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Summary
Chapter 1
Content warning: This novel concerns the sexual assault and murder of a teenage girl. The descriptions below may be disturbing to some readers.
On December 6, 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is murdered. Like others her age, she had a favorite teacher, Mr. Botte, and was eager to differentiate herself from her classmates. But Susie, as narrator, is quick to point out that Mr. Botte did not murder her. Instead, she was killed by a neighbor.
It is snowing on December 6, so Susie cuts through the cornfield to get home, where she runs into Mr. Harvey. He invites her to come see something he’s built. Awkward around adults, Susie does not know how to refuse. In hindsight, she can now see the various signs of danger, such as Harvey’s knowledge of her name, but at the time these signs had slipped past her. Such things do not slip past Harvey, however, as his audacious pretense of grief after her death makes clear. Susie sees him from heaven while she is trying to reassemble the parts of her body. Her guide in heaven encourages her not to worry about why she did not act differently.
Harvey leads her to his hiding place and points to the ground, where there is a wooden door. Her curiosity piqued, Susie agrees to enter through the door with him. She finds herself in a hole the size of a small room that has been outfitted with a chimney and a shelf. It is warm and Susie’s mind races with questions.
Mr. Harvey insists that Susie accept a Coke, explaining that the hole will be a hangout for neighborhood kids. She reluctantly accepts and, at his insistence, removes her coat. He compliments her looks, asking personal questions. When she says she needs to go, he tells her that she is not leaving and orders her to remove her clothes. He says he is going to check her virginity and insists she belongs to him now.
Susie fights Mr. Harvey as hard as she can, but it is not enough. He climbs on top of her and kisses her, which is nothing like her previous experience being kissed by an Indian classmate named Ray. Annoyed with her pleading, Harvey shoves her hat, decorated with little bells, into her mouth. He rips off her clothes and Susie begins to leave her body, terrified by what is happening. Susie hears her mother calling her for dinner as Harvey penetrates her.
Harvey makes her lie still underneath him and Susie knows that he is going to kill her. He asks her why she won’t get up and, when she doesn’t move, he reaches over his head for a razor. Removing her hat from her mouth, he orders her to say she loves him. Susie complies, but Harvey kills her anyway.
Analysis
The opening chapter of The Lovely Bones establishes some of its key themes and lays out the novel’s unique narrative priorities. From the first sentence, Susie establishes the fact of her murder, offering precise details about when she was killed and by whom. She is equally specific about how George Harvey lures her into the hole he has constructed specifically for the murder, yet she mercifully elides the details of her ordeal, offering oblique hints rather than explicit descriptions and relying on similes and metaphors to communicate how much she suffered. She compares how she feels to the sea in which Harvey has defecated and likens her body to a game of cat’s cradle. Juxtaposed against this horror are details that one might reasonably expect a 14-year-old girl to share, like the name of her favorite teacher or her “contempt” for expectations. The shift between these different ways of narrating the action adds weight to the simple statement with which the chapter concludes, an ending that coincides with Susie’s end as well. The way the novel is narrated is simultaneously explicit about the violence of the rape and murder but never exploits Susie’s privacy, even in this moment of terrible exposure.
The novel also disorients readers by roaming rapidly across moments in time, from various instances in the past or future to an undefined present and the near timelessness of heaven. Because Susie is no longer alive, she has an omniscient perspective that allows the story to range widely. She unfolds events as they happen and also jumps forward and backward in the action. When Harvey kisses her, Susie slips back to a very different kiss she shared with Ray Singh, a classmate she likes. As she reassembles her body, which she mentions before the story of her murder is told, she watches her suffering parents and still-unaware siblings. Without a transition, she is back in the hole, being offered a Coke by her murderer. This creates a sense of trauma—at any moment she might be in that horrible place. It also introduces the challenge that profound grief creates: it reshapes time, and our experience of it, in profound ways.
Susie explains that, in 1973, people did not yet understand that children could suffer terrible fates. Their missing faces were not printed on the sides of milk cartons, for example. But evil was present nonetheless, she insists, even if people did not want to believe this to be true. Her murderer was not just a neighbor, but a neighbor who had made elaborate and thorough preparations by building a framed hole under a cornfield, complete with heat, chimney, and a shelf for supplies, for the purpose of this horrific deed. Harvey skillfully manipulates Susie’s credulous innocence, youthful enthusiasm, and respect for adults, using all three to keep her from escaping his clutches. Everything that characterizes her average yet charming youth becomes a weapon he wields against her. Later she will state directly that monsters exist because people do, but that message is already evident in the opening chapter when Harvey runs into Abigail on the street and offers his consolation for the “horrible, horrible tragedy.” He even asks what her daughter’s name was, outraging Susie in heaven and causing Abigail immense additional pain. Not only do Susie and her family need to accept the fact of her death, they also need to accept that evil is an everyday occurrence.
