedy, the struggle of a family to survive in its aftermath, and the mystery of trying to catch a killer.

That description sounds like a pretty good read to me, and for the first half of the book it actually was. But then… things got super weird.

Around the two-thirds mark a cute, sad story about a dead girl watching her family from Heaven somehow transforms into a helplessly stupid literary clusterfuck. For no imaginable reason Alice Sebold suddenly decided to take a page from Stephanie Meyer’s approach to Breaking Dawn: she threw away everything that was good about her novel and instead asked herself, “what would a stupid 12-year old girl write?”

I don’t know, maybe the author just got bored.

Having watched from a distance for so long, Susie suddenly leaves Heaven and starts actively haunting the human world. She follows people around and randomly reveals herself to them (a power which no other ghosts seem to have, by the way, and which she didn’t have before either). The living people on Earth are never scared or surprised at seeing a ghost, naturally, and her haunting always makes them smile and feel loved. Nobody tells anyone else that they are seeing a murdered spirit, even though they all are. It is like each character has their own totally romantic secret.

Then, one of the girls from school suddenly develops the power to see other dead people. She becomes a stereotypical loner outcast and moves to New York City where she wanders the streets by herself, seeing the ghosts of murdered people. When she uses her powers to see what happened to a murdered child, she doesn’t bother calling the police or telling anybody. Instead she makes a little note of it in her five-star and goes about the rest of her day.

All of a sudden, everybody starts having sex with one another.

The killer keeps killing people, but we don’t hear much of anything about that – or the still unsolved murder investigation that dominated the first half of the book – because the main detective starts having sex with Susie’s mom. Unable to stand being around her family, the mother abandons her husband and children and runs away to live in a California wine orchard for five years. A few pages later it is suddenly five years in the future. Susie’s mom comes back from California and her husband takes her back immediately, the two now more in love with each other than ever before. Awww, it’s romantic AND realistic…

Towards the end of the book, the girl who sees dead people randomly comes across the spot where Susie’s body has been secretly buried for five years. In a completely unexpected twist (unexpected for a good reason), Susie comes down from Heaven and possesses the girl’s body. The audience gets twisted again though, because rather than tell someone about the body buried only ten feet away… or tell the police who killed her… or go see the family that she had been haunting relentlessly since her death… now-human Susie immediately has sex with a boy from her school that she barely knew, but always liked.

This tale of supernatural passion is a little weird when you remember the fact that she is still 14 and he is about 20. Bad gets way, way worse when in the middle of their preteen sexual escapade she looks into the boy’s eyes and tells him, “I am Susie.” Instead of being at all surprised to be having sex with a girl who has been possessed by the ghost of his murdered adolescent sorta-friend, the guy smiles longingly and says, “I knew there was something different about you.”

W.T.F.

After she finishes knocking boots, Susie leaves Earth again and decides that now it’s ok to finally leave the world behind her. Her unfinished business has been taken care.

Seriously…. W.T.F…

Her unfinished business was that she desperately needed to jump some dong? It had nothing to do with her horribly grief-stricken family? It had nothing to do with an unsolved murder and catching her killer (who is never caught, by the way)? There is no higher lesson to be had about finding acceptance in death, or forgiveness in the face of tragedy? All she needed was to ride some teenage dick.

At the very end of the book, before she finally ascends into Heaven, Susie makes one last Earthly stop and watches as the man who killed her tries to lure another young girl into his car. Susie uses her ghost powers to snap an icicle dangling over the man’s head, killing him.

Ugh.

So that sweet young innocent girl who we have lovingly followed for a few hundred pages spends the final act of the novel…

1) forcing control over a human body like some kind of demon
2) tricking a boy into statutory raping having sex with her
3) murdering a man

… and then she goes to Heaven with a giant Happily Ever After.

Hey, Alice Sebold: Shame. On. You.

Not at all surprisingly the movie plays out exactly like the book. The first half was decently good, but the final third was borderline unwatchable. I would actually say that the movie is probably better than the book, to be honest, if only because Peter Jackson goes nuts with his CGI. The story is still really bad, but P-Jax does a good job of making things look cool (I am a big fan of the ships-in-bottles sequence). The end result feels like a complicate mix of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Fall, What Dreams May Come, Zodiac, The Sixth Sense, and Twilight… but clearly nowhere close to as good as any one of them (except Twilight).

Take that however you want.

Oh, and the reason I say that The Lovely Bones is why I don’t have a girlfriend is because looking at reviews on Amazon the book has a 4+ star rating after 3000 reviews. On IMDB the movie has a 6.8 rating after more than 9000 reviews. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that no matter what their age may really be, all girls are still twelve years old at heart. They will completely love anything, no matter how stupid in concept or how poor in execution, so long as the annoying teenage girl gets to eventually have sex with the annoying, older boy.

IT’S TRUE LOVE!!

Chuck Klosterman wrote wrote a series of funny essays about how all girls have a deeply rooted, but thoroughly unrealistic expectation of love that can be most clearly represented by the works of Coldplay and John Cusack. Klosterman whines that he will never be able to fully satisfy any woman because they are only interested in a fantasy that no man can possibly uphold.

I agree, but I think it’s more than that. I believe that for girls the ultimate romance is being passed an anonymous note during third-grade recess. The girl basks in the secret danger of that note, then follows its directions to an unseen part of the playground where she meets a mysterious boy with a bad reputation who the girl never before even thought about liking until that very moment. He gives her a simple kiss just before the bell rings and everybody has to go back inside.

In my mind, it all breaks down to that. Forget roses and chocolates and exotic getaways. Girls just want that secret kiss.

If I could somehow bottle and sell that I would be a rich, rich man. Clearly, I wouldn’t even have to package it well at all. As proof just take a look at Sebold, Meyer, or the tens of thousands of overt romance novels that don’t even bother pretending to be real literature.

Honestly, I may never vote for a woman to be president. All it takes is a hundred pages of Nicholas Sparks (who I also think is a terrible writer, for the record) to reduce any woman to a blabbering mess. “But Allie and Noah were meant to be together!! It’s SOOO romantic!!” Two hundred years ago stupid girls had their bonnets in a bunch over Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Today it’s Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (and sadly, still Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy).

In her defense at least Jane Austin could write. Stephanie Meyer, Alice Sebold… not so much.