Ms. Perl befriended a local deejay and spent an entire night listening to the records that Lux's schoolmates listed among her favorites. From this “research”, she came up with the find she was most proud of: a song by the band Cruel Crux, entitled “Virgin Suicide”. The chorus follows, though neither Ms. Perl nor we have been able to determine if the album was among those Mrs. Lisbon forced Lux to burn:
Virgin suicideThere's something kind of special about The Virgin Suicides– special in how it's written more than the what of the plot – and it's rather mind-blowing to see that this was Jeffrey Eugenides' debut novel; here is an author who had something to say and who found a fresh way of saying it right out of the gate. This is my first time reading Eugenides (thanks to a book club pick) and I'll definitely read him again.
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin'
On this holocaust ride
She gave me her cherry
She's my virgin suicide
With that title and an opening line of, “On the morning the last Lisbon sister took her turn at suicide...”, there isn't a lot of mystery to the plot – Eugenides provides plenty of foreshadowing about the when and how of each doomed girl's end and treating those deaths as given and inevitable is rather the point. This story isn't actually about the Lisbon sisters: it's about the neighbourhood boys who watched the girls falter and fade, and despite their fascination with the Lisbons, and despite twenty years of looking back on the summer of the suicides, these boys could neither save the girls then nor understand them now. This book is a dissection of the male gaze – and written as it was in 1993, Eugenides anticipated the discussion of this phenomenon by yonks – and while the girls limped about like frail Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties, their Prince Charmings simultaneously wanted to both rescue and ravish them; ultimately finding themselves incapable of effecting either.
I liked that the narrator is a collective “we” speaking for all of the neighbourhood boys and also liked the specificity of the details that are recorded: for twenty years these boys, now men, have been collecting artefacts of the Lisbon sisters – from photographs to undergarments – as well as conducting and recording interviews with everyone from their old teachers, to old would-be suitors, to their still-grieving mother (who would only meet them at a bus station coffee shop; how pathetic is that?), and no detail or memory seems too private for the boys to feel entitled to in their search for meaning. This entitlement to trespass is apparent in the following passage about recovering and analysing the diary belonging to Cecilia; the first sister to kill herself, a year before the others:
Cecilia's diary begins a year and a half before her suicide. Many people felt the illuminated pages constituted a hieroglyphics of unreadable despair, though the pictures looked cheerful for the most part. The diary had a lock, but David Barker, who got it from Skip Ortega, the plumber's assistant, told us that Skip had found the diary next to the toilet in the master bathroom, its lock already jimmied as though Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had been reading it themselves. Tim Winer, the brain, insisted on examining the diary. We carried it to the study his parents had built for him, with its green desk lamps, contour globe, and gilt-edged encyclopedias. “Emotional instability,” he said, analyzing the handwriting. “Look at the dots on these i's. All over the place.” And then, leaning forward, showing the blue veins beneath his weakling's skin, he added: “Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly.”I love the level of detail in that one paragraph, and would have been more offended by the boys' acquisition and reading of the poor girl's private writings if they hadn't been so sincere in their quest for understanding by reading and rereading the diary:
We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called "sewery." We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.I loved the big picture details of the 1970s Grosse Pointe, Michigan setting – the malaise of suburban America with its dying industries, increasingly out-of-touch churches and educators, teenagers drifting without purpose – and also the finely observed small details that popped up surprisingly like, “We lay down on the Larsons' carpet, which smells of pet deodorizer, and deeper down, of pet” or “He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room.” All around, the writing delighted me and I was left with a real sense of the haunting that had been affecting the boys over all these years:
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.The Virgin Suicides both moved me emotionally and intrigued me mentally, and I can't ask for much more from a work of fiction.
