the virgin suicides jeffrey eugenides book review

In one memorable scene, their suitors make a last-ditch effort at communication. They are pulled out of school and locked in the house. “Eventually the boys succeed in taking the Lisbon sisters on a single group date, but Lux breaks her mother’s curfew and the girls are permanently grounded. These men, now balding and weary and a bit disappointed with their humdrum lives, serve as the book’s Greek chorus, stitching together the story of the Lisbon sisters’ tragedy, as they meditate upon its meaning. They were once in love with the Lisbon girls, and are now, some 20 years later, trying to piece together the story of their deaths. “In the case of The Virgin Suicides, the narrator is a collective ‘we,’ a group of young men who speak in one voice. In their recollections, actual experiences blur together with the distortions of nostalgia events are re-imagined, extrapolated and heightened in an effort to memorialize and make sense of the past. And both are narrated by observers who recall the larger-than-life events of their youth from the vantage point of middle age. Both novels focus on events that fracture the consciousness of an entire community into a before and after. Not only are the themes of the two books similar, but so also are their structures and narrative methods. With its incantatory prose, its fascination with teen-age tragedy and its preoccupation with memory and desire and loss, The Virgin Suicides will instantly remind readers of Alice McDermott’s fine 1987 novel, That Night.

Their suicides become a symbol of the innocence lost as adolescents are initiated into the sad complexities of grown-up life, and the lost, dying dreams of a community that finds its collective dreams of safety spinning out of reach. Eugenides, the deaths of the five Lisbon sisters take on the high, cold shimmer of myth.

It’s not at all the sort of thing one expects to find in a coming-of-age story set in the leafy Detroit suburbs of the 70’s and as related by Mr. “This terrible event, along with the subsequent suicides of Cecilia Lisbon’s four pretty sisters, feels like something out of a Greek tragedy.

The virgin suicides jeffrey eugenides book review