Imagining death

That's Susie's fantasy Heaven, yes, but even Sebold (who has told interviewers she doesn't believe in God and isn't sure there's an afterlife) makes it clear that this is a child's dream. When Anna Quindlen declared "The Lovely Bones" to be a classic of the same ilk as "To Kill a Mockingbird," she was lumping the novel with one that most people read in their early teens, a naive take on race relations meant for young minds not yet ready to face the sometimes ugly truth. And that's fine for children, but surely most of the readers of "The Lovely Bones" aren't kids, even if some of them choose to read it as if they were. If submerging ourselves in the most juvenile interpretation of this (admittedly ambiguous) novel is our way of assimilating Sept. 11, then we aren't assimilating it at all; we're wallowing in escapism without admitting to ourselves that's what we're doing.

Oddly enough, the antidote I've found to this cant comes from Stephen King, a writer generally considered to offer a grisly breed of escapism. His new novel, "From a Buick 8," to be published later this month, tells how a troop of Pennsylvania state troopers come into possession of a strange car that isn't really a car -- it's a portal to another dimension. The details of the Buick itself don't matter much for the purposes of this argument; it's really a symbol for what the troopers know, what their job shows them about life. Likewise, though Sept. 11 isn't dealt with explicitly (the novel was completed earlier this year), its relevance is obvious.

The troopers in "From a Buick 8" patrol the edges of the seemingly safe world where the families in "The Lovely Bones" (oddly enough, also set in Pennsylvania) live. Sudden, meaningless death and free-floating human malevolence are things they encounter all the time on the highways. Their unending task is to keep this stuff at bay, shut up in a shed like the unholy Buick, where the threat can only be minimized, never eliminated. Then they wipe the blood off the asphalt "because John Q. [Public] and his family didn't want to be looking at it on their way to church come Sunday morning."

The troopers tell their story to a teenager, the son of one of their own, a boy orphaned when his father gets hit by a drunk driver while on duty. The death of Curtis Wilcox is a senseless thing, but the boy wants sense to be made of it, just as his father wanted to discover the true nature of the Buick and just as, I suppose, some readers want to be shown the redemptive potential in the murder of a 14-year-old girl. The message of "From a Buick 8" -- repeated perhaps a bit too insistently -- is this: "You have to stop waiting for the punchline ... the world rarely finishes its conversations." There may be no explanations, but there's plenty of work to be done, and "when it comes to dealing with the unknown, there's a great deal to be said for police training." Training won't help when a trooper visits a former commanding officer hospitalized with Alzheimer's disease and, in a rare moment of lucidity, the old man says matter-of-factly, "I'm in hell, you know. This is hell." But when these men can do something to lessen the sum of the world's distress, the training sure does come in handy.

Even though "From a Buick 8" is a bleaker book than "The Lovely Bones," I found it more heartening; whatever bullshit there may be in the troopers' notion of stoic heroism, it's functional bullshit. Their code doesn't pretend the world is a better place than it is, but it gives them a way of envisioning their arduous lives that makes it possible for them to go on. They struggle not to wrap themselves up in a cocoon where death doesn't matter and people are never really separated from those they love. That's because in order to perform their small part in containing life's horrors, they can't afford to lie to themselves. You can be the protected child or the protecting adult, and the toughest thing about adulthood is realizing that the protection you offer can never be perfect.

Both "The Lovely Bones" and "From a Buick 8" wrestle with the more private side of grief; for a sense of how a great writer responds to collective tragedy, there's no better example on the "New Books" table right now than Haruki Murakami's "After the Quake." Murakami, a lover of Western detective novels and jazz, and a bit of a loner, had long felt like a misfit in his native Japan, but in 1995, when the country was battered by an earthquake that killed about as many people in the city of Kobe as were slain on Sept. 11 -- an event followed by the terrorist sarin-gas attacks in the Tokyo subway -- he returned to his homeland from a self-imposed exile in the U.S.

"After the Quake" is a collection of stories, a masterpiece of the form and a portrayal of the way a national tragedy affects people in ineffable ways. None of the characters in these stories is in Kobe or close to anyone lost there, yet the earthquake (the stories are set before the gas attack) rearranges the foundations of their lives nonetheless. And just as events that don't directly involve us can make us feel somehow united with strangers who share our grief and bewilderment, so are the characters in "After the Quake" only superficially separated from each other.

What does it mean that the same images and themes run like filaments through all these tales? That's impossible to say. Part of Murakami's greatness is that he understands that the central mysteries of life can never be penetrated, only intuited and marvelled at. The numinous connections sensed between these stories is a kind of miracle, as the bonds between any human beings are. The catastrophe that destroys someone else's life motivates us to reenvision or even change our own. Or, if we're lucky, it shows us that, as one of Murakami's characters puts it to another character grappling with the challenges of middle age and haunted by an old hatred, "If you devote all of your future energy to living well, you will not be able to die well ... Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value."

And, of course, the uncanny relevances of "After the Quake" also tell us that our collective tragedy is not so different from Japan's, or the blows absorbed by any other people since history began. That's what the rest of the world has been trying to tell America for quite some time now: We aren't exempt, we don't get a special dispensation that permits us, even after death, to go back and finish what we left undone, to say a proper goodbye. Paradoxically, it is only through making an effort to die well -- that is, with an honest respect for death's finality and unknowability -- that we will ever be able to live well.

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