“The Virgin Suicides” Jeffrey Eugenides

I remember reading a description of “The Virgin Suicides” and thinking that I wouldn’t be interested in reading it. After all, it is about teenage suicide, and this topic for me is both dreary and overdone. However, I read “Middlesex” without realizing that Eugenides wrote it and “The Virgin Suicides” and enjoyed how he describes different periods in time. I particularly liked that the book didn’t limit itself to Cal’s life, but instead includes the history of his family back several generations. In this way, “Middlesex” is something like “Warrior Woman,” because Cal’s life is placed in the context of his ancestry in a way similar to how Maxine Hong Kingston’s life is placed in the context of her ancestry. Another similarity in the books is that Cal and Maxine are not one thing or another, but somewhere in between; Cal is neither male nor female and Maxine is neither Chinese nor American. So much for the digression into a comparison between “Middlesex” and “Warrior Woman.” The point is that regardless of the topic of “The Virgin Suicides” I thought that it would be a good read since it was by Eugenides (and besides, I really like saying Eugenides.)

“The Virgin Suicides” is set in the 1970s, and in some ways I was able to connect with the story because of that. For instance, music plays an important role at a certain point in the story, and the songs mentioned (and actually sung by the reader at one point) took me back to my high school days. Actually, I listened to “The Virgin Suicides” on my drive up to Alaska and coincidentally had stocked the car with music from the 1970s, so it was as if I had planned on having the soundtrack to the book all along. On the other hand, there were aspects of the book that were foreign to me. The setting was in a mature Midwestern suburban neighborhood, far removed from my southern small town upbringing. The neighborhood included many families with children the same age as the Lisbon girls, again much different than the isolation my brothers and sisters and I experienced growing up in a more commercial area of town. I have several times in this blog discussed whether I could connect with a story or not, and it is not that I think I have to “get” the characters and their situations to think a book is good. But we do look for books that take us back home again, so to speak. “The Virgin Suicides” took me to a place that was both like home and not like home.

An interesting aspect of the book is that the narrator is a group of people. Not in the same way that books like “Love Medicine” by Erdrich are written, where each chapter is narrated by a different person. Instead, the narration of “The Virgin Suicides” is written in first person plural, and the narrators are a group of boys who knew the Lisbon girls and admired them from afar. Cecelia Lisbon attempts to and then succeeds in killing herself at the beginning of the book. In an attempt to understand why she did this, the narrators read her diary, in which Cecilia writes about her sisters and herself as if they are a single entity. In a way, this describes the boys narrating the story. Occasionally one of them is named, but it is like they are naming a limb instead of a separate being. We are not even sure how many narrators there are, but we do know that they are obsessed with the deaths of the Lisbon girls.

There were times that I felt the writing could have been tighter, and occasionally I tuned out while listening to the book. On the whole, however, I found the story engaging and surprising, and as I have said before in this blog, it is difficult for a book to surprise me. I actually listened to some of the story about Lux a couple of times to make sure I understood what was happening. I wanted to know more about what Mary, Bonnie and Therese were doing during their incarceration, but I also understand that too much detail about each of the girls’ lives would have made them seem like individuals instead of a single organism. The motivation for the suicides of the five girls is never explained and left for us to work out for ourselves, but I have one small theory. If we are to think of the five girls as a single entity, is it possible that when Cecilia died the entity lost a part that was so large and so essential that the rest of the organism simply could not live without it?