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A review by ps_stillreading
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
The Virgin Suicides is an atmospheric book filled with images of longing, death, and decay. But it also has slivers of “the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space.” And, of course, it also offers sparks from the short lives of the Lisbon girls in the very few moments we get to hear directly from them.
You see, the book centers around the Lisbon girls, but they don’t feel like the main characters of the story at all.
The story is told from the perspective of the neighborhood boys who don’t actually know the girls. But they want to, and they think they can come close to understanding these girls. But they really can’t. They tell us their fantasies, the lives of the girls as they imagine them to be, and their skewed interpretations of the girls’ actions. The boys also present us with information from interviews of people from their neighborhood in their attempt to piece together the enigma that is the Lisbon sisters and their suicides.
But the fact is, no one bothered to truly get to know the five sisters. So often, people see them as one big blonde being with five heads and multiple arms and legs. They were never viewed as individuals. They were always lumped together as if they didn’t have their own identity. So much so that when the neighborhood boys are invited into the Lisbon home for a chaperoned party, they are surprised to see the differences between the sisters and to discover their individual personalities.
In the end, we don’t get to know the Lisbon sisters either. Because they don’t get to tell their own story. Alive, they were ogled at from a distance, isolated as they were by their circumstances. And their deaths took on a mythical quality, a sign of the changing times that the adults say they were fortunate to escape.
And all we are left with are the boys who want so badly to be part of the Lisbon sisters’ story, that even years later they see themselves as failed heroes who were unable to save the girls. This is a story about the girls, but in telling it, the boys sadly made it about them.
You see, the book centers around the Lisbon girls, but they don’t feel like the main characters of the story at all.
The story is told from the perspective of the neighborhood boys who don’t actually know the girls. But they want to, and they think they can come close to understanding these girls. But they really can’t. They tell us their fantasies, the lives of the girls as they imagine them to be, and their skewed interpretations of the girls’ actions. The boys also present us with information from interviews of people from their neighborhood in their attempt to piece together the enigma that is the Lisbon sisters and their suicides.
But the fact is, no one bothered to truly get to know the five sisters. So often, people see them as one big blonde being with five heads and multiple arms and legs. They were never viewed as individuals. They were always lumped together as if they didn’t have their own identity. So much so that when the neighborhood boys are invited into the Lisbon home for a chaperoned party, they are surprised to see the differences between the sisters and to discover their individual personalities.
In the end, we don’t get to know the Lisbon sisters either. Because they don’t get to tell their own story. Alive, they were ogled at from a distance, isolated as they were by their circumstances. And their deaths took on a mythical quality, a sign of the changing times that the adults say they were fortunate to escape.
And all we are left with are the boys who want so badly to be part of the Lisbon sisters’ story, that even years later they see themselves as failed heroes who were unable to save the girls. This is a story about the girls, but in telling it, the boys sadly made it about them.