The Virgin Suicides: A Modern Novel Already Sharing Shelves With The Classics

Written by Amelia Cropley

Disclaimer: The Virgin Suicides holds the predominant themes of suicide, mental health and sexualisation, and this review does discuss these themes. We at The Literary Lounge advise you to read this review and book at your own discretion, bearing in mind these themes.

As the title truthfully presents, it is unfortunately, a book about the suicides of the teenage Lisbon sisters: Therese, Bonnie, Mary, Lux and Cecelia. And how those five girls are trapped in a household, watched by their neighbours as each sister resorts to death.

“…Eugenides’ incredible writing and story-telling ability, […] allowed me to be hypnotised in the way he wants us to be seeing the Lisbon girls through the boys.”

Intriguingly, readers never spend much time with the Lisbon sisters, instead we ride the journey with a group of boys who watch the girls they are infatuated with as they experiment with love, learn of girls, society and death. It is these boys who recount their stories years later as grown men who have still not moved on, speaking together as ‘we’ they remain as one, anonymous, or speak of each other in the group but with no particular narrator standing out. Hauntingly, they disguise themselves well whilst driving the story of the Lisbon sisters, either in memoriam or out of confession, readers will never know.

“That girl didn’t want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme.”

Whilst a reader and later upon reflection, I shall always find this narration particularly compelling. The first-person plural ‘we’ narration shapes the tone, distance and mystery in collectivity of every single page. I both loved and despised the unreliable narration. Despised it for the barrier they put up between myself and getting to know the Lisbon sisters myself, and loved it for Jeffrey Eugenides’ incredible writing and story-telling ability, which allowed me to be hypnotised in the way he wants us to be seeing the Lisbon girls through the boys. At times, I trusted their vantage point, but in each page their male gaze, obsessed teenage-minds creep into the narrative, Eugenides’ makes his readers just as intrigued by the Lisbon girls as the boys.

Unlike anything I’ve ever read before, this book delves into the cracks of Suburban life and the American Dream in an entirely original way. How Eugenides’ describes the girls as if porcelain dolls, “carnal angels” and how they “were models of ineffable sorrow. Their pale faces lit by the streetlights…” to against the broken edges and domestic fissures you don’t know happens behind closed doors, or, entirely out of bored boys’ imaginations.

And cleverly enough, the narration, cracks in the narrative or the obvious mistakes in the boys memories, or do not make it hard to follow or confusing, no, it is intreaguing and utterly tantalising. The introspection of the work is critical, haunting, and forces a reader to question where they stand in the story.

“… The Virgin Suicides is a mesmerising commentary on gender roles in society, the male gaze, and the fine line between infatuation and voyurism.”

But the most enchanting part of The Virgin Suicides that will be sure to draw you in, is of course, the Lisbon sisters. Beautiful, ethereal and almost other-worldly, they are always out of grasp but never out of mind, not even after their deaths. With Eugenides’ overly attached, hauntingly close narrative, the girls are elevated into myth. But at it’s heart, this is a book about youth and adolescence: ‘Obviously Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl’ – not only about the hardships of going from childhood innocence to adolescent burdens, but how the men (and simultaneously boys) envision the girls through the eyes of love-sick teenagers. And especially, how those juvenile years can change the course of one’s entire life.

“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

But finally, The Virgin Suicides is a mesmerising commentary on gender roles in society, the male gaze, and the fine line between infatuation and voyurism. It is a delicate yet shameless presentation of family dynamics and the cultural silence around mental health, suffering in silence and isolation. It is deep, dark and graphic, not without tears or even the necessary need for a breather, but The Virgin Suicides is exquisitely written, blending poetic prose with unsettling clarity to evoke a deep sense of nostalgia and quiet tragedy.

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In-article image courtesy of Waterstones. No changes were made to this image.

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