The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Virgin Suicides
Book Review: A mixed bag
Summary: 3 Stars
Here is what is innovative and cool about this novel:1) A subject matter that is really pretty interesting (and rather creative).
2) A cool setting (yay - 70's suburbia).
3) An exciting form of narration (a collective second person, used more often in a few really good short stories than in novels like this, but still, pretty fun, and well executed)/ Here is what is slightly less cool:
1) Characters who you sort of care about, but not really.
2) A lot of unanswered questions (which would sort of be the point of this book to answer).
3) The raising of issues which are commonly raised in literature.
It is a fun read - and better than the movie. Still. Nothing brilliant. I read it on an airplane, which may account for my lack of enjoyment, but it was first class, so I doubt it.
Book Review: A modernist debut
Summary: 5 Stars
I've seen the word "macabre" used a lot in reviews of Eugenides's first novel, and I think it's appropriate, but for all its darkness this is certainly a novel with a heart. The bleak cynicism of its portrait of middle-class cluelessness (a community's inability to understand or care for its teenage daughters; the flailing, insincere attempts to "deal with" tragedy through therapy and both official and inofficial memorials to untimely death; and the flimsiness of individuals' concern for their neighbors, in the 20th-century American suburbs that claim to be "neighborhoods," through which a desperate sense of fear and self-preservation is constantly breaking) is balanced by the uncharacteristic tenderness of the teenage boys who observe the five doomed Lisbon sisters with an unrequited longing that is the closest thing this lifestyle offers to true love.
I read Eugenides's second novel, Middlesex, a while ago, and enjoyed it very much, but I think I liked The Virgin Suicides better. I was trying to explain to Z what I liked better about it, fumbling with how Middlesex is sprawling and narrative-oriented and this is weirder and somehow about something other than the story, but it won't quite give up what, and he did a much better job of articulating what I was trying to say: "It sounds," he said, "like The Virgin Suicides is modernist, while Middlesex is Victorian." Duh--that's exactly it. And then this morning, I came across an interview with Eugenides (by his onetime student, Jonathan Safran Foer), in which he says,
"I always say it like this: my generation of writers grew up backwards. We were weaned on modernism and only later read the great 19th-century masters of realism. When we began writing in high school and college, it was experimental fiction. I think now that a certain kind of academic experimental fiction has reached a dead end. Middlesex is a postmodern book in many ways, but it is also very old-fashioned. Reusing classical motifs is a fundamental of postmodern practice, of course, but telling a story isn't always. I like narrative. I read for it and write for it."
I'm not of his generation, but I did cut my teeth as a serious reader on modernism (I spent my senior year of high school cultivating an obsession with Virginia Woolf, and she remains a standard of intelligent writing for me, whether I will it or not), which explains my attraction to the style Eugenides is trying to outgrow. I look forward, then, to Eugenides's third novel, whenever it appears, because I anticipate we will see a fusing of the styles he has learned to master into something fresh--not the tired and imprecise "postmodern," but whatever it is that comes afterward; the new generation of narrative fiction.
Book Review: A rare,disturbing,marvelous,depressing masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
This book tells the sad tale of the five Lisbon sisters,who are fated to kill themselves through the course of a year. It explores the relationships between parents and children and boys and girls. After the death of Cecilia, the remaining sisters are slowly suffocated out of existence by their mother and their only hope for salvation is the neighborhood boys. The all too human truths and emotions that run rampant throughout this novel are what make it as genuine as a news article; they are what make this novel the darkly shimmering tale of a family's descent into a dark unending abyss of misery.Book Review: A simply mesmerizing debut novel
Summary: 5 Stars
Jeffrey Eugenides' first novel The Virgin Suicides is an almost surreal, haunting, wholly unforgettable work of literary art. It has an almost unmatched depth and resonance that penetrates deeply into the ephemeral layers of life and humanity. In company with the vaguely revealed narrator and his former childhood friends, the reader becomes a peeping tom spying on the five young ladies next door and developing an intense need to understand their innermost thoughts and feelings and to come to know what terrible forces lurking inside that increasingly deteriorating house could possibly lead each of them to take their own lives. There's no real mystery to this story, as the reader is told from the very first page that the five girls will all commit suicide; the heart of the novel lies in the search for answers that can never truly be forthcoming.The Lisbon girls - Cecilia (13), Lux (14), Bonnie (15), Mary (16), and Theresa (17) haunt every page of this novel; even as one reads about their lives during the tumultuous year in which all would commit suicide, one sees only ephemeral visions of what they could have been without any penetrating snapshots of their engaging in life in a literal sense. Cecilia, the youngest, is the first to go. Three weeks after slitting her wrists in an unsuccessful attempt to die, she leaves a party thrown for her own benefit and hurls herself from an upstairs window onto a picket fence. The neighborhood boys are there when it happens and thus feel an intense link to the lovely girls next door who die without ever really having lived. We hear their private conversations and speculations about the girls and witness their attempts to both penetrate the deadly gloom that soon wraps the house in a death shroud as well as to somehow save the girls from a fate seemingly forced upon them by destiny. While certain adolescent issues of a sexual nature meander through their thoughts, the image they cast of the girls is one of purity of a sort. Even Lux, the one sister who is far from virginal, comes across as some type of mystical being whose most sordid of acts seems less than unclean.
All we learn about the tragic sisters comes from our narrator and his friends, boys whose fascination and surreal love for the girls never loses its hold on them in later adulthood. The images conveyed about the mysterious interior of the house and the complete and utter breakdown of the entire, tragic Lisbon family is filtered through their eyes. The Virgin Suicides really is a type of ghost story and as such can only be analyzed and pondered over without being "solved." Eugenides does seem to wander off into tangents on a couple of occasions, but by and large he builds this story up beautifully to its previously stated yet still tragically shocking ending. The novel gets under your skin and penetrates your very heart, leaving a very real emotional imprint on the reader's mind and soul. This is an exquisitely written masterpiece of a novel, lyrically gripping in its style and mesmerizing in its emotional impact.
Book Review: A smart, compelling, and interesting novel.
Summary: 5 Stars
The novel, The Virgin Suicides, kept me enticed through all two hundred and forty nine pages of this well written book. Told through the eyes of the boys who love them most, five sisters living on lockdown in their home go though love, sex, betrayal, and in the end, death. This compelling novel, written by Jeffrey Eugenides, keeps your eyes focused on each page as you gradually see the lives of the girls get worse and worse. Now a film, The Virgin Suicides is ultimetly a novel about youth and innocence being lost through unnecessary captivity. With a heart wrenching ending, The Virgin Suicides is a novel that make you appreciate the small luxuries that you have in life that you most likely take for granted. These two hundred and forty nine pages of paper each left a profound impression on me. With that said I will say, go pick up a copy of The Virgin Suicides and read it because it will keep your mind embedded on the paper the whole time.