The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeffrey EugenidesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-06-01
ISBN: 0446670251
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Book Reviews of The Virgin Suicides
Book Review: Obviously, I've been a 13-year-old girl
Summary: 5 Stars
SPOILERS AHEAD (if it's possible given the title of the book):
I love this book but I wonder if anyone, including the author, entirely understands what he has done here. Does he think the deaths of the Lisbon girls mysterious, or is it only his unreliable narrator who thinks it, a man clearly haunted as much by adolescence itself as by five long-dead girls? If you want this to stay mysterious, stop reading now.
I'm puzzled that anybody is puzzled why the Lisbon sisters all kill themselves. There are clues all through the book: at the prom, one sister asks if the boys took them out because they felt sorry for them. One reportedly cries when she can't afford to get her messed up teeth fixed, something her parents either can't or won't pay for. One says she feels like a charity child, attending this posh school because her father teaches there. They are describe as wearing last year's school clothes because the mother won't buy them any that fit (which really poor families sometimes do at thrift shops--at least then they're the right size). At the prom, they know their "shapeless sacks" dresses are wrong the minute the other girls look at them. Obviously, as much as the boys idealize and romanticize them, the girls feel like freaks and justthisclose to being outcasts--like the retarded boy the kids make fun of at the party right before Cecilia kills herself. If they don't band together and hide their family's dirty laundy, they'll be openly persecuted instead of just whispered about.
Trip dumps Lux not because they had sex, but because she showed emotional vulnerability. "I always screw up," she says--not the stuff the Kewl Girl is supposed to say. The boys don't call after the prom, even though Bonnie's date promises to. They can't trust anyone; no neighbor cares enough to call a Social Worker or truant officer when they're pulled out of school. Aren't they worth rescuing? Apparently not. Why don't they run away? Because their mother has told them all their lives boys only want them for one thing and will lose interest in them. What little experience they have with boys bears this out. They have no reason to believe the outside world will value them when their own parents don't and boys who get to know them even slightly seem to lose interest. They don't fully trust the ones who are crushing on them at the end because they figure they'll just get bored too if the girls don't stay on the pedestal.
Bonnie's date won't call her, but he parts his hair the way she liked it when he's middle-aged--he doesn't want a real girl, he wants a fantasy. When Mary commits suicide a month after her sisters died, it's on the day of another girl's debut party--the kind of party to which she will never be invited, let alone give. She can't escape to college because she wasn't allowed to finish high school. And she figures she must be worthless, because after all that, the hospital sent her back home, just as they sent Cecilia home. They sent her home to a mother who apparently never did laundry or had the girls do it, given the state of the bedlinens when the house is cleaned out. The mother treats them like trash so that's how they feel, isolated in this middle class neighborhood where other people have debutante parties.
We don't know if there was physical abuse, but there is clearly emotional abuse, and it is hard to get authorities to intervene in such cases even now, let alone in those days when you had to show a broken bone or a broken hymen before anyone would do anything. Eugenides has brilliantly depicted the pathetic attempts of psychologists and reports to explain the suicides away with fancy arcane theories about rock music and Rorschachs, when the girls are obviously miserable because they want to fit in and are never allowed to. The naivete of the boys is understandable, and it's sweet and accurate how they would be dazzled by the glamor of the sisters' feminine preening tools: mustache bleach creams and feminine hygiene supplies, when the girls obviously were afraid of being ugly and gross. But the cluelessness of the school, with its Day of Grieving, and the callous indifference of the neighbors--except for the one old Greek lady who deplores the American custom of pretending to be happy, like covering over Cecilia's scars with perky bracelets (what a brilliant image the author has there!)--the fact that "normal" well-adjusted adults allowed this to happen is disgusting. And disgustingly typical of suburbia, with its constant cover-ups. If something goes wrong in a slum, every tenement neighbor knows it. And slum kids know that if they commit a felony, the authorities will pull them out of the parents' house, and it won't be hushed up the way it is with "nice" families. They'll have to do time in a juvenile facility, which may be an improvement over home. Nice girls like the Lisbons don't know how to work the system.
Eugenides has done a magnificent job of telling the readers, if they care to look, everything the sisters didn't know how to tell the world. One of the points of this book is how easy it is for people to ignore the obvious. When we leave the girls mysterious, when we aestheticize them, we are implicated along with the people in the book who aren't interested in them as real people. Many readers have complained the girls are indistinguishable, except for Cecilia and Lux. But I believe the point is that just because we don't know about people, doesn't mean there is nothing to know. Ever read a poem called "Richard Corey"?
We as readers, and the now grown-up boys, can idealize the Lisbons because they are safely dead, and won't interfere with our haunting little fantasies with any of their troubling reality. No wonder the boys prefer these convenient ghosts to their wives.
"We just want to live, if people would let us," says one of the girls.
Summary of The Virgin Suicides
Juxtaposing the most common and the most gothic, the humorous and the tragic, author Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling portrait of youth and lost innocence. He takes us back to the elm-lined streets of suburbia in the seventies, and introduces us to the men whose lives have been forever changed by their fierce, awkward obsession with five doomed sisters: brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and pale, saintly Cecilia, whose spectacular demise inaugurates "the year of the suicides." This is the debut novel that caused a sensation and won immediate acclaim from the critics-a tender, wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination.Movie Tie-Ins Books
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