The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

I had to read this book because Middlesex was just so incredible, and I'd seen "The Virgin Suicides" on VHS during a slumber party some years back when it first came out. I remember thinking Kirsten Dunst was a huge slut, but that was it. Oh. And there was this pretty graphic suicide scene at the beginning of the movie involving a virgin and an iron post fence. Yikes. But that's it. Truly.

Anyhow, I did enjoy this novel, though it wasn't quite as engaging as Middlesex. It might have to do with the fact that Suicides is narrated in the first person by a character retelling his memories of the girls, rather than getting a first person narration by the main character herself, as is done in Middlesex. It would have been nice to have gone inside the sisters' heads and better understand why the they wanted to die. But really, that's the whole point of the book. The entire small town is affected by this strange occurance, and they want to make sense of it. But nobody knows. So is it making a statement about depression? About broken homes and the problem with sheltering children? (They were Catholic in the 1970's.) Who knows?

I finished this one a couple months ago (I know, I'm way behind on my reviews), so it's hard to remember everything about the book. But basically, the story is about five beautiful sisters who end up killing themselves over a period of a few years. The girls keep to themselves at school, and their parents are crazy strict. They are obviously damaged. Most of the story comes from the accounts of a group of boys who admire the girls from a far. Sometimes they do not see the girls come out of their house for weeks and so they make speculations as to why. Sometimes they sneak into the girls' house or have sex on the roof with the slutty one (probably Kirsten Dunst), but there really is no plot, so you can't expect a page-turner. On the outside, Suicides is just an insight into the curious world of the Lisbon girls and their strange family. But looking deeper, there's plenty more to find. I may have benefited more if I'd read this book in a class or book club, because doing so on my own left me feeling a bit empty. Or maybe if I read it a second time everything would become illuminated. I think I was expecting something more like Middlesex, so I couldn't fully appreciate the book's structure on its own. But really, the two books are very different, and they really can't be compared. Both are good, but for their own reasons.