The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Summary
Five sisters live on an ordinary street in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the middle 1970s. Cecilia, the youngest, attempts suicide, and after she succeeds at the second try the parents shut the remaining four in the house. Within a year all five are dead.
The novel is narrated by the boys who lived across the road, speaking as a collective we, decades later and still middle aged and still obsessed. They have assembled everything: photographs, diaries, interviews, a numbered list of exhibits. They explain nothing, because they cannot, and the entire book is the sound of grown men who have never stopped trying to account for something that had nothing to do with them.
Eugenides gets astonishing effects out of that voice. The prose is lush and precise, the suburb is rendered exactly, and the girls stay permanently out of focus, which is the point.
That is also the case against it, and it is worth knowing before you start. The Lisbon sisters have no interiority because the narrators never had access to any, and readers who find the novel a beautiful monument to the fetishising of dead teenage girls are describing something genuinely in the text. Whether it critiques that gaze or performs it is the argument the book has generated for thirty years, and it is a better novel for being arguable rather than settled.
It is short, the voice takes about five pages to get used to, and once it has you the last section is very hard to put down. Read it for the prose and the strangeness of the telling rather than for anyone to identify with.
Historical Context & Significance
The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993, Eugenides's first novel, and readers and critics have compared its collective narrator to a Greek chorus, a label Eugenides has said probably owes something to his own surname. It made his name immediately and won no major prize, though its first chapter, printed in The Paris Review, took that magazine's 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.
That absence is the reason it sits on this list. Eugenides went on to take the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003 for Middlesex, so the prize record makes him a laureate while leaving the debut that established him unmarked, which is a common shape: juries reward the later, larger book.
Its afterlife has been unusually strong. Sofia Coppola's 1999 film adaptation was her first feature and fixed the novel's imagery in a generation's memory, to the point that the book is now frequently encountered second, and it has become a permanent fixture of the way American suburban adolescence is imagined.