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A review by favvn
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
I keep dragging my feet on typing out a review for this book. Possibly because there's so much I could say about it that I'm at a loss for how to phrase it, much less fit it all into a review barely anyone will read (maybe someday I'll be a booktuber girlie but not any time soon lmao). I just reread it for the third time and I still don't know exactly what to say.
I could be flippant and say, "Cecilia is just like me fr fr" or that this book once helped to tank my already sunken mood so badly I found myself in therapy as a result, but that's just sensationalist and doesn't explain why I would come back to it again and again. (I will say, if you struggle with depression/depressive episodes.... maybe wait until your mood stabilizes before cracking open this book because guess who didn't and just got worse in continued self-imposed isolation 🤪 until the fog lifted and in a moment of lucidity I sought help) So, I guess let me try to put into words why I like The Virgin Suicides enough to come back to it in spite of my past history with it.
1. The Writing Style/Set Up
Eugenides reveals what's going to happen right in the title, right in the first sentence. Already, you go into this book knowing what you will encounter. He does this because he wants you to ask, like the collective narrator, "Why?" And the more you read, the less you will ask why but rather, "How could no one help?" This is the issue that haunts the narrator(s). This is why they're still obsessed with the Lisbon girls 20+ years later. Well, that and teenage hormones/first crush/"we could've dated, but never did, so all we have are scenarios we dreamt about" type combo. Add suicide at such a young age and anyone could be haunted by all of those what-ifs and maybes, that complete lack of resolution.
2. The Collective Narrator
Truly the most unreliable narrator of all time! Like playing a game of telephone, these boys/men contradict themselves, get details mixed up or wrong entirely, or focus on the most mundane of things while glossing over the important events.
Yes, there's a heaping amount of gross sexualization and misogyny as a result. Frankly, this should come as no surprise (although I'm a cynic. If men want me to change my opinion, change your behaviors first xoxo). They're recounting their teenage years--the time of crazy hormones and intense feelings--during the 70s, a time period that could be just as grossly sexist as earlier periods and was sexist as a backlash to the Women's Movement of the time. It would be unrealistic for the boys to not be perverts about the girls, although frankly, why they're dreaming of the girls whilst having sex with other women 20+ years later is a big, gross yikes. Eugenides, please explain that decision to me.
That aside, the fact that the boys sexualize the Lisbon girls works to heighten the girls' plight, in my opinion. There's a line in chapter 4 that I think about always because it's a throwaway type of line, but it's jarring because of its placement in the story. The boys are finally about to enter the Lisbon house to play out their fantasy of rescuing the girls by taking them away to wherever, but before they enter they watch Lux smoking in the living room and take stock of a halter top they had last seen her wearing 2 years before everything happened. The boys tell themselves that it's this great symbol of the girls soon-to-be had freedom, but it ends with, "That halter could've come undone with one quick yank." And this line destroys that stupid white knight fantasy the boys believe they're living because all it shows is how the Lisbon girls would be trading a cloister (albeit a rotting and leaking cloister with a questionable food supply) for a new hell of objectification at the hands of boys believing themselves to be saviors. Which, based on criticisms I've read from women about the free love movement of the late 60s/early 70s and the expectation of domestic labor from the women involved in political activist groups of that time... it all hits. Or I'm just being a complete cynical killjoy.
But of course, the best possible example of what I'm talking about comes later in chapter 4, when the boys return to the basement. The floor is flooded from rain and backed up sewage vents and nobody cleaned up from the party held the year before. The decorations, food, punch bowl, all of it is still out, rotting and collecting dust.
I could be flippant and say, "Cecilia is just like me fr fr" or that this book once helped to tank my already sunken mood so badly I found myself in therapy as a result, but that's just sensationalist and doesn't explain why I would come back to it again and again. (I will say, if you struggle with depression/depressive episodes.... maybe wait until your mood stabilizes before cracking open this book because guess who didn't and just got worse in continued self-imposed isolation 🤪 until the fog lifted and in a moment of lucidity I sought help) So, I guess let me try to put into words why I like The Virgin Suicides enough to come back to it in spite of my past history with it.
1. The Writing Style/Set Up
Eugenides reveals what's going to happen right in the title, right in the first sentence. Already, you go into this book knowing what you will encounter. He does this because he wants you to ask, like the collective narrator, "Why?" And the more you read, the less you will ask why but rather, "How could no one help?" This is the issue that haunts the narrator(s). This is why they're still obsessed with the Lisbon girls 20+ years later. Well, that and teenage hormones/first crush/"we could've dated, but never did, so all we have are scenarios we dreamt about" type combo. Add suicide at such a young age and anyone could be haunted by all of those what-ifs and maybes, that complete lack of resolution.
2. The Collective Narrator
Truly the most unreliable narrator of all time! Like playing a game of telephone, these boys/men contradict themselves, get details mixed up or wrong entirely, or focus on the most mundane of things while glossing over the important events.
Yes, there's a heaping amount of gross sexualization and misogyny as a result. Frankly, this should come as no surprise (although I'm a cynic. If men want me to change my opinion, change your behaviors first xoxo). They're recounting their teenage years--the time of crazy hormones and intense feelings--during the 70s, a time period that could be just as grossly sexist as earlier periods and was sexist as a backlash to the Women's Movement of the time. It would be unrealistic for the boys to not be perverts about the girls, although frankly, why they're dreaming of the girls whilst having sex with other women 20+ years later is a big, gross yikes. Eugenides, please explain that decision to me.
That aside, the fact that the boys sexualize the Lisbon girls works to heighten the girls' plight, in my opinion. There's a line in chapter 4 that I think about always because it's a throwaway type of line, but it's jarring because of its placement in the story. The boys are finally about to enter the Lisbon house to play out their fantasy of rescuing the girls by taking them away to wherever, but before they enter they watch Lux smoking in the living room and take stock of a halter top they had last seen her wearing 2 years before everything happened. The boys tell themselves that it's this great symbol of the girls soon-to-be had freedom, but it ends with, "That halter could've come undone with one quick yank." And this line destroys that stupid white knight fantasy the boys believe they're living because all it shows is how the Lisbon girls would be trading a cloister (albeit a rotting and leaking cloister with a questionable food supply) for a new hell of objectification at the hands of boys believing themselves to be saviors. Which, based on criticisms I've read from women about the free love movement of the late 60s/early 70s and the expectation of domestic labor from the women involved in political activist groups of that time... it all hits. Or I'm just being a complete cynical killjoy.
But of course, the best possible example of what I'm talking about comes later in chapter 4, when the boys return to the basement. The floor is flooded from rain and backed up sewage vents and nobody cleaned up from the party held the year before. The decorations, food, punch bowl, all of it is still out, rotting and collecting dust.
Buzz Romano waded out to the card table, and as we all watched, began to dance, to box-step, as his mother had taught him in the papal splendor of their living room. He held only air, but we could see her—them—all five, clasped in his arms. “These girls make me crazy. If I could just feel one of them up just once,” he said, as his shoes filled and emptied with silt. His dancing kicked up the sewage smell, and after that, stronger than ever, the smell we could never forget.
It's an entirely fitting description that his shoes should fill with disgusting sewage water while he imagines dancing with the girls as he says he wants to feel one of them up. It covers all bases: the boys' fantasy of their relationship to the girls and the reality of why the boys are so dogged in their pursuit.
3. The Parallels
I love parallels. I love when separate things mirror each other and show a united message once compared. Love it, love it, love it. And in The Virgin Suicides, Jeffery Eugenides parallels the deterioration of suburban life in the 70s with the deterioration of the environment and the deterioration of the Lisbon family.
The unifying symbol of all this deterioration and decay is, of course, the elm trees. Once a thing of natural beauty that hid how sterile and uniform the neighborhood was in the boys' youth, they are removed one by one throughout the book owing to an outbreak of Dutch Elm Disease. Without the trees, the boys are confronted by how artificial their life is, and with no more trees, the neighborhood loses an old communal tradition of each household collecting leaves to burn by the end of fall. The Lisbon's tree, in a poetic turn, is left standing last but as a bare trunk devoid of limbs, described as, "a creature clubbed mute, only its sudden voicelessness making us realize it had been speaking all along." Do I even need to say what this symbolizes?
The ending chapter describes a spill at a local chemical plant creating a thick layer of algae that results in a disgusting, swampy smell permeating the neighborhood. It recalls the descriptions of vapors coming from the Lisbon house earlier and that strange smell that would enter the neighborhood if any Lisbon opened the door. But, naturally, no one wishes to be ousted by such a silly thing as nature taking its due course, so a local family uses the theme 'Asphyxiation' for their daughter's debut party.
It's in this backdrop that racism is included in the book and, much like Eugenides' use of sexualization, it's very much for a purpose. It's mentioned in passing, of course, because the book focuses solely on white characters--black maids waiting on street corners for buses to the city, the local costume store changing its ghost mannequin to look more pointed, a restaurant removing fried chicken from its menu. And yes, there is at least one use of the n-word that I can recall. But it's all in the sake of reality because yes, the wealthy, white suburbs of Michigan would be racist in the 70s, especially with the 1967 Detroit Riot happening about 10 years prior to the book's setting and the white exodus from the cities to the suburbs going on since the 50s. Racism never limited itself to south of the Mason-Dixon line, it just took a more subtle approach. Eugenides isn't tossing in these details to be shocking or showcase latent racism on his own part. He was writing from his own experiences as a teen in 1970s Michigan. And by this point in the story, if a whole neighborhood can watch but never confront the decaying house across the street or its occupants, how is casual racism from these same characters so shocking? They're not even caring after their own neighbors! Which goes back to how hollow and meaningless the suburbs of The Virgin Suicides have become--any sense of community slowly erodes with each passing year until families outright pack up and leave for the Sun Belt. The only thing that keeps enough of them together--or possibly brings them back--is survivor's guilt at not doing enough to help the Lisbons.
Other/Miscellaneous:
I will forever laugh at the part where the boys earnestly believe girls ages 13-17 are douching every night. Big hearty chuckle.
Partly mind boggling but partly not to learn that Eugenides had zero symbolic intentions behind having Cecilia wear an old wedding dress. I love knowing he just said, "She's a weird kid so that's one of her quirks." Meanwhile so many people analyze it--rightly so!--to call back to the idea of a virgin bride and the joy of a wedding only for Cecilia and her shorn-hemmed, stained dress to turn all of that on its head. Gotta love serendipitous coincidences.
It's also funny to me that Eugenides was surprised to learn how so many girls are fans of a book so thoroughly centered in the male perspective, but he captured the hell of being a girl perfectly: on one extreme, the Lisbon girls are locked away by their mother to stay safe forever. On the other, they are lusted after by the boys and held up as a fantasy that doesn't exist according to the boys' white knight dreams. In the process, no one wants to see them for who they were--not a dream or sex fantasy or something to be protected and locked away, but human. And under living conditions like that and a society only all to happy to crush them into further dehumanizing roles, they took the one choice that was theirs to control entirely. Ya know, like the original meaning of the word virgin, not a sexually inexperienced person but a woman in control of her own life (even if that control only extends to choosing to end it).
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Confinement, Sexism, Misogyny, Child abuse, Child death, and Suicide attempt
Minor: Sexual content, Racism, and Racial slurs