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.