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Summary
Chapters 2–4
Chapter 2
Everyone’s heaven is different, and Susie’s resembles Fairfax High. Everyone she encounters lives in their own version of heaven, including her roommate Holly. Both had died three days previously and dislike heaven, where their simplest dreams are satisfied. On the fifth day, their intake counselor Franny arrives. She explains that heaven will expand to fulfill their wishes. Susie’s desires—to grow up and live her adult life on Earth, and for Harvey to be dead—cannot be met, however. Susie decides to watch her family carefully so she can still be part of their lives.
On December 9, the police call the Salmon household, asking for details about Susie. They explain that they have found an elbow, but Len Fenerman, the lead detective assigned to Susie’s case, says the discovery doesn’t confirm Susie’s death. Jack and Abigail, Susie’s parents, repeat Len’s phrase, “Nothing is ever certain,” in uncomprehending horror, hoping she is safe and warm. The next morning, when Jack tells Susie’s sister Lindsey that a police dog found an elbow, she vomits.
Though a police dog finds blood in the cornfield, the case appears stalled. Then the police find a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, the book assigned in Susie’s grade. On December 12, the police locate Susie’s notebook, with a love note from Ray Singh inside. The police question him, although the Salmons know he did not kill Susie. Ray’s alibi is ironclad. In heaven, Susie is frustrated that she cannot direct the investigation toward Harvey.
Three days later, the police arrive at the house with Susie’s hat, which is covered with her saliva. Susie’s disappearance is now being investigated as a murder, even though there is no body. Abigail and Jack are devastated.
While trying to harden herself, Lindsey decides to return to school. She is immediately sent to the principal’s office, where he attempts, and fails, to console her. Susie wishes the principal would make Lindsey laugh instead.
Chapter 3
Susie recounts that when her soul fled her violent death in a chaotic rush, it brushed past her classmate Ruth. Ruth later tells her mother she dreamt about a female ghost running out of the soccer field. Her mother dismisses her, so Ruth remains silent. Ruth begins writing poetry and gathering pictures of Susie. From heaven, Susie tries to direct Ruth to a clue: a charm from her bracelet, which is no longer in the cornfield.
Susie misses her mother intensely. She remembers finding the camera her parents were going to give her on her 11th birthday. She had intended to stalk a neighbor with it but instead found herself captivated by the expression on her mother’s face in the morning quiet, and Susie snapped the picture. Looking at the photo sometime later, Susie, for the first time, recognizes Abigail as someone who is more than just her mother. She now watches Lindsey look at the same photo of Abigail and witnesses her sister have a similar revelation, seeing their “mother-stranger” for the first time.
On December 23, Susie briefly enters the mortal world. In the den of the Salmon home, Jack is looking at some ships in bottles, an activity he and Susie had once shared. Suddenly, he smashes them all, upsetting her. Susie projects her face into the pieces of broken glass, and Jack laughs when he sees it. He then runs to Susie’s bedroom and sobs uncontrollably. Buckley manages to soothe his father and Jack determines to pay more attention to his son.
Chapter 4
After murdering Susie, Harvey collapses the hole in the cornfield and carries her body parts to his house. Her blood stains the garage floor while he cleans up, thinking about what he needs to do, like retrieve his knife and a book of sonnets from the gory bag. Harvey then drives Susie’s body to a sinkhole, into which the Salmons once threw a refrigerator. He pays a disposal fee to the owner of the sinkhole, and the owner’s wife jokes that the sack might contain a dead body. When Harvey discovers Susie’s charm bracelet in his pocket, he stops at a construction site and, after pulling off the Pennsylvania keystone charm, throws the bracelet into a hole.
On December 23, Harvey experiments with constructing a mat tent, a ceremonial bridal structure he sees in a book. He is building behind his house when Jack Salmon enters the yard. The men work on the mat tent together. When Harvey goes inside the house, Susie tries to will her father to grasp the truth but cannot reach him. Still, when Harvey returns, the mood has changed and Jack challenges him, asserting that he is hiding something. They continue building as fresh snow falls, as Susie mourns the fact that she can no longer rush out into the snow with their dog Holiday. Jack says Susie’s name aloud and Harvey tells him to leave.
Analysis
The novel begins in a kind of hell—the hole where Susie dies—and shifts at the start of these chapters to heaven. The Lovely Bones imagines what happens after death but does so with very little reference to any organized religion. Susie’s heaven resembles her high school, but, instead of academic subjects, she and her roommate read teen magazines about fashion. Because each person is unique, so too is their heaven, which the novel consistently defines in terms of contentment and desire. Susie’s first iteration of heaven meets her simplest desires but not the ones she yearns for most fervently—her own life back, and Harvey’s death. Her heavenly counselor, Franny, tells her that she must let go of desires like this and accept her new reality. As Susie mourns what she has lost, upon finding moments of acceptance, her heaven expands and changes. The same will prove true for the living members of her family.
Although Susie voices some of her feelings, particularly her longing and loneliness, the grief she experiences differs fundamentally from what her family and friends endure. Their incomprehension and horror, exacerbated by uncertainty, suggest their mourning and trauma. Each character mourns Susie’s murder in radically different ways. Jack is active, seeking information and trying to prove that he can protect his family, while Abigail is resolute that clues are inconclusive and that it is impossible to be certain about what they mean, as Len says. She maintains this position when an elbow, book, and notebook are found. But the discovery of Susie’s hat, which Abigail herself had made, shatters her composure. When Harvey gags Susie with the hat, she can only communicate via the hat’s bells. Its speaking power works differently for her mother, who sees the hat as evidence that tells her the truth of her daughter’s death.
The books that Susie had been reading for English class—William Shakespeare’s play Othello and Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird —subtly stress the novel’s interest in violence against women and girls. Like The Lovely Bones, To Kill a Mockingbird features a young female narrator who is forced to confront mature subjects at a young age. Both novels shift elegantly between different narrative perspectives while also tackling pressing social issues. Where To Kill a Mockingbird focuses on racial inequality and the social problems it creates, The Lovely Bones considers the everyday reality of violence against women and girls. Although Harvey’s crimes never come to trial, the novels are likewise similar in dealing with criminal proceedings. Since the publication of The Lovely Bones, critics have drawn parallels between the two works. The inclusion of Lee’s classic in the plot suggests that the author of The Lovely Bones welcomed the comparison. The plot of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello also culminates in violence against a woman, when Othello murders his wife Desdemona over an imagined infidelity. The theme of violence against women links the three literary works.
Equally important is the representation of Susie as a photographer who stalks her subjects. She hopes to be a wildlife photographer but, as she lives in Pennsylvania, settles for pictures of neighbors and family. Early one morning, she takes a picture of her mother, but when it is developed, she does not recognize the woman in the image. Abigail looks different, not entirely like her mother, and Susie describes her as “the mother-stranger.” Susie’s photographs will often communicate truths to the people who look at them, as in this section when Lindsey sees the picture of Abigail for the first time, and they develop the novel’s interest in the problem of everyday horror. It disturbs the sisters to see a version of Abigail who isn’t their mother, and this disruption of their expectations unsettles them. The question of whether or not photographs accurately represent their subjects runs throughout the novel, as does the parallel idea that people are sometimes not what they seem.
George Harvey is a fully realized version of this chasm between perception and reality. He seems “off” to the Salmons, though harmlessly so, as Susie notes in the opening chapter. They are entirely wrong in this view, but they are not alone in their mistake, as Harvey has successfully evaded discovery for previous crimes. He congratulates himself on his improved skills. Susie shares that he enjoys the memories of her pain so powerfully that he feels them physically, noting too that the murder has made him feel full and satisfied, as if he had eaten a cheeseburger and apple pie. The discord between these stereotypical American foods and Harvey’s vicious crime is especially disturbing. So brazen is he that he can joke with the woman at the sinkhole, where he disposes of Susie’s body, and can tolerate Jack’s help in constructing a ceremonial tent, an early experiment for his next murder. Susie has determined to hunt Harvey no matter how gruesome the outcome, and in this scene tries to influence her father. She thinks she has failed, but Jack leaves the encounter with Harvey convinced the man knows something about Susie’s disappearance.
