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What it argues
Five sisters. One year. A neighborhood still trying to make sense of it decades later. The Virgin Suicides is narrated by a collective "we" — a group of middle-aged men who were teenage boys in the suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the 1970s and who have spent their adult lives obsessively reconstructing the lives and deaths of the Lisbon girls: Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese. The novel opens with the youngest girl's attempted suicide, and what follows is part mystery, part elegy, part case study in the impossibility of truly knowing another person.
The book is not really about suicide. It is about the stories we tell ourselves about the people we want but cannot understand. The boys collect objects, newspaper clippings, diary entries — evidence — and build an elaborate mythology around girls they never actually knew. Eugenides is precise about what the novel is doing: the Lisbon sisters remain opaque because the narrators are projecting onto them, and the act of projection is itself the subject. The girls' interiority is glimpsed in fragments, always through a filter. The mother who imprisons them, the father who recedes, the neighborhood that watches and waits — none of them see the sisters clearly either.
What it gets right
- 1.
The collective male narrator is the real subject — the novel is about how young men mythologize women they barely know, not about the women themselves.
- 2.
Eugenides keeps the sisters' interiority almost entirely out of reach, which is formally central: we cannot understand them because the narrators never could.
- 3.
The suburb is a trap that predates the parents' restrictions. Grosse Pointe's manicured conformity is itself a form of suffocation.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jeffrey Eugenides is an American novelist born in Detroit in 1960. His debut novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), established him as a major literary voice. His second novel, Middlesex (2002), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became an international bestseller. His third, The Marriage Plot (2011), was a finalist for multiple awards. Eugenides has taught creative writing at Princeton University and has been a fellow at various prestigious institutions. He writes at long intervals and with meticulous craft, and each of his three novels operates on a distinct formal premise.
