First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.
Jefferey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford universities. The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993 and was adapted into a motion picture in 1999 by Sophia Coppola. His second novel, Middlesex, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in the fall of 2007.
First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.
"Arresting . . . uncannily evokes the wry voice of adolescence and a mixture of curiosity, lust, tenderness, morbidity, cynicism, and the naïveté surrounding these bizarre events."—The Wall Street Journal
"A piercing first novel . . . Incantatory prose . . . The narrator's hypnotic voice succeeds in transporting us to that mythic realm where fate, not common sense or psychology, holds sway. By turns lyrical and portentous, ferocious and elegiac, The Virgin Suicides insinuates itself into our minds as a small but powerful opera in the unexpected form of a novel."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Mr. Eugenides is blessed with the storyteller's most magical gift, the ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary."—Suzanne Berne, The New York Times Book Review
"Arresting . . . uncannily evokes the wry voice of adolescence and a mixture of curiosity, lust, tenderness, morbidity, cynicism, and the naïveté surrounding these bizarre events."—The Wall Street Journal
"[A] comic and elegiac first novel . . . Eugenides is one of those rare writers who can manage sympathy and detachment simultaneously—and work small wonders with words while he's at it. As The Virgin Suicides puts its heroines through hell, its readers, weirdly enough, will be delighted."—David Gates, Newsweek
"The Virgin Suicides takes the dark stuff of Greek tragedy and reworks it into an eccentric, mesmerizing, frequently hilarious American fantasy about the tyranny of unrequited love, and the unknowable heart of every family on earth—but especially the family next door . . . There's much here that's marvelously original, and like Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus or Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, this is one of those debuts that tell you you are present at the beginning of a major career and make you glad you own a first edition."—Tom De Haven, Entertainment Weekly
"Rhapsodic . . . With a deft, often comedic touch, Eugenides examines the concept of mass suicide in a way that might, in less assured hands, strain a reader's credulity. By skillfully displaying the parents' inability to succor the grief of their surviving daughters and by showing a father 'with the lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be all the life he ever had,' the author makes the reader understand the lemminglike conduct of a group of adolescent siblings. By turns hypnotic and elegiac, the novel manages to sustain a high level of suspense in what is clearly an impressive debut."—People
"Eugenides's remarkable first novel opens on a startling note: 'On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide . . . the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.' What follows is not, however, a horror novel, but a finely crafted work of literary if slightly macabre imagination. In an unnamed town in the slightly distant past, detailed in such precise and limpid prose that readers will surely feel that they grew up there, Cecilia—the youngest and most obviously wacky of the luscious Lisbon girls—finally succeeds in taking her own life. As the confused neighbors watch rather helplessly, the remaining sisters become isolated and unhinged, ending it all in a spectacular multiple suicide anticipated from the first page. Eugenides's engrossing writing style keeps one reading despite a creepy feeling that one shouldn't be enjoying it so much. A black, glittering novel."—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
"Eugenides's tantalizing, macabre first novel begins with a suicide, the first of the five bizarre deaths of the teenage daughters in the Lisbon family; the rest of the work, set in the author's native Michigan in the early 1970s, is a backward-looking quest as the male narrator and his nosy, horny pals describe how they strove to understand the odd clan of this first chapter, which appeared in the Paris Review, where it won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for fiction . . .Eugenides's voice is so fresh and compelling, his powers of observation so startling and acute, that most will be mesmerized. The title derives from a song by the fictional rock band Cruel Crux, a favorite of the Lisbon daughter Lux—who, unlike her sisters Therese, Mary, Bonnie and Cecilia, is anything but a virgin by the tale's end. Her mother forces Lux to burn the album along with others she considers dangerously provocative. Mr. Lisbon, a mild-mannered high school math teacher, is driven to resign by parents who believe his control of their children may be as deficient as his control of his own brood . . . Under the narrator's goofy, posturing banter are some hard truths: mortality is a fact of life; teenage girls are more attracted to brawn than to brains (contrary to the testimony of the narrator's male relatives). This is an auspicious debut from an imaginative and talented writer."—Publishers Weekly
The Virgin SuicidesMarch 10, 2010 Darlim(Medford, Oregon) Prompt service and I was so pleased with the condition of the "used" book! Many thanks!
Simple & ComplexedFebruary 22, 2010 C. Davis(Kansas City) The Virgin Suicides is a very easy read, it takes very little time to read it.
The story is amazing, slow at times but still great none the less.
What I personally enjoy about the book is that the story is still complexed at moments and very little can be said, yet it still affects the audience.
"You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."December 16, 2009 Luan Gaines(Dana Point, CA USA)
Not only does Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides have an intriguing title, but a movie is based on the provocative tale of the tragic- and unpredictable- suicides of five teenaged sisters in early 1970s Detroit over a period of one year. When the smoke clears, the Lisbon's are left grieving the loss of daughter Cecilia, 13, Bonnie, 15, Lux, 14, Mary, 16, and Therese, 17. The story is told from the perspective of a group of neighborhood boys, themselves trapped in the ambiguity of adolescence, as they observe, transfixed by the shocking events than unfold at the Lisbon home. EMTs that arrive to save Cecilia from her first attempt (slashing her wrists in the bath tub) return once more with no hope of saving the girl who is impaled on a fence after jumping to her death the night of a staid party.
Eugenides' approach is rhythmic and fluid, in sharp contrast to the nightmare that is plaguing the Lisbon home, including the resignation of Mr. Lisbon, a high school math teacher. What kind of teacher is this man who cannot control events in his own household? Certainly, the testosterone-riddled voices of the adolescent narrators contain no more truth than the idle speculations of shocked parents as the suicides continue. Virgins all, save one, only the harsh music of teenaged angst intrudes, a note of disharmony in this surreal landscape, but even that is annihilated by a vigilant mother. This is a family suffering from fatal melancholy, certainly an anomaly, but so bizarre that the teenaged boys can only watch in stupefied fascination. It is the boys' reactions to this year-long drama that create the weight of the story, balanced against the surreal atmosphere in the Lisbon home.
Yet for all the acclaim and the occasional bursts of poetic prose, I found this novel tedious, less involving with each page, regardless of the shocking content. Where others have found a rich reading experience, I have failed to enjoy the enthusiasm of most reviewers. The title is so rich with possibilities and the actual reading of the novel so lackluster, the drone of hearsay, diary entries, interviews and observations. Albeit a paean to the troubled years of adolescence, I cannot appreciate the author's style or content. Luan Gaines/2009.
Just a Fine Turn of Cherry-tinged WritingSeptember 22, 2009 M. Swinney(Flower Mound, TX) 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Granted I had heard of Jerry Eugenides pulitizer prize winning novel Middlesex and Sofia Coppola's movie The Virgin Suicides but never really gave it much thought to sit down and read one of Eugenides' books. Upon shopping for fiction-lover brother this past August, I did some Amazonian research and came up with a list of ten or so titles I thought would fit him and his literary tastes. Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," made it to the top of the list. So I did the easy thing and ordered it from Amazon and just before wrapping it I took a closer look at the subject matter...hmmm 5 or 6 sisters all kill themselves and that's pretty much the plot of the book...and had second thoughts about unleashing this black macabre upon said brother. Thus, a second gift purchasing of The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) became the substitute stand-in as I kept "The Virgin Suicides," to read and screen first before unleashing such dark subject matter on another.
And on a selfish note, boy, I'm glad I kept it. Good creative writing where sentences are crafted well and language is used uniquely and the narrative is skilled to weave a story wins me over every time, despite subject matter. From a person who has read a few books in his days, Eugenides won me over on the first page. "They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, 'This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go.' He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began." That's a sentence. In fact its two sentences. In it, along with the book's first sentence, we get pre-announced that this book is going to be about a group of teenage sisters that end up killing themselves and thirteen months time elapsed it will take for the story to unravel. Many authors would think that's putting too much out there in the beginning revealing the big reveal on page 1. It works wonderfully for Eugenides' tale though.
The story is told through a Greek Chorus narrator of a group of nosy pubescent boys who investigate and obsess over the Lisbon sisters to no end. And just like the classic tragedy, this story harkens back to a Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. We don't blink twice about our teenagers being exposed to Romeo and Juliet's star-crossed love affair ending in suicide and murder but the subject matter of Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," can be daunting and vexing. The novel is loosely based on a real life event of which I'm not too sure about the details so these kind of things evidently happen. Eugenides just turns it into a moral tale about the ultimate selfishness of such acts and while doing so spins a yarn so perfectly catching the awkwardness and thrill that comes along with growing up in America that you become a believer that this isn't just a black comedy but a tale that reveals something true of the human soul and psyche...an aim for all good literature.
So there is a pinnacle moment in the book of which I won't tell of as to not give anything away should you read it. I read a lot of Stephen King books as a kid growing up and though "The Virgin Suicides," isn't a horror book, this piece of writing in a few paragraphs achieves a chill in the bones as much as a novel full of King's Pet Cemetaries or haunted Colorado hotels do. Just listen to this writing, "How long we stayed like that, communing with her departed spirit, we can't remember. Long enough for our collective breath to start a breeze slowly through the room that made Bonnie..." And that's all I'll reveal. The rest you just gotta read for yourself, dear readers.
I'll hand off this book pre-screened to the brother now, with a caveat, I want it back to read again someday. Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," highly recommended but not for the faint of heart. --mmw
cheatingAugust 4, 2009 Caraculiambro(La Mancha and environs) 4 out of 11 found this review helpful
It puzzled me somewhat that, though this book was highly regarded on Amazon, I had never heard of it. So I put it on my wish list but never got around to buying it. Then a movie came out, so I figured I'd better get a move on before others were more informed than I!
So even though I'd been wanting to read this for years, when I finally did I couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about.
It's a novel about five sisters who grow up in a fastidious Catholic household and all kill themselves within a short span of time. Unusually for a modern novel, the story is narrated by a chorus in the classical Greek style, a chorus consisting of a passel of teenage boys who were variously in love with the doomed sisters.
But I don't think that the author, Jeffrey Eugenides, has any more insight about such matters than anybody else does. The use of the teenage boys as a narrative strategy struck me as awkward, pretentious, and unnecessary. Worse, I didn't think it added much to whatever the book was supposed to be getting at. I suspect if Eugenides had used a more straightforward narrative device, the clunky improbability of his tale would have been laid bare.
In other words, if he had told his story in a more conventional manner, it would have become blazingly obvious how little he has brought to the table. Essentially we are presented with the mystery of five tragic and inexplicable suicides--but there's never any explication. It's not like they were unfathomable, but then, when the skillful novelist leads you to consider things aright, you can see why they happened or what can be learned from them.
No, no. Nothing like that. I don't think anybody in the book - least of all the author - had any idea why the suicides occurred, other than a gaseous "Mom was oppressive." "The Virgin Suicides" is like one of those modern poems you can never understand because the author was writing to himself, not you.
Initially I withheld judgment on the mistaken belief that Eugenides' book was a novelization of something that had actually happened back east, but a cursory investigation into the matter disabused me of that. Eugenides spun the tale up out of whole cloth.
But that's cheating, you see. You can't make a mystery in your book, not solve it, and then declare that the very insolubility of your mystery reveals how ineffably mysterious everything is! Great art is made when a human mind communciates insight about some mystery in life, not merely repeats it and asks you to draw your own conclusions.
Otherwise, who can't write a great book? Here's what you do: 1) set up a familiar milieu; 2) have something horrible or shocking happen; 3) have people spend the rest of the book wondering why it happened; 4) narrate everything in an artsy, literary way.
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