The Virgin Suicides

Normally, I finish the books I start, especially when, like this one, they are well written and well narrated.

I made it half way through this put book and put it away in disgust. I didn't want any more of it in my head.

This isn't because I felt too emotionally distraught by experiencing a novel that centres around the death by suicide of five young sisters. There is no empathy for those women in this novel. The young women here are displayed as curiosities, barely distinguishable from one another, alien to the boy/man describing them, important because of the impact they have on the boys who observe them rather than because of any intrinsic worth. They are the thunderstorm the boys stand in. How the boys felt in the rain is what Jeffrey show more Eugenides is concerned with, not what it means to be a storm.

The book is set in an American White Middle Class suburb in the 1950's and is told, twenty years after the fact, by a man who was a boy at the time of the suicides and who is still sufficiently obsessed by the events to be investigating them, not so much, it seems, to unravel a mystery as to revive the taste of it in his mouth.

Eugenides writes well. This does not endear his novel to me because he chooses to deploy his skill not to write an elegy that gives meaning to the suicides of the young women, but to write an almost masturbatory reminiscence of what it felt like to be a white boy with no first-hand knowledge of girls, lusting and longing for the Lisbon Sisters, without actually being able to see them as people.

The era itself, including its racism and its sexual repression, is presented with unquestioning love. There seems to be more regret in the author's mind for the loss of a time when nice families raked leaves off their lawns in the Fall than there is for the death of any or all of the Lisbon sisters.

The adult narrator, recalling his own reactions as a boy, seems to long for a time when girls were a mystery and boys spent hours talking to each other about what it might be like to touch them.

The books seemed to me to be steeped in a repressed but deeply felt homoeroticism. The description of Trip Fontaine and his encounter with Lux Lisbon is a good example of this. Trip is described with a tenderness and admiration, bordering on love, both as a beautiful youth and as a middle-aged man, wrecked by drug use. Lux, in her short, frenzied, assault on Trip, is presented as a threat, an unleashed animal, something alien and dangerous and far from human.

The longer I listened to this well written, well narrated book, the more I was repulsed by its nostalgia for ignorance and its voyeuristic delight in treating women as an alien, not quite human, species.

Like all good story tellers, Eugenides is a skilled manipulator. He uses the passive, unquestioning, but articulate romanticism of the narrator to lull the reader into an uncritical assessment of this world and the people in it. He dresses his book with literary allusions, from character names that are amusingly descriptive, through selected quotations from poetry, to a stylistic nod at Steinbeck, and he sets this all back far enough in time that the use of tinted lenses to view the world is seen as appropriate.

Unfortunately, I am repelled by this particular manipulation. It is at best hollow and uncritical and at worst sets out to eulogize a male view of the world that I despise.

O.K., so he's a Pulitzer Prize winner. That wasn't my decision. Putting his book away halfway through was. Life is too short to spend on well expressed ideas that curdle the soul. show less

The Lisbon family is made up of five teenage daughters, a mild-mannered father and an extremely conservative mother. When the youngest daughter, Cecilia, commits suicide at the beginning of the novel, the family is thrown into a painful year of grieving. Their quiet life in a
Detroit suburb becomes claustrophobic as they slowly retreat within themselves.

We watch their story unfold from the outside view of the neighborhood boys and because of this we never truly understand all that the girls go through. The reader is left wanting more; more information, more interaction with the Lisbons, just more. I think that Eugenides intended this, because he wrote the book from the point-of-view of outsiders who were themselves, left wanting more. show more That is a double-edged sword though, because while the novel is strangely fascinating, it also keeps the reader at a distance. We hear about events that have already happened and we receive little explanation for them. It’s hard to become too involved, but it’s also a tribute to Eugenide’s skill as a writer that he can give the reader so little and yet hold their attention.

It’s a beautifully written debut novel and I’m glad I read it, though I might have held him to a higher standard with this novel, because I knew what he was capable of. In the writing I recognize the style that I loved so well in his second book, Middlesex. This book’s somber tone failed to capture my love in the same way his later novel did. show less

An unsettling, beautifully written fever dream of adolescence and the unknowability of another's life and mind. One of my book clubs chose this, and we all loved it, despite finding it a difficult read. There is so much to unpack in the 250 pages of the novel that it made for a far-reaching and very meaty conversation. Our discussion focused on the themes of voyeurism, the male gaze, adolescence, and emotional and psychological abuse, among other things. Eugenides' prose is rich and lush, and I highlighted dozens of phrases and passages that struck me with their perfection.

4 stars

'The Virgin Suicides' is somewhat odd in that it seems to begin with the end. The first line reads: “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” At once, the reader understands that all five Lisbon sisters, Cecelia, Lux, Mary, Bonnie and Therese, will die at their own hands. It seems absolutely right for the reader to then assume that will follow is the girls’ stories—their joys, their traumas, that drove them to their tragic ends however they would be very wrong.

The novel is show more narrated by an unknown man some twenty years after the deaths who is a member of a group of now middle-aged men who have spent much of their lives haunted and fascinated by the suicides of their teenage neighbours. They’ve constructed a rough narrative of events by conducting interviews and collecting evidence over the years. Cecelia was the first to die and the story largely centres aftermath of her death that occurred over the following eighteen months. Through tattered photographs and newspaper clippings, they attempt at reliving the past and imagining themselves in the shoes of the Lisbon sisters. At school the girls had few close friends and were seen as something of an enigma, an unknowable quality which fuelled the neighbourhood boys' desires and imaginations. But what makes the girls mystifying is what also makes them deeply alluring, “a patch of glare like a congregation of angels.”

I am sure that some readers will feel that this novel romanticizes suicide but it does shine a light on an important societal issue. At its core this book is about how people try to assign a meaning to senseless tragedy.

I found this book well written book from start to finish. There is a subtle humour sprinkled within it that raises it above the morbid. I would like to have learnt more about a couple of the girls but it still felt so real I had to check that it wasn’t based on a true story. Eugenides not only raised awareness about an issue that devastates thousands of people today, but he’s brought to light themes of adolescence, repression, and the impact of societal expectations. I found it to be a riveting read which is all the more remarkable given that this is his first novel. show less

“In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”

“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”

The Lisbon family consists of both parents and five teenage daughters. The girls have led a sheltered life, being reined in by a strong-willed bible-thumping mother. One fateful night, the daughters are allowed to have a chaperoned party, at their home. In a shocking turn, the youngest commits suicide and over that summer the rest follow suit. The story is told in a collective voice, representing the neighbor boys, who are infatuated with the girls show more and have followed their every move.
Of course, this impressive, challenging debut novel, takes getting used to and I can understand why so many readers have been completely turned off by it. Fortunately, I began to lock into it's dark, disturbing groove and was dazzled by his introspective prose and inventive style. Lots to chew on here and I am not sure a single reading, can digest it all.

**I also followed up, by watching the film version, directed by Sophia Coppola, which is very faithful to the novel but suffers from being a bit chilly and aloof. If you like the book, I still recommend seeing it. show less

The Virgin Suicides is one of those critically-acclaimed books that, after you read it, you stand back and say “Huh?” And then start beating yourself up for not being intellectual enough or perceptive enough to winkle out the deep and profound meaning, the extended metaphors, and the classical allegory of the novel.

Either that, or the emperor has no clothes.

Eugenides’ debut novel, apparently set in the 70s (as determined by the pop songs and teen fashions being referenced), traces the story of five sisters in one family who all kill themselves over a one-year period of time. That’s not a spoiler, as it's referenced fairly early on while the novel’s structure is being set up. The story is told in flashback from the viewpoint of show more several young men (their exact number and specific identities are never clarified) who were hormone-laden contemporaries of the Lisbon sisters and lusted for them in various ways during the last year of their lives.

One could, I suppose, expound upon the fact that the interior lives and ultimate motivations of the girls are never shown from the girls’ viewpoints. Perhaps this is intended to reflect the notion that women exist only to reflect the ideas of men, or that adolescents are routinely destroyed by the expectations of the adult world. Or maybe that modern families have become so insular that a community no longer sees, or is expected to step in (so much for “it takes a village”) when one nuclear family begins to implode.

One could pretend that the metaphor of the gradual disintegration of the Lisbon home is a brilliant and original way to represent the disintegration of the family and their intertwined manifestations of obsession and madness, except that it’s neither brilliant nor original. Most of the metaphors, in fact – the brief lifespan of the fish-flies whose annual cycle of emergence and death bracket the year-long span of the story, the slow dying of the stately elm trees whose beauty and dignity enhanced the neighborhood – are labored and obvious.

Or one could simply throw up one’s hands and move on to a more satisfying read, where characters develop, interact, and advance the basic plot as they reveal themselves and their relationships. Because one will find none of those qualities in this book. show less

A weird but terribly compelling tale, set in a middle class town in 1970s Michigan. Narrated not by any one character but by a 'Greek chorus' of the local boys; every event told from the 'we' perspective. They recall the Lisbon family - schoolteacher father, overprotective Catholic mother and their five lovely daughters. After the youngest - and strangest - commits suicide, the family begins to crack up. We never really know what propels the other daughters to eventually follow suit: the loss of their sister? their abnormal home life? something genetic? The whole narrative is kind of Gothic, dreamy, other-worldly; just as we never get a real handle on the several narrators, so too the girls are seen only through their eyes and their show more recollections and opinions- like watching them in a mirror rather than really knowing them.
I've never read anything like this, an incredible feat of writing. show less