The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
I’ve had a few days to think about this one since finishing it. Surprisingly, the book I picked to read afterwards (HouseKeeping, which is below this) had some similarities in terms of a reflective sort of tone. The subject matter, plot, and themes, are very different, however. Eugenides creates the story of sisters who live close by, who he knows through limited experiences, second hand accounts, and small fleeting glimpses of them; one sister holding a box of macaroni in the kitchen, another’s cosmetics, a month old sandwich sitting on the stairs, the magazines they escape in, a tree they crowd around to save from being chopped down, journal entries with bubbled dots over the i’s… The reader is walked throught different exhibits meticulously kept track of by a man whose life has been consumed by this mystery. The only real explanation that is even fathomable is that their spirits were so suppressed by this suburb and by their strict somewhat puritanical parents that they could not breathe freely. I’m sure the title has been suggested by some as somewhat of a misnomer as Lux, one of the Lisbon girls, is definitely not a virgin and secretly invites men onto the roof of the family home whilst her parents are asleep. However, in the sense that they are captive and not really allowed to experience the fullness of life, the title is in fact acutely accurate. One must also wonder how alive the Lisbon parents must be themselves if they cannot see the struggle under the surface of their daughters’ waking hours.
It’s also touching in the way it deals with adolescence and the way the narrator as a boy tried to cope and understand with his friends not only the mystery of the Lisbon girls but what being a girl feels like. You definitely have the sense that the girls chose that if they could not truly live as they longed, they would make their mark on someone last forever. Not just someone, actually, because no doubt the narrator’s friends are effected as painfully. You can imagine them compiling the artifacts and struggling to make sense of it. This story is rich in symbolic memory and is very moving overall.
Quickly, I want to say that although I felt this was a thoroughly captivating story, it pales in comparison to Eugenide’s Middlesex. Middlesex is almost an epic compared to this. It spans three generations between Greece and Detroit and delves into the life of an intersexual who grows up painfully as a girl and chooses to live his adult life as a man. It seriously calls into question the very fundamentals of our society and of the precarious way in which we must make all people choose a gender and for people like the main character, a sex as well. It’s tremendously insightful and moving and the more I read, the more I felt I didn’t want it to end. In addition, the fascinating side stories that are weaved in and out of the main character’s struggling adolescence are incredible and very memorable. I would put this on a list of top ten books of all time.
(Beth Gibbons bittorrent Berlin 2003)