Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones is a story told by a dead girl. Narrating from heaven, fourteen year old Susie Salmon watches the fallout from her own murder, and tries to comes to terms with her death. She reflects: ‘These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.’
Before You Knew My Name grapples with the same mystery – how to imagine the world without yourself in it. Alice Lee has a few more years than Susie Salmon – she is eighteen when she is killed. She has fled unhealthy ties in small town Wisconsin and arrived in New York thinking ‘I have 79.1 years promised to me, that’s the life expectancy they gave to girls born in 1996, like me.’ Those years and their promise are extinguished, barely a month into her stay.
Alice is discovered by a jogger named Ruby, another woman fleeing old connections. She has moved to NYC from Melbourne, and her first weeks in America are dominated by loneliness, the kind of exhilarating loneliness you only feel in a city where nobody knows you. Ruby is jogging in a local park during a storm when she finds Alice. Ruby can’t get the dead woman out of her mind – she hangs around the police station, asking about leads, until an exasperated officer directs her to a PTSD group, and through them, she meets the ‘Death Club’ – a group of friends who meet in restaurants and dive bars to talk about their connections to death. Lennie is a mortician, Sue lost her daughter in a car crash, Josh was technically dead himself after a biking accident for a moment or so. On one level Before You Knew My Name is a terrific story about making friends, which is not always an easy thing to write about.
But Alice is still very much in the picture, telling the story, not from heaven but the air and dust of the physical New York. She reconstructs for us the players of her little life – the mother who killed herself, the lazy guardian who took her in, her chaotic best friend Tammy, her creepy schoolteacher Mr Jackson, the kindly old man in Manhattan who gives her a free room out of nothing but generosity and his own loneliness. At the same time she’s hanging around Ruby, trying to push the older woman in the right direction, towards new friends and away from feckless lover Ash back in Melbourne. Alice is fascinated by people and life, sees kinetic energy coursing through them. Sometimes this is overwrought. Sometimes it isn’t. When Ruby meets the old man Noah, his dog Franklin ‘gives his seal of approval, nosing at Ruby’s hand when she sits down, asking for a scratch. He looks for me still, the old mutt, and he finds me sometimes, too.’
‘I too have tried to get close to him,’ says Alice, ‘But the man who murdered me only has to think about what he did that morning for those wild waves to start up again, drag me under the roiling water.’ For most of this novel the killer is off the radar, outside the net. Eventually though, he can’t help putting himself into the story, turning up at the crime scene, steering conversations back to the crime, and warning every woman he meets to ‘Be careful… It’s not as safe out there as it might seem.’ America is full of unsolved murders, people who disappear and are never found, real life cases told in books like Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls and Ethan Brown’s Murder in the Bayou. But Jacqueline Bublitz gives us hope that the knock will come, for Alice Lee’s killer, for Mr Jackson, perhaps for the killers in Oak Beach and Jefferson Davis as well.
When the Death Club hold a memorial for Alice, Ruby has one rule of conversation: ‘until the trial and resultant conviction made him impossible to avoid – no speaking about that other man, please.’
Max Dunbar 