If you’re like me, you don’t remember a lot of detail from the books that you read. I am perfectly capable of handing a book to someone and telling them how great it is, and when they ask for a better description, all I can do is shrug and say “I don’t remember, but it’s really good.” (This does not usually inspire confidence, unless the person knows me well and knows this quirk of mine.) But every now and then, something in a book will jump out and stay vividly with me from then on, to the point that I can visualize it with crystal clarity. Today, I’d like to highlight a scene from Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The novel follows Susie Salmon, a fourteen year old girl who is murdered by a man in her neighborhood. What follows is her account of watching her family deal with what happened to her, and watching her murderer as he plots to kill again. She also talks about Ruth, a classmate who Susie encountered just after her brutal death. And it’s this short description that stood out to me:
On my way out of Earth, I touched a girl named Ruth. She went to my school but we’d never been close. She was standing in my path that night when my soul shrieked out of Earth. I could not help but graze her. Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on.
What caught my attention was the way the author describes how Susie’s death was so traumatic that the urge to flee lasted even into death. The picture accompanying this post is taken from that scene in the movie based on the book. It’s almost perfectly in line with how I mentally pictured it when I initially read the novel. It’s a haunting image–a teenage girl, now a disembodied spirit, running screaming from the site of her own murder. Describing it as her soul shrieking out of Earth, turning the noun “shriek” into an action, makes it even more harrowing.
This book can be an extremely difficult read due to its subject matter, but it can’t be denied that Sebold’s use of language is darkly beautiful. It imbues you with the horror of what has happened with her unusual choice of words and her spare descriptions. For this reason, Susie Salmon’s fleeing spirit has continued to stick with me decades after the first reading.