During her first suicide attempt, Cecilia is clutching a laminated holy card with an image of the Virgin Mary. Readers get virtually no insight into the girls’ interior lives. Of course, part of the issue is that the boys are merely outside observers. The narrators mention several times that the Lisbons are devoutly Catholic, almost using this to rationalize their odd behavior. Their parents are strict and overbearing. What we learn about all five Lisbon sisters is mostly the boys’ speculation.Īnother ambiguous element is the girls’ religious upbringing. In contrast, it’s hard to pin down anything that specific about most of the characters. Pop culture references and descriptions of a local elm blight situate the book clearly in Michigan in the 1970s. The unusual narrative voice is one of the first signs that the entire book is ambiguous and elusive-even nightmarish. It’s too facile to say that The Virgin Suicides is about the limits of the male gaze, but the narrative objectifies them in many ways, without ever getting into the girls’ heads. Because the boys observe them from afar, both the narrators and the girls seem interchangeable. This has the strange effect of making the narrators indistinguishable-just a nameless “we.” The boys attempt to befriend the Lisbon sisters, but their relationship is mostly obsession from a distance. I wasn’t even sure how many boys there were until I watched the movie. The narrators are several neighborhood boys who are infatuated with the Lisbon sisters. I’ve only come across it in Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” and in certain chapters of Faulkner’s novels. It’s written in the first-person plural, which is extremely rare. The narrative voice is one of the most distinctive yet frustrating aspects of the book. The writing is nuanced and even delicate.

The first sentence is chilling: “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide-it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese-the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” It sounds sensationalized, but this isn’t a pulpy novel. It’s haunting, atmospheric, and elegantly written.

Overall, I found his first novel, The Virgin Suicides, not as good as Middlesex, much better than The Marriage Plot, and completely different from either of these books. Jeffrey Eugenides is a brilliant, versatile author, and his novel Middlesex is one of my favorite books. (Trigger warning: this article, and the book it describes, contain graphic descriptions of suicide.)

The virgin suicides review book