DOUBLE BOUND SUCCESSFUL LITERARY PARTNERS SHARE A HOME, BUT NOT WRITING STYLES.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

It's hard to overstate what Alice Sebold has achieved. Sebold has taken a fairly untenable premise - a young girl who was raped and murdered at the age of 14 narrates the story of her family's aftermath from heaven - and not only transformed it into a heartbreakingly hopeful first novel, ``The Lovely Bones,'' but also one that has met with wild critical acclaim and ensconced itself on best-seller lists.

Glen David Gold, Sebold's husband, whose own first novel - ``Carter Beats The Devil,'' about a real-life magician suspected of murdering President Warren G. Harding - made a similar splash last fall, notes, ``There are two types of readers: Readers who are too hip to read about heaven, and readers who are so sensitive that they don't want to read about murdered children. So you have 95 percent of the people gone from the room. But every type of reader discovers, A), heaven isn't icky, or B), the murder of this kid is actually redemptive.''

Sebold interjects: ``Please, please title your article 'Heaven isn't icky.' '' They laugh.

And with back-to-back his-and-hers best sellers, they have plenty of reason for good humor these days. New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, in a rare front-page-of-the-arts-section review, raved, ``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 ... 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.''

A few months earlier, in the pages of The New York Times Book Review, Stephanie Zacharek similarly enthused of ``Carter,'' ``Sometimes the most entertaining novels, like the best magic tricks, are deceptively simple. ... His book, which is a work of fiction built around a framework of real-life characters and events, is simply a grand story told well, in plain language that glows with bare-bones elegance. It's a class act.''

Early chapters

Sitting upstairs at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena where, upon being recognized by store employees, Sebold is practically genuflected toward - the couple (who live in Long Beach) cheerfully discussed their disparate working methods and their long roads to critical and reader acceptance. They're a personable and, despite their accolades, particularly unpretentious pair, quick to joke and appreciate the other's one-liners.

Of course, that could be because prior to their books, Gold and his wife collaborated on a script for an episode of Nickelodeon's ``Hey, Arnold!'' (Sebold took no credit) and, he says, ``I was on the staff of '101 Dalmatians' for eight hours. It was an extremely literary eight hours. I had written a script about lesbian biker chicks and the men who love them and the guy hired me to write about Pongo and Perdita and wiser heads prevailed and fired him and me.''

The two have very different approaches. Gold's ``Carter Beats the Devil'' is a sprawling historical novel, filled with betrayal, paranoia, spectacular magic tricks that go horribly awry, action sequences and a blind beauty - it's like a big brass band, compared to Sebold's more hushed chamber piece. As a consequence, though they both write at home, they've learned how to give one another space when working on their books.

``When we're both (writing), we have rules about how we try to live,'' Gold says. ``We kind of nurture each other's neuroses.''

``I didn't first believe that (playing computer solitaire) was part of the process, but it is for him,'' Sebold interjects, ``and also searching eBay because he writes historical novels, he'll find pictures of old stuff.''

Gold adds, ``For me, the happy accident happens. A lot of time, I really am just goofing off. But yesterday I was on eBay looking at antique furniture, and a description of the furniture had two sentences explaining what it was originally used for and I thought, 'Wow, that's great! I can't buy the furniture but I can steal the narrative.' Suddenly, it's research!''

Likewise, their dissimilar styles help them assess one another's work without getting sidetracked from their own. ``Because they are so different it works well,'' Sebold says. ``It might not if we worked more similarly. For me, it's like walking from one kind of room that's distinctly decorated into a whole open pasture. I get to sit down with Glen's work and enter this other world. And in a weird way, it's a real break from my work and I feel more refreshed when I get back to it.''

``Alice's work is very much based in relationships, emotions and characters, and my work, or at least 'Carter,' is based on finding interesting ways to blow things up,'' Gold says. ``There's a humanity in her work that when I read it, I think, 'This is what fiction can be at its best,' and it makes me very happy to read it, and it's not like what I'm writing. I can help in editing her work, and in the same way, she can ask me, 'In the scenes where people blow up, how do the characters feel when things blow up?' ''

Risk and reward

Sebold's entire book could have blown up in her face - it could have been too maudlin or horribly affected - had she not chosen her path deftly. But she said that wasn't really a worry while writing.

``Since I expect to fail, I write all the time, so I didn't necessarily write with the idea of acceptance,'' she says. ``I wanted to make it as good as I could, but I felt comfortable walking out on the plank because if I fell, who cares, because no one's ever heard me. So I wasn't really thinking about the stakes of the thing.''

Prior to her novel, Sebold had published ``Lucky,'' a wrenching memoir of surviving a rape as a college freshman. ``I started writing 'Lovely Bones' before I wrote 'Lucky,' and stopped the novel about 100 pages into the draft and started writing 'Lucky,' she explains. `` 'Lucky' ended up being a published part of the process of writing 'Lovely Bones.' My experience with violence obviously informs my ability to write about violence, but I'm not the character in the novel.

Both books have been optioned for films. ``Chinatown'' screenwriter Robert Towne is currently adapting ``Carter,'' with Tom Cruise possibly starring. ``Lovely Bones'' had been optioned before it saw print, though the owners of the rights, British-based FilmFour, recently declared bankruptcy.

In the wake of their success - Sebold says, ``people who never wanted to talk to us for a moment now want to talk to us. Suddenly, we're real, and we weren't real for 20 years. Everything has changed and nothing has changed at the same time, because we're old enough that it's not like I'm going to get an all-leather wardrobe.''

``We both failed for so long,'' Gold says, adding that they've never felt competitive toward one another. ``I have four very bad novels in a drawer that won't come out anytime soon. What happens is when both of you succeed and both of you get paid attention to, there's enough pie for everybody.''

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Married novelists Alice Sebold, left, and Glen David Gold are taking their recent success in stride. ``We're old enough that it's not like I'm going to get an all-leather wardrobe,'' Sebold says.

Tom Mendoza/Staff Photographer