Cannonball Read 3 Review #17 - The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

This was my second time around reading this novel, and it still is one of my favorite novels ever. Eugenides is a first-class writer, and he has a true gift for observation and wit. The Virgin Suicides is the story of the last year of life of the five teenaged Lisbon sisters, narrated by a sort of anonymous "we," a group of boys who live in the neighborhood and are infatuted with the mysterious Lisbon sisters. We know that the Lisbon girls live at home with their strict, conservative Catholic parents, but any other insight into their lives is through other people's sometimes conflicting accounts. The narrators are now older, and they are researching the events of that year that led up to the Lisbon sisters' deaths by going through the "evidence" they had collected as kids and interviewing neighbors, family, and friends for their accounts of what happened. Set in the suburbs of Detroit in the 1970s, the novel is an outsiders' observation of a family's decline over the period of about a year. The novel kicks off with the youngest sister Cecilia's suicide attempt and then documents the narrators' observations and little contact with the sisters throughout the next year. These normal teenaged boys are completely fascinated by and flummoxed by the elusive Lisbon sisters. They can only guess at the complexity of those girls' emotions and struggles within their home. Even so, Eugenides still captures the self-involved teen angst that young girls go through, the kind that we wallow in and think will never pass. When Cecilia is in the hospital after her first suicide attempt, a doctor asks her why she's there, telling her "You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." Cecilia replies "Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl."

Eugenides is creative, wry, and a sharp observer. His narrators take on a sort of collective anonymity, allowing the reader to be one of them, devotedly watching the girls from across the street or asking questions of people who might have had even the slightest contact with the beautiful and strange Lisbon sisters. Piece by piece we learn more about the last days of five girls who slowly get lost in their own unhappiness. So while the subject material is kind of a downer, the author manages to bring humor and imagination to the proceedings, making for a unique and mesmerizing story.

Cannonball Read 3 Review #16 - A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I suggested this novel for the June meeting of my book club, not because I like hype, because as one could tell from my distrust of Jonathan Franzen and my late-coming to Harry Potter and the Millenium Trilogy, I'm not into hype. I wanted to read the book because I heard it was written from various people's perspectives, over many years, and one of the chapters was in PowerPoint format. That is creative and intriguing, and I had to read it. Oh, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, too. That's probably something I should mention, but again, not really my main reason for choosing the book.

The novel is divided into chapters that could almost be short stories from people who are either closely or distantly related from each other. Bennie, a big-shot music producer and Sasha, his long-time assistant bookend the novel and show up throughout, and the rest of the novel is fleshed out by people they are sometimes close with or only tangentially associated with. But even those people distanced from them by several degrees or generations are still shown in vivid close-up. We see intimate snapshots of these people's lives over time and come to know them deeply, even if we're with them for just a chapter. The characters' lives weave in and out of each other's over a lot of time, showing how we change, how our lives diverge from what we expect, and ultimately, how time marches on. Egan uses rock music and technology, even her ideas of where technolog is going and what our future looks like in terms of how we connect with each other personally, as a backdrop for a truly modern reflection on human relationships and how we deal with aging in today's world. That's what Goon Squad is about: about time rushing at us like a bullet train as we sit on the tracks, oblivious, smoking, drinking and having a picnic. We make plans and make decisions that change our lives in big and small ways, and before we know it, it's twenty years later and we're shocked at how we got here. But Egan isn't trying to bum us out, she also uses the story to show how humans connect, and how even the briefest of contact can change us and stay with us over time. In one scene, Sasha's uncle gently tries to reach out to his lost, defiant, friendless niece, telling her "You can do it alone. But it's going to be so much harder." Time flies by, bringing with it unexpected disappointments and surprises. The connections we have with the people around us are what stay with us through it all.