In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters–beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys–commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. (Synopsis source: www.amazon.com)
The Virgin Suicides may be one of the most unconventional coming of age stories I’ve read, if only because its protagonists end up dead instead of functioning adults at the end of the story. It is in that unconventionality that both the best and the worst parts of this novel lie – Eugenides’ attempt to capture the essence of youth’s fragility and temporality is successful only insofar as it exists completely outside of the real world. In other words, The Virgin Suicides should be read as a fairy tale. Whether or not Eugenides meant for his novel to be read this way, he makes it very easy; like any (good) fantasy writer would, Eugenides spends enough time building a self-contained world that one can become lost inside his novel’s universe without paying attention to the rules and realities that govern our outside world. The dreamy, surreal suburb in which the novel is set is historical, otherworldly, and above all macabre: it is a world in which five pretty girls in white dresses killing themselves violently is an aesthetic spectacle that simultaneously horrifies and enthralls their neighbors.
This is where the problem comes in. Eugenides writes very absorbingly. That makes it easy to forget how deeply, profoundly problematic this novel is, especially given that The Virgin Suicides is stylistically voyeuristic, narrated by neighborhood boys who have a decidedly sexual fascination with the Lisbon sisters and see their deaths as increased fuel for that fascination. If Eugenides wishes to comment on the fleeting nature of adolescence – and how that nature makes it beautiful – he has done so in the most sexist, morbid way possible. At the end of The Virgin Suicides, I was disappointed with my reading experience because the entire story felt like an elaborate gag to drag the reader into the faulted, narrow mindset of the neighborhood boys, who grow older but seem frozen in perpetual adolescence along with the objects of their fascination. Yet Eugenides writes his novel so that the Lisbon sisters become inhuman idols, held above the reach of ordinary people like the boys who narrate the story. They are not characters so much as they are things; they are not subjects so much as they are objects.
The Virgin Suicides could have been a brilliant novel if it were written with an ironic spirit, but I find no indication that it was. A story whose narrators are vague shadows that speak in plural first person and whose main protagonists are attractively doomed to never even being characters (a fate much worse than death in a novel) is not a story that can hold the reader’s attention without resorting to sentimentalist tripe. Which is what Eugenides did. The Virgin Suicides is an absorbing and beautiful read, but you may feel cheated when you reach its end.
Not recommended
Disgruntled Lit Major 