November 2007: The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

"The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death"
by Michiko Kakutani
June 18, 2002
New York Times Book Review

At first it sounds like a high-concept movie, one of those supernatural heart-tuggers like ''Ghost'' or ''The Sixth Sense'': the story of a teenage girl's rape and murder, and the fallout those events have on her family, as narrated from heaven by the dead girl herself.

As it turns out, however, Alice Sebold's first novel, ''The Lovely Bones,'' is anything but a hokey, Ouija-board mystery. What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy, much like Alice McDermott's ''That Night,'' about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence. And it is also a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed -- slowly, grudgingly and in fragments -- through love and acceptance.

In the novel's opening passage, Ms. Sebold's narrator introduces herself with matter-of-fact charm: ''My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie,'' she says. ''I was 14 when I was murdered on Dec. 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the 70's, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen.''

Susie tells us right off what happened that awful day. She was taking a shortcut home from school when a neighbor known as Mr. Harvey lured her into a hideaway he'd built in a cornfield. He then brutally raped and murdered her -- as he'd done with a series of other girls -- and disposed of her body in a sinkhole. Her soul now inhabits a heaven that conforms to the lineaments of her 14-year-old dreams: there is a high school there, where the textbooks are Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue; there is a charming duplex for her and a roommate; and there are lots of dogs to play with.

From her vantage point in heaven, Susie looks down on the world, and she comes to believe that ''if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on earth.'' Not only is she able to follow the daily activities of her family -- her mom; dad; teenage sister, Lindsey; and baby brother, Buckley -- but she's also able to rewind their lives, to relive moments from their past from a cosmic VCR.

Being a ''watcher'' gives Susie the solace of staying in touch with her family, but at the same time it makes her yearn for her former life on earth. She is able to live vicariously through Lindsey -- sharing her sister's joy in falling in love with a boy, having sex for the first time and making plans for marriage -- but she is also reminded constantly that she has died before experiencing these rites of passage herself, that she now lives in a perpetual yesterday.

Her counselor in heaven warns her: ''If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.''

By providing Susie with omniscience of the past and present, Ms. Sebold -- the author of ''Lucky,'' a critically acclaimed memoir that chronicled her efforts to come to terms with being raped when she was a college freshman -- is able to construct an artful narrative that moves back and forth in time, while revealing what all of the principal characters, including the murderous Mr. Harvey, are thinking in the shadowed recesses of their minds.

For the members of Susie's family and their neighbors in a small suburban development, her murder rumbles through their lives like an avalanche: for some, it moves with breathtaking violence and speed, shattering old notions of safety and faith; for others, it moves in slow motion, catching them when they least expect it and tipping them off balance.

Susie's father is broken by her death: bereft and angry and convinced, in the ensuing days and weeks, that Harvey is the man who killed his daughter. When the police are unable to find evidence supporting his suspicion, he embarks on a one-man quest for justice that will earn him a reputation as a crackpot. Susie's mother desperately tries to escape the reality of her death, turning to an adulterous affair with a police detective, then leaving town altogether to try to invent a new life for herself, far away from her husband and surviving children.

Too young really to understand the disappearance of his sister, Buckley imagines that he continues to see Susie as he goes about his life. But Lindsey, so close to Susie in age and temperament, finds her life completely rocked by the loss of her sister. She tries to assume a mantle of detachment, to steel herself against the pain, but finds her classmates looking at her as a doppelgänger of a dead girl. She vows to help her father find evidence proving Mr. Harvey's guilt, a vow that will put her directly in the serial murderer's path.

Because Ms. Sebold makes us care so intensely about each member of the Salmon family, we are held rapt by their overlapping stories, fearful not only that Lindsey will fall prey to Mr. Harvey like her sister, but worried, as well, that the Salmons will never be able to reconstruct themselves as a family.

In the latter portions of the novel, Ms. Sebold's assured narration takes a few stumbles: there are portentous and highly abstract musings on Susie belonging to a historical continuum of murdered girls and women, and some unconvincing scenes dealing with an eccentric schoolmate's belief that she can somehow channel Susie's feelings.

In the end, however, even these lapses do not diminish Ms. Sebold's achievements: her ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love between parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets and unstilled hopes of one girl and one family.

October 2007: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

by Richard Louv

"Growing up Denatured"
by Bradford McKee
New York Times
April 28, 2005

Were it not for the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Neil Figler said, his sons, 7 and 11, might never peel themselves away from the Xbox to go outside and play.

"My kids want to finish their homework so they can play video games," said Mr. Figler, 47, a salesman and Cubmaster in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. In Scouting his sons have learned to light fires, handle knives and build sleds for trekking through the woods. But even those occasional encounters with nature are planned and supervised by adults.

Nonetheless, the outings seem wilder than most anything else going on in kidland these days. Mr. Figler said his sons find life easier and more familiar in front of a computer screen. Among the Scouts, he said, "that's more the norm than the exception."

The days of free-range childhood seem to be over. And parents can now add a new worry to the list of things that make them feel inept: increasingly their children, as Woody Allen might say, are at two with nature.

Doctors, teachers, therapists and even coaches have been saying for years that children spend too much time staring at video screens, booked up for sports or lessons or sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction.

But a new front is opening in the campaign against children's indolence. Experts are speculating, without empirical evidence, that a variety of cultural pressures have pushed children too far from the natural world. The disconnection bodes ill, they say, both for children and for nature.

The author Richard Louv calls the problem "nature-deficit disorder." He came up with the term, he said, to describe an environmental ennui flowing from children's fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders. Those who are obsessed with computer games or are driven from sport to sport, he maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilization.

Parents will probably encounter Mr. Louv in appearances and articles leading up to the publication next month of his seventh book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" (Algonquin Books). The book is an inch-thick caution against raising the fully automated child.

"I worked really hard to make this book not too depressing," Mr. Louv (pronounced "loov") said last week from his home in San Diego. He urges parents to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that they may remember from their own youth but that few promote in their offspring. "It's society's whole attitude that nature isn't important anymore," said Mr. Louv, 56, who has two sons age 17 and 23.

Dr. Donald Shifrin, a pediatrician in Bellevue, Wash., and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he sees the signs every day of the syndrome Mr. Louv describes in his book. His patients now arrive with fewer broken arms from falling out of trees (soccer and lacrosse injuries are most common) and more video games, cellphones and hand-held computers.

"We have mobile couch potatoes," Dr. Shifrin said. "The question is, Are we going to turn this around with more opportunities for kids to interact with nature?"

Even if parents think their children get too much screen time and not enough safari time, many have no idea what to do about it. "It's absolutely a phenomenon that nobody knows how to break," said Mark Fillipitch, 40, a manager for a Caterpillar dealer and the father of four children - 10-year-old triplets (two boys and a girl) and a 6-year-old boy- in Acworth, Ga. "It is stronger than we are."

When Mr. Fillipitch was growing up he and his friends played baseball in a big field. "And if there weren't enough kids, you'd close right field," he said. His own children have bicycles, skateboards and a swing set, he said. But "there's this magnet pulling them into the house." It is the Nintendo GameCube. "I have to throw them outside."

Tracy Herzog, 42, a hospital fitness director and the mother of boys age 7 and 12 in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in effect banishes her children outdoors, she said, by not allowing them near the television, the Game Boy or the PlayStation until after dark. And only if their homework is done.

"As parents we have to make it uncomfortable for them to be sedentary," Ms. Herzog said. "The temptation is to let the TV or PlayStation baby-sit them."

Playing on parental anxieties has become an industry unto itself, but substantive data are almost nonexistent on the presumably growing distance between children and bugs, flowers and seashells. Mr. Louv, who is also a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, has studied the topic as much as anyone. He interviewed about 3,000 children nationwide and many of their parents for his book.

Few if any scientific studies exist showing that children now spend less time exploring nature or describing the ways they benefit from being where the wild things are.

"Who's going to pay for that research?" Mr. Louv asked. "What toy can we sell for natural play?"

Stephen R. Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale whose book "Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection" (Island Press) is to be published this summer, said that he had not seen Mr. Louv's book but that ample anecdotal evidence exists to support its argument.

"When you look for the hard data, it's hard to find," Dr. Kellert said. "And people talk about children's contact with nature often in a very indiscriminate way."

Children, he said, experience nature in many settings, often indirectly. If the Internet or television prevents a child from looking for four-leaf clovers, it may also provide vicarious ways to discover Amazonian rain forests. But, he added, the passive watching of a video screen does not simulate the uncertainty and risk, however minor, that make natural exploration bracing.

The risk part, assuming that children do just want to wander or waste time outdoors, is perhaps never low enough for parents.

Tom Cara, 47, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Ill., said that he and his wife, Erin, take their son, 10, and daughter, 14, on bike trips and that he and his son, in particular, go camping and fishing in the Wisconsin wilderness. But it's hard to let children roam too freely, he said, because the news media have spooked parents with reports of child abductions and murders. "We've been conditioned to live in fear," he said.

That fear resounds for other parents, too. Mr. Figler, the Cubmaster, said that 12 rural acres lie behind his family's home, and that he and his sons often explore them together. But the woods are off limits to his younger son if he is alone. His older son may explore them, but only with a two-way radio. "It's more my wife than me" who worries, Mr. Figler said. But they both grew more concerned after their sons' school notified them that two registered sex offenders live nearby.

"We're in an awareness of safety now that may not have been as prevalent" in the past, Mr. Figler said. "You're always thinking about child abductions. You see the stories on TV, and it gets you nervous."

Like grim news stories, Amber Alerts, broadcast to help spot missing children, may also take a toll on parents' nerves by playing up the risk of criminal harm to their children. Dr. Daniel D. Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a former chairman of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he understood the fear that parents have. But he said they need to balance that fear with reality and learn to create safe zones where their children can run around on their own.

"We definitely want kids to be able to go out and play," Dr. Broughton said. "The sedentary lifestyle is a huge problem in my practice every single day. I haven't gone a day where I don't see a kid who's too fat."

Mr. Louv refers to parents' abduction fears as "the bogeyman syndrome." But he suggests that the more likely bogeymen are people who "criminalize" outdoor play through neighborhood associations and their covenants. His own neighborhood's residents' association, he said, is known to go around tearing down tree houses.

"If all these covenants and regulations were enforced, then playing outdoors would be illegal," Mr. Louv said.

And to let a child loiter is almost unthinkable, said Hal Espen, the editor of Outside magazine in Santa Fe, N.M. "The ability to just wander around is a much more fraught and anxiety-prone proposition these days," he said. "There's a lot of social zoning to go along with the urban zoning."

For Ms. Herzog, the fitness director, the local schoolyard has become the latest casualty. It was fenced off recently for security: a "lockdown," she called it. "That doesn't allow active play on the school grounds" during off hours, Ms. Herzog said. "It's not getting any easier."