The Virgin Suicides question

one of the songs that the girls played for the boys (or the boys played for the girls...I don't remember) over the phone was The Virgin Suicides. I checked the book out from the library so I don't have it on hand, but when I read that it was like an ah ha moment :-p

It is the title of a song by a band called Cruel Crux, or something like that. It is mentioned twice in the book, although I dont think it's one of the songs they play for each other.

the song is about the suicide of the girls virginity, basically, not about suicide but about a girl deciding to have sex and get rid of her virginity.

I think it's the 'first time' the girls kill themselves...and what I mean by that is it repeatedly happens when the boys continue to tell this story over and over again to themselves and to us as the reader.

Also I think it might mean that the suicides had a 'pure' intention which we don't know about.

I think once you kill yourself, that is once enough. I saw the movie, and the narrator ended up in a psych ward. I think he felt to blame for what happened. I think the parents wished things were different. All the girls come on.

Ben wrote: "Anyone?"

As it has already been mentioned, inside the narrative 'The Virgin Suicides' is a song by a band that does not exist in real life.

My take on it is connected to the fact that the band is not actually real and that the title of the song was used by the reporter who deliberately set out to simplify and give neat answers to what remains, ultimately, a mystery.

Just like Ms Perle cannot possibly get to the heart of the manner so the narrator(s) will forever not know. It is the impossibility of ever truly knowing that is ultimately at the heart of much of the novel; arguably the entire novel is a fumbling for closure but must fail precisely because in itself it is doomed to failure by definition.

Thus, 'The Virgin Suicides' is not any more accurate than the reporter who claimed that Theresa 'loved horses' even though there is no evidence to it.

The very fact that even within the narrative proper, in which the song does exist, it is unclear if Lux ever even listened to it, shows in itself an irrevocable disconnect between the desire to know and the knowledge.

I also think the title points to the way in which the sisters' identities get conflated and blurred. Even the narrator, obsessive as he is in recording the brief life and death histories of the Lisbon sisters, often admits that he and others confuse them and do not even quite know who is who. (This happens to the priest, in the very end, over the girls' graves).
By that token, 'The Virgin Suicides' came to represent all of the sisters even though Lux was most definitely not a virgin. But it does not matter, an aura of virginity hovered over them all and thus Lux is absorbed into the collective idea of the 'Lisbon Sisters' and thus is also a 'Virgin Suicide'.

I dunno. But "Virgin Suicides, except for the sister who was a whore" probably didnt have the same ring to it.

Ha!

Seriously, are people really confused by this? It really couldn't be more straightforward.