Scan barcode
A review by wolfdan9
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
2.5
“We knew the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
The Virgin Suicides is Jeffrey Eugenides’ first novel. Eugenides’ prosaic style is somewhere among Malamud’s, Yates’, and Williams’ in its economical efficiency (I’d rank him the weakest among these names, but he still has some sparkling sentences and interesting ways of conveying ideas). For a literary novel, The Virgin Suicides has the uniquely thriller-esque premise of five teenage sisters forming a suicide pact. It’s introduced in the first few pages, narrated by a neighborhood boy decades later, with the bulk of the novel being dedicated to why it happened. While the novel is very successful at capturing suburbia, the explanation/conclusion of why the suicides happened is unsatisfying at best. Eugenides did not seem to want a concrete reason, which makes sense because the evaporation of ambiguity would ruin any chance for the reader to make their own interpretations throughout the unraveling of the story, but, according to Eugenides, the five girls committed suicide because of their “refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.” This doesn’t mean much to me. Something as unbelievably strange as five sisters committing suicide one after the other requires a reason more bizarre and interesting than restrictive parents or “the world sucks.” Maybe the movie is better; I don’t really care to find out.
The Virgin Suicides is Jeffrey Eugenides’ first novel. Eugenides’ prosaic style is somewhere among Malamud’s, Yates’, and Williams’ in its economical efficiency (I’d rank him the weakest among these names, but he still has some sparkling sentences and interesting ways of conveying ideas). For a literary novel, The Virgin Suicides has the uniquely thriller-esque premise of five teenage sisters forming a suicide pact. It’s introduced in the first few pages, narrated by a neighborhood boy decades later, with the bulk of the novel being dedicated to why it happened. While the novel is very successful at capturing suburbia, the explanation/conclusion of why the suicides happened is unsatisfying at best. Eugenides did not seem to want a concrete reason, which makes sense because the evaporation of ambiguity would ruin any chance for the reader to make their own interpretations throughout the unraveling of the story, but, according to Eugenides, the five girls committed suicide because of their “refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.” This doesn’t mean much to me. Something as unbelievably strange as five sisters committing suicide one after the other requires a reason more bizarre and interesting than restrictive parents or “the world sucks.” Maybe the movie is better; I don’t really care to find out.