The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel

(October 9) For a book about suicides, this is a lot of fun. Eugenides is such a good story-teller and so vivid with the images that it doesn’t matter how morose his subject matter is -- it’s enjoyable. Also, from the very beginning, the girls who commit suicide are disembodied, ephemeral beings, not concrete characters -- they are the idealized obsessions of a group of boys who never knew them very well and who attempt many years later to understand them by piecing together scraps of clothing, shreds of paper and memories of fleeting interactions.

We aren’t given a lot of details about the boys, either -- some of them are mentioned in the third person and have individual quirks, but we’re not sure how many there are exactly and we have no information whatsoever about the central narrator: he is always an amorphous “we.” Nevertheless, because everything is presented from “their” point of view, “they” feel real and we identify with their teenage agonies. This is really, after all, the boys’ tragedy -- they must face the horror that they are fixed in time by the girls’ deaths, forever yearning for the intensity of feeling and drive they experienced so briefly and lost so abruptly.

So it’s a very interesting and nervy approach Eugenides is taking here, but the “group narrator” is sustained beautifully throughout and the lament for lost innocence feels pretty fresh for such an old, oft-visited theme.

Eugenides is obviously intensely interested in teenage angst -- it’s a huge component of Middlesex as well -- and I think he’s very adept at recreating it, particularly middle-class '70s teen angst. There is a brilliant “conversation” between the boys and girls conducted exclusively by playing popular '70s songs to each other:

the Lisbon girls: “Alone Again, Naturally,” Gilbert O’Sullivan
us: “You’ve Got a Friend,” James Taylor
the Lisbon girls: “Where Do the Children Play?,” Cat Stevens
us: “Dear Prudence,” The Beatles
the Lisbon girls: “Candle in the Wind,” Elton John
us: “Wild Horses,” The Rolling Stones
the Lisbon girls: “At Seventeen,” Janice Ian
us: “Time in a Bottle,” Jim Croce
the Lisbon girls: “So Far Away,” Carole King

Hilarious, and like a quick trip back in time.