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Summary
Chapters 5–7
Chapter 5
Back home, Jack thinks about how to get Harvey to talk. Susie happily believes he knows the truth. Lindsey stomps in, interrupting Jack’s thoughts yet insisting she wants to be alone. Rather than pushing Lindsey to open up to him, Jack calls Len Fenerman, the detective, to share his suspicions.
While searching Harvey’s house, Len finds his dollhouses to be peculiar, but doesn’t identify anything else suspicious. Harvey tells Len the tent is for his deceased wife, Leah, and points Len toward a neighborhood boy accused of killing pets. Len reports to Jack that he found nothing that points to Harvey as a suspect, but Jack believes that Harvey had previously said his wife’s name was Sophie. Susie observes that both are names of his victims.
Samuel Heckler interrupts the Salmon’s dismal Christmas celebration to deliver a present for Lindsey. As Abigail gets Samuel some eggnog, Buckley asks again where Susie is. Jack invites Buckley to play Monopoly and, using Susie’s favorite piece—the shoe—gently explains that she is dead. Jack cries, and Buckley puts the shoe on his desk, where it remains for a long while before it goes missing. In the kitchen, Lindsey opens Samuel’s gift. It is a necklace with half a heart. He wears the other half. Lindsey leans in to kiss Samuel and Susie thrills, feeling nearly alive.
Chapter 6
Susie recalls a certain day two weeks before her murder. While sneaking into school through the backstage theatre, she encounters Ray Singh, who stands above her on the scaffolding. He tells her she is beautiful and invites her to join him. She hesitates briefly but climbs up. They are about to kiss when two teachers arrive with a student named Ruth, and the teachers chastise Ruth for her explicitly sexual art project. The teachers leave, and Susie and Ray climb down. They look at Ruth’s drawings and Susie finds them beautiful.
In the present, Ruth walks around the roped-off cornfield. She cuts class and leaves early for school so that she can walk alone, kept company by Susie from her side of the Inbetween. Susie feels especially connected to Ruth, who also seems to sense her. One day, Ray waits for Ruth and offers her tea, which she declines. She gives Ray ChapStick, which he accepts. They begin to meet regularly on the sports field, sharing their feelings of alienation and thoughts of Susie. They agree Norristown is a kind of hell, and Ruth asserts that Susie is in heaven.
Lindsey and Abigail are arguing when Jack goes to the Singh house and meets Ruana, Ray’s beautiful mother. He wants to talk to Ray and expresses gratitude that Susie was able to experience Ray’s love when she was alive. The conversation is difficult because Ruana wants to protect her son. Jack confesses to Ruana that he believes Harvey killed Susie. Ruana says if that is true, and if it was her child that Harvey had murdered, she would kill Harvey herself.
At the Salmon house, Len sits with Abigail, who draws as they wait for Jack. Abigail reminds Len of his dead wife. When Jack returns, Buckley greets him enthusiastically. Susie notices that Len carries pictures of dead people, including her, in his wallet.
Chapter 7
Buckley tells his friend Nate that Susie returned. He insists that Susie kissed him but that she told him not to tell anyone. The friends go into Susie’s room, and, under her bed, Buckley pulls out a bloody twig. He swallowed it the year before and almost choked to death, but thankfully, Susie rushed in and saved his life. Buckley thinks about how his parents’ eyes looked that day and how empty they are now. In heaven, Susie wonders if Buckley has actually seen her or if his claim is just a comforting lie.
Analysis
The sweetness of a first kiss is an important element across this section of the novel, both for Lindsey and for Susie. In the opening chapter, Susie’s memory of Ray Singh helps her to endure the horror of Harvey. She returns to their encounter, narrating it at length, inspired by the sight of her sister kissing Samuel Heckler on Christmas. Her identification with Lindsey is so powerful that when Lindsey flushes, so does Susie. The prose captures her youthful excitement at the fact of a “cute boy” in the kitchen. The same tone continues as she walks through the awkward uncertainty of her first romance with Ray. She lingers over the details of their missed opportunity and the surprise of the actual kiss. Ray’s kindness and affection for her is clear, a welcome counterpoint to the violence of her death. It can sometimes be easy to forget how young Susie is, but these scenes illustrate the joy of youth and its firsts.
The identification between Lindsey and Susie has more negative connotations in these chapters, however. When people look at Lindsey, they now see her dead sister. While their closeness in age meant they were always compared, there had previously been key differences: Susie was known as the more beautiful sister, and Lindsey as the smarter one. But now Susie’s tragedy threatens to erase not only her own future, but Lindsey’s as well. One of the key challenges for Lindsey as a character will be to define herself as an individual without betraying or denying the importance of her sister. Her relationship with Samuel is an important part of this process.
In addition to Susie’s close relationship to Lindsey, which existed while she was alive, Susie also bonds with Ruth Connors after her death. Ruth becomes a champion for dead women and girls, a vocation that begins when Susie brushes against her as she departs from Earth. Ruth, a gifted artist, is a sensitive soul and is fundamentally affected when she sees Susie fleeing life. Ruth begins dreaming of Susie and believes that she can sense her. Gathering photographs of her dead classmate and writing poems, Ruth hides her conviction that she and Susie have become connected, as others find it odd. As she walks in the cornfield, however, Susie joins her. While Susie often notes how intertwined the living and the dead are, this is made especially true in her afterlife relationship with Ruth. But Ruth is not wrong about the presence of the dead, as Susie’s success in projecting her face into the shards of broken glass demonstrates. As The Lovely Bones gives Susie the chance to tell her story her way, it also insists on the reality of ghosts and astral projection. Some critics have labeled the novel a supernatural thriller, but it is, arguably, more accurately a coming-of-age novel that blurs the differences between life and death.
In heaven, Susie spends a great deal of her time watching events on Earth. Indeed, much of the action of the novel is made up of people engaged in different forms of visual exchange: looking, watching, surveilling, glancing, staring, and so on. The act of observation is sinister when Harvey watches his victims, tense when the police look for clues and keep an eye on suspects, and loving when parents watch over their children. In heaven, Susie watches her family both to ease her loneliness and in the hopes of guiding the investigation. When she watches Harvey, her gaze takes on a suspicious, almost predatorial, quality. Even on Earth, Susie had been a watcher, looking through her camera. Snapping pictures of people, she would catch them unaware, revealing things they perhaps wanted to keep hidden. Many scenes in the novel are made up of layers of “watching,” suggesting that this everyday occurrence has both benign and sinister implications.
