Play Book Tag discussion

The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
3.5***

Eugenides’ debut work focuses on one family in a Detroit suburb. The five Lisbon sisters chafe against their mother’s strict rules and attract the attention of the neighborbood boys. Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese are beautiful and eccentric, and off limits. And then one commits suicide, and the four remaining sisters struggle to find their way out of grief – both their own and their parents’.

The novel is narrated by a group of thirty-something men, looking back on their own early high-school years, and the way they were obsessed with the Lisbon girls. Watching – or more accurately, spying on – them, looking for clues as to what they were thinking and what they might do. They applaud the efforts of one jock to take the object of his affections, fourteen-year-old Lux, to the homecoming dance. And they watch as a missed curfew results in Mrs Lisbon’s ever restrictive rules. The boys are certain they will somehow rescue the girls. They cannot see that the troubles the girls face are much deeper than just being grounded.

I read Middlesex first and loved it. Eugenides can write characters that fairly jump off the page, they are so real and so passionate about their feelings. But this book is somewhat different. There is an ethereal quality to this novel. We never really know what happens inside the Lisbon home, we have only the memories of men who, some twenty years later, cannot let go of the events of that year. What they remember most clearly is how they felt – their hopes, dreams, passions, fears. And although the boys witnessed the girls’ final acts, they are haunted by what they did not – and never will – know.


LINK to my review