The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides By Jeffrey Eugenides

 

The Virgin Suicides depicts the morbid story of five sisters who each commit suicide in a single year.  The book is a classic fiction, written from the perspective of their neighbor, an anonymous male within his group of spellbound friends.  Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides managed to captivate all of my senses with fascinating despair.

 

Eugenides' writing style is like a fictional memior of everything the anonymous boy sees of the Lisbon girls.  The book is written in first person plural, so that the boy refers to his group instead of himself.  Occasionally, he uses 'we' and 'us' only to reveal the group's obsession with the girls.  The story manages to hover only around the sisters' experiences and actions but never completely penetrates into their thoughts.  The boy tells his group's ideas of what the girls' thoughts might be, but the audience can never be certain.  This lack of intimacy with the main character's thoughts is made up for with an ample amount of detail regarding the girls' posessions, their behaviors, their parents' behaviors, and so forth.  This keeps readers curious and absorbed in a very realistic point of view.  I enjoyed and admired Eugenides' mysterious style.

 

The Lisbon sisters consist of 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese.  Cecilia has always been the peculiar one with a great imagination.  But, being the odd one is very difficult for her; She doesn't quite fit in with her sisters, and she has no friends.  This is the assumed reason for her depression.  The other sisters are generally displayed as fairly normal and happy before Cecilia's depression and, ultimately, suicide.  However, they, too, spiral downward shortly after.  All of their visible behavior is described acutely.  Mr. Lisbon, the girls' father, works at their school as a teacher, a position frustrating for the girls. 

The story takes place in a quiet suburb of Detroit in 1993.  The Lisbon's community is a town innocent to much tragedy.  The Lisbon's neighbors are deeply affected by the girls' suicides, and many of them move after the occurrence.  The book's words do not lie among the neighbors so much, though, as they do the confounded and intense emotions of adolescence.  The world in which the story takes place is the world of the Lisbon sisters, who travel only to school and are, otherwise, trapped in their ruining home.  The depiction of the Lisbon home conjures nasty images of stale food rotting upon layers of dust and junk strewn about in a decaying setting.

The plot immediately captures the audience.  The tale begins when Cecilia first attempts suicide by slitting her wrists. When this effort proves to be of no avail,  she tosses herself out the upstairs window so that she plummets onto the fence pole and dies, finally.  This ignites each of her sister's depressions.  The girls stop leaving the house, and they start to become more trapped all the time. Lux begins smoking cigarettes in the bathroom.  Eventually, the anonymous boy and a few of his friends are able to take the sisters to one last homecoming.  Their time is enjoyed, and Lux ends up kissing her date, Trip.  Only a short time passes before Lux is making love upon her roof with various men almost every night.  The girls, then, stop attending school altogether because of their horrible, worsening melancholy.  In the end, they free themselves from their miserable traps.

The Virgin Suicides reminded me slightly of Girl Interrupted because both tell dismal, captivating stories of female groups experiencing phycological disorders. I was suprised by Eugenides' engrossing story, and I recommend the book especially to all teenage girls. The Virgin Suicides, however, should not have a limited audience. This is a must read for people of either gender and all ages!