The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

reviewed by Gerti

Once upon a time, there were five teenaged sisters who lived in a large house with very religious parents. As is common in a close community, they are the objects of the focused attention of a group of neighborhood boys. Then the youngest girl, 13-year-old Cecilia Lisbon, tries to kill herself, using the ancient roman method of cutting her wrists in the bath. She is found in time and rushed to the hospital. Everyone collectively breathes a sigh of relief, and soon the family tries to get back to normal, inviting a few of these neighborhood boys over for a party. Although her wrists are bandaged and covered with festive bracelets, Cecilia doesn’t seem to enjoy the party, and excuses herself to go upstairs. But soon the party hears the wet sound of her body being pierced by the metal-spiked fence outside. She was simply too depressed to live. Or is it all an allegory about a teenager becoming a woman?

While Cecilia was seen as the strange one, the other girls, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17 year-old Therese, take the death of their sibling very hard. Everyone tries to resume a normal life in the wake of the suicide, and some boys even ask the sisters to a high school dance. Their strict parents agree only if the girls go in a group. Trouble is not far away: there is some drinking and some making out. But Lux, the promiscuous one, ruins it all by not returning home by curfew. She has obviously slept with her date. Although Mr. Lisbon teaches at the local high school, the girls are now kept home from the school they attended to keep them from the gossip and stares they engender. Soon, the ladies are all cloistered inside. Only the father leaves the house, to go to work, but it’s not too long before Mr. Lisbon is fired from the school, too.

The community and media initially rallied behind the family, using them as the local example of a national trend, and yet… As the months go by, the house gets more run down and people see the occupants less and less. Food is delivered. People stop visiting the family. The boys are still obsessed with the surviving Lisbon girls, and a rough kind of communication is worked out where the girls get them to call the house, and then stay on the line after the father has hung up. During one poignant phone call, nuanced records are played by both sides, who are using the lyrics to express their buried feelings for each other. The girls convey the message that they plan to escape one night, and the boys eagerly enter the house to help them flee. Unfortunately, June 9^th is the day Cecilia made her first suicide attempt, and that date is a deadly anniversary for the rest of the girls, who all feel the need to die with her so they can be together again.

The book is written once everything has happened, and the best part of the narrative is the archive the boys have kept of the Lisbon girls. Eugenides writing style is breezy and frequently amusing for such weighty subject matter, making it an easy, but disturbing read. While I’m sure it’s fraught with levels of meaning, if it’s all an allegory about sexuality and becoming a woman, it’s a grim one.