Product Description

The story of five sisters who all commit suicide in the same year. Trying to fathom events two decades later, one of the boys who used to spy on them recreates the fateful year, from the youngest's first plunge into her own bloodbath, to the final field day of the national press.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1167416 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
Wry and wistful, melancholy yet flecked with a dark thread of humour, Eugenides's novel is a remarkable debut to say the very least. The protagonists of the title are a group of adolescent sisters who kill themselves, one after the other, in a Seventies summer that stays immaculately preserved in the memories of the young boys who hero-worshipped these elusive creatures from afar. Set in suburban America, it's a bizarre story and one that in lesser hands could easily have tumbled into the melodramatic, but everything is handled here with enviable fluidity and the potentially macabre becomes instead gently luminous. It's told retrospectively and collectively by all the boys, represented with a single voice as they look back at their youth two decades on and remember the fascination that the Lisbon sisters exerted over their prosaic lives, endowing everything with a touch of mystery. As they piece together their story from fragments of information presented in the form of exhibits, the lives of these girls become almost a touchstone of youth, a melange of memory distilled into a single bright image. Virtually imprisoned inside their claustrophobic home, not by malice but by sheer ignorance, the sisters find different ways to assert their individuality and Eugenides's description of the ball, their only date, is heartbreakingly poignant in the way it depicts the quartet grabbing every moment of delicious freedom like drowning swimmers gasping for air. Despite the sad subject there are many humorous touches like the image of the brassiere casually draped over the crucifix, but one of the book's most moving moments comes near the end when, desperate for contact and slowly sinking into their final spiralling despair, the girls play snatches of plaintive songs down the phone, the boys responding with cheerful anthems of teenage hope they intend as salve to the girls' loneliness. Beautifully written and intensely poetic in style, this novel may be an acquired taste for some but no one could deny the power of imagination necessary to conjure this haunting vision of a family slowly torn apart by the spectre of suicide. (Kirkus UK)

Debut novelist Eugenides is a heavyweight: proof of it is in nearly every pitch-perfect sentence of this startlingly and very good book. A group of teenage boys in a Detroit suburb have come under the siren spell of a group of like-aged sisters, the Lisbon girls, the eldest of whom, Cecilia, has killed herself by jumping out a bedroom window onto a fence. Shocked and dislocated by the fact of young, willful death, the boys are increasingly fascinated as the always strict and secretive Lisbon family goes into a kind of cold storage (the other girls eventually withdraw from school), and the house is let go into decrepitude (the boys, using binoculars from up in a treehouse, can see that the other girls have turned Cecilia's bedroom into a shrine). To rescue the Lisbon girls becomes the boys' instinctive obsession - and an accepted invitation to the prom almost accomplishes this. But one sister, Lux, has turned promiscuous - dooming her and her sisters' chances for freedom thereafter. Left to them all is death only. Eugenides, meanwhile, writes just about as well as anyone in recent memory has about male teenage desire, mythologizing, and half-rational thought: one unforgettable scene has the boys and the Lisbon girls communicating on the phone by playing certain popular songs close to the receiver for each other, third-party messages heartbreakingly personalized. The boys narrate the story together like a chorus, moving around in time, ever-haunted, in prose that is sinuous, untricky, yet polished. They come to recognize that the Lisbon girls mean life and death simultaneously - and that they will never get over having got to know this so young. Maybe the most eccentrically successful, genuinely lyrical first novel since William Wharton's Birdy. Not to be missed. (Kirkus Reviews)

Independent
"The Virgin Suicides is wonderfully original. It could prove to be the start of an important writing career."

Observer
"One of the finest novels in many years - a Catcher in the Rye for our time"

Customer Reviews

Delicate and perceptive
This is a really fantastic book, beautifully observed and and elegantly written. It tells the story of 5 teenage sisters who all commit suicide, one after the other.

The book is told from the perspective of the boys who fantasise about them. Although their voices merge, it is the insight into those teenage boys which is the most real and striking - their obsessive fascination and cataloguing, their curiosity about the girls and everything about them, at an age when most actual physical boy-girl contact was awkward fumbling and sweaty hand-holding.

The description of the decay of the family home as the family slowly sinks into despair is equally convincing.

You are totally swept up into Eugenides world, through his evocative descriptions of dust, smells, and tiny details of observation.

Coppola's film is good, but not as good as the book, because in the end the film is about the Lisbon sisters, who remain ultimately enigmatic in the book, whereas the book is about the boys who observe them.

The Virgin Suicides: Define Obsession.
Define Obsession.

A worryingly-touching novel depicting the struggles of five young girls attempting to grow in the most restrictive of capacities. The story of the suicides is told through the inquisitive eyes of one of the girls many besotted victims. Eugenides' image of obsession and yearning is the feature point of his novel and its jigsaw-like narration allows it to retain a wonderful sense of ambiguity. Eugenides major triumph is his ability to shock. In a novel which reveals its conclusion within the first two lines, it is amazing how it is able to create a false sense of hope from the reader. 'The Virgin Suicides' is beautifully eloquent and Eugenides' vivid imagery makes it a very engaging read. This skill is evident in his superb ability to produce a sense of awkwardness that almost makes the reader feel bad for prying. Even though Eugenides' is dealing with a difficult subject like suicide he still creates a dark and humourous account which actually lightens with every read. 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, which has now been adapted by Sofia Coppola to a feature-length film is coincidentally his first novel as is Sofia Coppola's directorial debut. The film takes a more light-hearted view of the situation whereas the book delivers the story with a more morbid and frightening truth. There are parts however where the novel loses its gripping edge. But it Eugenides is quick to pull it back on track and into the realms of surrealism. 'The Virgin Suicides' is a remarkable novel and Eugenides' melancholic tone throughout makes it so powerful and evocative.

"the insufficiency of explanations"
After reading Eugenides masterful Middlesex, I decided to go back and read his much slimmer debut novel in the hopes it was at least partially as good. While it's not quite as amazing as Middlesex, it is quite good in its own peculiar way. However, those who like their novels to answer the questions they raise should be forewarned, as they will likely find it a rather unsatisfying experience.

Set in the early '70s in the tony Detroit suburb of Grosse Point, the story's premise is outlined in the very first paragraph: over the course of a year, all five of the teenaged Lisbon sisters commit suicide. This year is described in an unusual second-person plural voice which is that of a group of neighborhood boys (now men) who, some twenty years later, are reviewing the results of their "investigation" into the suicides. (There doesn't seem be any particular point to laying this out as an investigation, as opposed to a memoir, and this framework is a little shaky in that various "exhibits" and "attachments" are referred to in the narrative, but unavailable to the reader.)

So while the reader is aware from the start that this is a tragedy, the expectation is that the story will go on to explain why this occurred, what drove the girls to do this. And while the story beautifully details that dismal year, and reports on all the speculation by the neighborhood adults who project their own worldviews onto the tragedy, it concludes: "We were certain only of the insufficiency of explanations." And that is presumably the main point of the book --that suicide cannot ever be explained because we can never have access to the person's thoughts and emotions. This also explains the use of the second-person perspective, as Eugenides implicitly rejects the notion of the omniscient narrator. The boys' obsession with the sisters is another enigma, and becomes almost as creepy and dark as the suicides, as we learn of their all-night vigils and serial-killeresque hoarding of Lisbon sister-related artifacts.

The writing has a certain dreamy ethereal ambiguity to it--there's definitely the haze of memory and a certain degree of nostalgia, but overlain with the essential mysteriousness of the five girls. We only get to know two of them particularly well: Cecilia, a kind of proto-goth who dyes her underwear black, and Lux, who attempts to find human connection via hedonism. In a sense, the book is kind of gothic horror story, shot through with moments of black humor (such as the when the men of the neighborhood struggle to remove the fence Cecilia impales herself on). The film version is utterly faithful to both this tone and the storyline itself.