For example, in clever ways Eugenides shows how even our seemingly innocuous, nerdy narrators objectified the Lisbon girls: The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset.įurthermore, the narrators’ reflections are superb and enlightening even when they are puerile, coming from the memories of adolescence. I enjoyed how he could be funny and ominous at the same time while describing this otherwise mundane suburban setting. His sentences weave in and out, he has a great sense of timing, and the atmosphere he creates is appropriately comical, muggy, and haunting. I do have a major gripe with this book (disclosed below after some spoiler warnings, and, strangely, one that actually made the book even more appealing in the end), but because I don’t want to spoil the book right now I can really only say what I liked - I liked many things about The Virgin Suicides.įor one, Eugenides is an excellent stylist. This book is their reflection, their report. Through the years they’ve interviewed everyone who can give them any details into the girls’ lives, including the poor parents. In fact, they’ve been obsessed, collecting “exhibits” such as photos, shoes, retainers, anything they can get their hands on. Telling the story from the first person plural, a group of middle-aged men who, when adolescents, were neighbors of the Lisbons during the “year of the suicides” have never been able to get over the deaths. But that the Lisbon girls commit suicide is not the real purpose of this book. And if that doesn’t, the first few pages should be enough. Įugenides doesn’t hide what happens here. Now, how to start a fairly positive review of The Virgin Suicides without sounding morbid.
I hoped to have some questions answered, or at least discussed, in the book. Okay, I admit it: I saw the movie and was intrigued but not satisfied. Despite my unsatisfactory experience with Eugenides, I was attracted to The Virgin Suicides. I read Eugenides’s Middlesex a while ago and was surprised it had won the Pulitzer. Though Eugenides is an excellent writer of sentences, overall that book just didn’t do it for me. The story never came together, the tone never felt right, it felt like a knock-off of Midnight’s Children or Forest Gump, albeit with many clever twists and turns in both the writing an the story.
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