Star Rating: 4/5
“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
The Virgin Suicides seems to begin with the end. The first line of the novel 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 will die at their own hands. What one might assume will follow is the girls’ stories—their joys, their traumas, the innate inner turmoils that drove them to their tragic ends. The calm narration on the first page suggests otherwise. The firefighters get out of their truck slowly, a fat one mutters something under his breath, they trample over the Lisbons’ “erupting” lawn, and only after all these details does the reader finally get to the beginning of the story: Cecilia’s death. The girls seem to be an afterthought from the start. This is their story, and yet, it isn’t.
The girls seem to be an afterthought from the start. This is their story, and yet, it isn’t.
The Virgin Suicides is narrated by a group of unnamed men who have spent much of their lives haunted and fascinated by the suicides of their teenage neighbors. They speak as a choir, only ever using the collective “we,” explaining that this book is the result of many years of research delving into the eighteen months that transpired between the first suicide (Cecilia’s) and the last one (Mary’s). They’ve constructed a rough narrative of events by conducting interviews and collecting evidence over the years. Through tattered photographs and newspaper clippings, they make a pitiful attempt at reliving the past and imagining themselves in the shoes of the Lisbon sisters. These middle-aged men are so transfixed by the one great mystery of their adolescence that they fail to recognize the futility of their efforts. Despite their “thinning hair and soft bellies,” they are, ultimately, just confused teenage boys.
Through tattered photographs and newspaper clippings, they make a pitiful attempt at reliving the past and imagining themselves in the shoes of the Lisbon sisters.
This seems to be the running punchline of this otherwise morbid book. The narrators never overcome the insurmountable distance between them and the Lisbon sisters—a distance that they created and maintained when the girls were still alive. The sisters are constantly discussed throughout the novel as mysterious, otherworldly beings that appear as “a patch of glare like a congregation of angels.” Having placed them on this pedestal, the boys rarely interacted with the sisters, preferring to “pretend [they] hadn’t been looking for them at all” when the girls passed by them in school. In one of the rare instances when they actually attempted to communicate with the sisters, they did so by playing them songs over the phone in cryptic exchanges. It shouldn’t be surprising then that, as men, their memories are retained mostly in the form of short anecdotes and physical objects—Cecilia’s prayer card, Lux’s tube top, the knee socks they wore at school—that don’t reveal as much about the girls as they think they do. Even as the boys study and examine the past, they never get any closer to understanding the Lisbon sisters because of the self-imposed distance they created as a result of both scrutinizing and idealizing them.
But what makes the girls mystifying is what also makes them deeply alluring—not only to the narrators but also to readers. It’s easy to understand why the boys hold on to their mental images of the girls, taken while observing them from a distance: Cecilia wearing her tattered wedding dress, Therese fiddling with her ham radio, and perhaps the most compelling, Lux and her rooftop rendezvouses. These images don’t offer substantial insight into the girls’ inner thoughts, but as fragments of their lives, they intrigue and captivate regardless. They also mirror and contrast with the dull Michigan suburb the story is set in. On the surface nothing seems amiss in this quaint neighborhood until one realizes that it’s rotting: Dutch elm disease eats at the trees, dead flies encrust cars, and bushes overgrow on untrimmed lawns. The suburb is depicted as near-gothic, highlighting how this neighborhood has failed to hide its repulsive reality. Much like the girls, the environment erodes in a strange but conspicuous manner, and by the end of the book when all the trees are cut down, it’s too late for the community to probe this mystery.
Still, the boys probe, engrossed in the great mystery of their youth. Their pursuit brings them to one conclusion: “The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness.” It’s the kind of sentiment that reaffirms the cynical reader’s suspicion that the boys have explored this tragedy more so for their sake than for the sisters’. The girls, after all, passed decades ago; they now serve only as reminders to the men of how young they once were. This book may well be their last attempt at reconciling with the past as they remain paralyzed in time, puzzled by the eccentric sisters embalmed in their memories as angels from the sultry, summer days of their adolescence.
Their pursuit brings them to one conclusion: “The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness.”
But being an angel isn’t easy. It’s difficult enough to be a girl. One of the most famous lines from this novel comes after Cecilia’s failed suicide attempt when the doctor tells her she’s “not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” “Obviously, Doctor,” she says, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.” The narrators end up agreeing with the doctor, although while reading Cecilia’s diary, they become convinced that they’ve gained a better understanding of girlhood: “We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.” The truth is that girlhood isn’t inherently imprisoning. It can certainly feel imprisoning, especially when compounded by suburban malaise and teenage boys who treat you as a concept and not a person. The Virgin Suicides remains a cult classic precisely because Eugenides understood this important distinction. The Lisbon sisters seemed to as well.
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. His collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint, is from FSG (2017). Eugenides is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton.
The Virgin Suicides can be purchased here.
Berkeley Fiction Review 
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