The Virgin Suicides

Even if you've read Jeffrey Eugenides 1993 novel or you've seen the movie adapted by Sofia Coppola, haunting, evocative imagery and a slyly ironic voice make "The Virgin Suicides" a book to be read and reread.

It was this novel that announced Eugenides as a major American talent. He went on to write other extraordinary bestsellers like "The Marriage Plot" and the Pulitzer-Prize winning "Middlesex."

This pocket-sized rerelease by Picador Modern Classics is both sturdy and stylish with a hardback cover printed in a pink rose pattern that makes it mistakable for a young girl's diary.

The experience of reading this edition is like peeking into the secret world of an elusive young woman in hopes of discovering her private mystery, like the handwritten volume recorded by Cecilia Lisbon, the first of a family of five sisters to take her own life.

"Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves." The action is not described to us through any individual, but through the group voice of an unnumbered cluster of boys. It's a style that tries to be objective and factual in its first person plural, but there is nothing journalistic in the wildly fantastic, dryly humorous and sometimes grotesque descriptions of their voyeuristic male gaze.

"We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why the felt compelled to complement each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or tell each other how pretty we were."

Cecilia's death sets into motion an eroding series of events that leads to the systematic, somewhat ritualistic suicides of all the girls. Though the Lisbon girls' actions are completely inexplicable the narrators will spend the novel trying to figure out what made this bizarre mass suicide take place in a family that was like a cult with no leader, simply a beginning and an end.

Eugenides breaks one of the rules of the well-made novel by foregoing a charismatic protagonist and making his book about a group of people instead, the inhabitants of a suburb in a dying Detroit whose members are barely distinguishable from each other.

This coming-of-age story is like an epic romantic poem, a portrait of a decaying community as the suburban idealism of the 1950s and 60s culminates in just over one year of macabre proceedings. Reminiscent of the great Southern Gothic stories of William Falkner and Flannery O'Connor, this novel replaces plantations with an auto industry and the dying suburban values in the wretched 70s. Full of dark humor and mesmerizing, sumptuous images, "The Virgin Suicides" is middle-American mythology, an achingly erotic and agonizingly unfulfilled ode to the second half of the 20th Century.

"The Virgin Suicides"
By Jeffrey Eugenides
$16.00
picadorusa.com