Each of these books maps the fallout from these losses and shows us the holes left in the lives of the dead/missing characters' family and friends, though in very different ways.
In The Lovely Bones, the narrator, ninth grader Susie Salmon, is raped and killed in the book's opening pages. She then narrates the novel from (for the most part) heaven. This creates, in a very weird way, a kind of happy ending/uplifting narrative for the reader, since as much as Susie is dead to the family and friends she leaves behind on earth, for the reader she is alive in the telling of her story -- both what happens on earth without her and what she experiences in her afterlife.
Having a dead narrator is an excellent conceit -- one you might also recall from the movie American Beauty, among other places. At first, I thought the book would be a kind of supernatural catch-the-killer chase story, led by Susie's younger sister. I was looking forward to that, but this thread gets let go after a while and never really gets picked up again. The lead detective here, even if it is the 1970s, seems too disconnected from the police in any other city or state, and unable to do much to crack the case.
Then later in the book, a sort of magical realism sets in -- just briefly, though -- and while it has been set up with hints and nods earlier in the book, it still felt a little out of place here to me. But I read this book in two days -- in airports and on airplanes, traveling home from a visit to Michigan -- and recommend it for just such purposes. This is what I think of as smart popular fiction, like Ann Patchett's Bel Canto: beach or airplane reading for English majors.
Having wanted to read this book for years, I finally did after seeing a preview for the upcoming movie adapatation. This was news to me, but The Philadelphia Inquirer ran pictures of the location shoot last year.
Unending Nora, in contrast, offers no such uplifting narrative or comforting views of any afterlife. In this novel, the title character, thirty-something Nora Yano, suddenly goes from drifting through her life to running off the rails, by way of a strange ailment and an ill-fated romance, among other things, and then one day just disappears. Gone. Without a trace.This woman who seemed an odd, unremarkable third-wheel to her two close friends, brainy Melissa and beautiful Caroline -- and more or less inexplicable to her parents and even her church pastor -- turns out (once gone) to have been the center of gravity around which these and other lives revolved. As the novel shows how life goes on, more or less, for each of the other characters, we see again and again how this missing woman was once the key to meaning in their lives.
With the multiple, overlapping narratives of these and other characters, this novel gives you the density and scope of real lives -- and, like real life, offers little comfort and not much in the way of tidy resolutions.
I'll have more to say, in print, about Unending Nora, so for now I'll just recommend it very highly. (Shigekuni's two previous novels are on my "To Read" list now too.) This fine novel was just published by Red Hen Press and is available in all the usual places. Please check it out.
