860. The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
1993

Around 250 pages

Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of one of my favorite books (this isn't it), so I am quite happy to have him join our esteemed ranks.

The story is told from the perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys, who knew five sisters in the 1970s who all killed themselves. So once again, we are fetishizing virgin young women, and once again, their story is being told by the perspective of men. 

This reminded me of the fairy tale "The 12 Dancing Princesses," where the princes are obsessed with what the 12 princesses are doing every night. As a society, we are so crazed about women and girls being pure, but at the same time, we would consider them boring and sexless if they had no secrets. So the best of both worlds is we get beautiful, angelic girls that we know are part of some dark conspiracy, but we never find out the details, so they don't tarnish our view of the girls. In this case, the boys want to understand why the Lisbon daughters committed suicide. Of course, if we got a satisfying and succinct answer to that question, the book would not at all be true to life. 

I'm not hating on Eugenides for writing the book this way. But he seems like he is trying to call attention to the expectations and uncertainties of being a young woman, but is also simultaneously contributing to the same ethos by mythologizing these female characters and not making them feel like real human beings. Again, it's not really the sisters' story, it's the story about how their deaths affected the neighborhood boys. Poor babies.

I sound like I hated this far more than I did. Actually, it gave me a lot to think about, which is always a good thing. I enjoyed the 70s setting, and Eugenides is a very readable author. But too melodramatic for my taste. And I know Eugenides can do better.

RATING: ***--

Interesting Facts:

Adapted into a film in 2000, directed by Sofia Coppola.

The inspiration for the plot of the book came to Jeffrey Eugenides when his nephew's teenage babysitter told him that she and her sisters had planned to commit suicide. When he asked why, she only replied, "we were under a lot of pressure."

UP NEXT: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields