I don't know what to rate this book. Well-written? Yes. But on a personal level, it was disturbing and I probably shouldn't have pushed myself. I've picked it up and put it down many times before; once I got a dozen pages in, I said "Well, I never want to read this again, so I'm going to finish it." I believe I only made it by keeping it at (emotional) arm's length, so I certainly didn't give it a proper reading.

...Reading books is not only about the way the book is written; it also has to be (more than I usually factor in?) about the reader. Maybe.

At least I can put this one behind me now. It actually did make me want to reread Middlesex.

Edit Nov 2017: Fuck not rating books. I hated this. It's literally written from the POV of the male gaze, and it still makes my skin crawl when I think about it. ( )

The ending was really inadequate. A very complex and compelling story with a cop out ending ( )

The prose in this novel is arresting; the story uncomfortable in so many ways; the symbolism well-placed; and the point of view fresh. The Virgin Suicides unfolds from a first-person plural viewpoint: a group of men collectively recalling the incidents that occurred in their upper middle class Detroit suburb during their teenage years, and against which they continued to measure experiences later in life. It is less a story about the suicides themselves and more about the boys’ adolescent fantasies that seemed to carry with them late into adulthood, still obsessed with what occurred in the period of a less than two years. The teenage boys here seem to have fallen under the spell of the Lisbon girls, who are not allowed to date and kept under the strict scrutiny of their parents. While the backdrop is the girls’ suicides over the course of a little more than a year, the real story is about teenage male desire, fantasizing, mythologizing, and objectifying the girls. ( )

Just could not get into it. I can see why other people like it: good writing, subversive, family dramas in all there weirdness and unknowability…. But it left me cold. Didn’t finish, but I read the last couple of pages to confirm that my reasons for not finishing were sound. Nothing more was going to be gleaned by me than what I had already gleaned. DNF

This is a profoundly depressing book. First, it’s about the sad and useless suicides of a family of daughters, abused and crushed by their mother’s behaviour. At the end the author has a minor rant about how they had taken on something that should have been left for god- a comment that seems wrong after the endless descriptions of the girls’ hopeless lives. Surely if god were about, someone would have stepped in and stopped this from happening.

The second reason it is depressing is because the writing is just so darn good. Occasionally, I tired of the lengthy descriptions of minor characters or scenes, but over all, the prose sings with a competence I so wish I had.

I didn’t like the book, but I may have to reread it just to see how he did it, how he put me in that town, with those people, so quickly and deeply.

That said, there are some places where his being a man writing about womanly things runs away with itself. I can’t imagine boys wanting to collect women’s tampons (used), and in one place the author compares the sadness of this family and town to investigating one’s testicles- sorry, not the same. At times the writing gets too precious, too fond of its voice. Are young boys really this obsessive?

Maybe they are. For me, it’s a grim grim tale that somehow misses making the reader feel involved- we are observers, just as the town is, and I’m left with a distant colouring of guilt, as if I could have helped the girls, but chose to watch them pruriently instead.

Must go wash my hands. ( )