The Virgin Suicides

Ordered at the library today.

The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Bloomsbury Publishing

About the book
In brief
In a quiet American suburb an ambulance arrives outside a house where five sisters live. Watched by a group of adolescent boys, the paramedics carry thirteen-year-old Cecilia Lisbon to the ambulance, her slit wrists bound. Twenty years later, the boys, now men, are still in thrall to the Lisbon sisters, all five of whom took their lives that year.

In detail
The Virgin Suicides tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters and the effects of their suicides on their small suburban community. Jeffrey Eugenides explores the heady territory of adolescent sexuality through the collective narrative voice of the young boys, now men, who fell under the sisters’ spell. As they look back with a mixture of humour, melancholy and wistful yearning they remain haunted by questions still unanswered after twenty years.

For some time the Lisbon sisters have intrigued the neighbourhood’s teenage boys. They watch the girls from a house across the street, longing to catch their most intimate moments. When the most daring finds a way into their house he discovers thirteen-year-old Cecilia in the bath, her wrist slit. Although Cecilia’s first suicide attempt fails her second, a gruesome plunge on to a fence below her bedroom window, succeeds.

Already confined by their mother’s draconian strictness, the girls find themselves under lock and key after the adventurous Lux returns late from Homecoming after taking off with Trip Fontaine, the school heartthrob. The boys dedicate themselves to observing the sisters, searching out and savouring evidence of their lives, from scraps of their hair to their discarded underwear. As time wears on Lux is seen making love on the roof, Bonnie comes to the door most mornings clutching her pillow, Mr Lisbon loses his high school teaching job and the house begins to fall down around their ears. Under the boys’ watchful eyes, the girls seem to fade into shadows of themselves.

When the sisters eventually contact them in a bid to escape, the boys, eager to help, are ready. But the girls have another sort of escape in mind and soon the ambulance is at the door again leaving the boys endlessly speculating, quizzing anyone who will speak of the suicides, still asking why twenty years later.