99 pages • 3 hours read
The Lovely Bones
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Chapters 6-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Two weeks before Susie’s death, she arrives late to school. To avoid punishment, she sneaks around to the back door of the stage. Ray is in the scaffolding above and calls Susie beautiful as she enters. Susie reveals that Ray moved from England a year before her death but was born in India, and that the two had a mutual crush on each other. Ray invites her up on to the scaffolding. After a brief hesitation, she joins him since “it was [her] one day in life of being a bad kid” (74).
As Susie and Ray lie together in the scaffolding, two teachers enter below them with Ruth. The teachers reprimand Ruth for a charcoal drawing she did of a nude reclining woman, which someone then photocopied and passed around the school. They instruct Ruth to draw only what she is told to draw, and the teachers leave as Ruth begins crying. Susie climbs down and approaches Ruth. Ruth shows Susie her sketchbook, and Susie, noticing Ruth’s artistic talent, “realizes how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers” (77). Susie tells the reader that, while she didn’t get to kiss Ray then, they had their only kiss later that week in front of their lockers.
After the police abandon the investigation of the cornfield, Ruth begins walking through it every morning after her father drops her off at school early. One morning Ray goes to meet her in the cornfield, and they wait together until school begins. It quickly becomes their ritual, and they spend every morning sitting and talking with each other. Ruth reveals to the skeptical Ray that she believes in heaven and is glad that at least Susie is out of this “shithole” (83). Susie watches Ruth in these mornings and feels a connection between them.
Jack goes to the Singhs’ house and Ruana, Ray’s mother, greets him. He apologizes for how the police accused Ray and tells her that he is glad Susie had a nice boy who liked her enough to write her a love note. Jack also tells her that he knows who killed Susie and is trying to find evidence on his own. Ruana tells him that if she were in his place, she would confirm her suspicions and then kill him.
While Jack is at the Singhs’, Fenerman comes to visit the Salmon household. Fenerman tells Abigail that he is optimistic the authorities will eventually catch Susie’s killer. While watching Abigail play with Buckley, Fenerman also reveals that his wife died shortly after they were married. Susie notices that Fenerman keeps a stack of photographs in his wallet of all the women who’s murder he has investigated, writing the date on the back when solved. Both Susie’s and his wife’s picture are in there with nothing on the back.
Chapter 7 Summary
Buckley and his best friend Nate are playing at the Salmon house when Jack comes home. Staring at a grave rubbing that Susie and Lindsey used to play make-believe with, Buckley says that Susie visited him at night and takes Nate into Susie’s room. The two crawl under Susie’s bed to open her secret storage space underneath the box spring, and Buckley takes out a handkerchief with a bloody twig wrapped inside.
Susie then flashes back to a memory of watching Buckley and Nate play in the backyard. The Salmon parents often tasked Susie with watching Buckley. As Susie applies nail polish, she hears Nate screaming for help as Buckley has accidentally swallowed a twig and is choking. Susie rushes downstairs, puts Buckley in the back seat of Jack’s Mustang, and manages to drive him to the hospital—saving his life.
Following the memory, Susie feels faint and suddenly sees a large, dark Victorian building that she has never gone in. Susie thinks she sees a row of women, but they turn out to be crows holding twigs, who follow her as she walks home. As she returns, Susie is not sure if Buckley has really seen her (as she has been trying to conceal her presence to protect him) or whether he has been telling “beautiful lies” (95).
Chapter 8 Summary
For three months after Susie’s murder, Harvey dreams of buildings. His favorite and most frequent dream, the one he dreamt the night after killing Susie, is of the Church of the Transfiguration in Vologda, Russia. After killing a victim, Harvey has these peaceful dreams, however, the other dreams eventually come back: the “not still dreams—the ones of women and children” (96).
Susie looks back in Harvey’s childhood to when his father built shacks of broken glass and old wood in the desert while lecturing George on how to construct a sturdy building. When his not still dreams begin to come back, Harvey reads over his father’s sketchbooks, trying to love the pictures of the places he drew to have his peaceful dreams of buildings again.
That night after reading the sketchbook, Harvey dreams of the day he saw his mother for the last time. His father had abandoned her on the side of a road in New Mexico after a fight, and George watched from the back seat of the car as they drove away with her chasing after. Before the incident, his mother had given him her amber necklace, with a fly sealed inside, that he has kept till this day.
Chapter 9 Summary
Abigail’s mother, Grandma Lynn, arrives the evening before Susie’s memorial. Abigail has a fraught relationship with her mother, Lynn, whom she views as an embarrassment: Lynn is an eccentric, an alcoholic, and a heavy user of Benzedrine. Whenever visiting, Abigail’s mother would always sport her furs on walks around the block, wear heavy makeup to neighborhood parties, and ask Abigail personal questions about the neighbors. Despite her odd behavior, Lynn “dragged the light back in” (100) to the house.
As Lynn arrives, she asks Abigail if Jack still believes Harvey did it and warns her that Harvey could sue them for defamation. Lindsey secretly listens to the conversation from the top of the stairs. That evening after dinner, Lynn asks if Abigail needs help. While Abigail interprets this as Lynn wanting to help with the dishes, Lynn instead begins giving Abigail a makeover instead. Buckley asks to learn about makeup, which Lynn obliges, and Abigail begins to smile again as she gets her makeover. Lynn immediately realizes that Lindsey now has a boyfriend, which she announces to the entire family, causing Jack to smile again as well. That night, Lynn gets drunk, as does Jack (who hasn’t consumed alcohol since Susie’s death), and Lynn gives Lindsey a makeover as well. Susie watches as her family is finally able to share a happy moment and realizes that “the most amazing thing was that [her] mother went to bed and left the dirty dishes in the sink” (103).
After everyone has gone to sleep, Lindsey looks at herself in the mirror and sees an adult who can take care of herself. Lindsey appreciates how the makeup sharpens her features and makes her look more attractive and grownup. She then goes to sleep on her back so that she doesn’t mess up the makeup.
The day of Susie’s memorial, Lindsey hides in her room until the last possible minute so that there won’t be time to wash off the makeup. Lindsey goes into Susie’s room to wear one of her dresses. Inside, she notices that the visiting family members have taken keepsakes of remembrance and increasingly disturbed Susie’s room in the process. However, the family blames all disturbances on the dog. As Lindsey looks around for something to wear, Lynn enters and asks for help zipping up her dress. She then helps Lindsey pick out an outfit (which was actually a dress that belonged to Clarissa), get dressed, and fix her makeup.
To Jack’s surprise, he finds the memorial day pleasant, as he does not have to pretend to be normal and can be honest about his grief. However, he can no longer look at his wife and see the woman he knew before Susie’s death. Ruth arrives at the memorial with her father and is horrified at Lindsey, as she does not believe in women wearing makeup. Ray does not attend the memorial but says goodbye in his own way: He places Susie’s studio photo, which she gave him as a gift, into a volume of Indian poetry that he and his mother press flowers in.
At the memorial, everyone says nice things about Susie while the family sits there, numb. As everyone rises for the final hymn, Lynn leans over to Lindsey and points out that Harvey, who Jack believes killed Susie, is standing by the door. Lindsey locks eyes with Harvey, and then passes out. As the family attends to Lindsey, Harvey slips away without anyone else noticing him.
Chapters 6-9 Analysis
After the initial shock of Susie’s disappearance, these chapters cover how the characters struggle to deal with Susie’s death in the immediate aftermath. Sebold depicts the dysfunctional and toxic behavior of the adults while demonstrating that the kids, although grieving, continue to move on with their lives in a healthier way. Jack and Abigail begin to drift apart, with Abigail becoming even more detached from her role as “mother” and placing her faith in the police. Jack, however, becomes convinced that Harvey killed Susie and begins his own investigation. Although Jack’s suspicions about Harvey are correct, the novel presents both Abigail and Jack’s coping mechanisms for their grief as dysfunctional, and it is not until the end of the novel that they are able to achieve some kind of closure or happiness. Here we also learn about Harvey’s abusive childhood and how he kills to achieve a type of spiritual peace, albeit only temporarily before the spirts of the girls he has killed return to torment him.
More successful are the coping mechanisms of Susie’s peers, which is where the novel’s two major themes of grief and coming-of-age intertwine. Ruth and Ray begin a friendship based on their shared connection with Susie (Ruth being passed by Susie’s soul and Ray sharing a first kiss with Susie) as a way of dealing with their grief. Susie revisits the only time that Susie, Ruth, and Ray were together, although Ruth and Ray do not interact in this memory. Here, all three are transgressing the bounds of proper behavior at school—Susie is late, Ray is skipping English, and Ruth is reprimanded for a nude drawing she did. While Susie, a typical suburban middle-school girl, is less-obviously an “outsider” than Ruth (a feminist, artist, and “weird” social outcast) or Ray (seemingly the only family of color in Norristown), her death and subsequent observation from heaven markers her as an outsider in a most literal sense. In this way, Sebold establishes the strong connection between the three characters, even though the three of them are never actually together.
Similarly, Lindsey and Samuel’s relationship begins in earnest here, and Susie is able to vicariously experience the coming-of-age rituals they go through together: Lindsey and Samuel share their first kiss after Samuel gives Lindsey a Christmas gift. Later, when Grandma Lynn arrives, she puts makeup on Lindsey for the first time, which is another coming-of-age ritual and physical marker of adulthood.
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