Editors Reads Verdict
Eugenides's debut is one of the great American novels about adolescence — not because it explains the sisters but because it demonstrates, formally and emotionally, that they cannot be explained from the outside.
What We Loved
- The collective 'we' narrator is formally original and serves the novel's central argument about the inaccessibility of female interiority
- The suburban Michigan setting is rendered with the specificity of someone who grew up there
- Sofia Coppola's 1999 film is excellent and worth watching alongside the novel
Minor Drawbacks
- The refusal to explain is the point, but readers who want resolution will be frustrated
- The girls themselves are somewhat indistinct as individuals — again, deliberate, but limiting
Key Takeaways
- → The inner lives of young women are not accessible to the men who observe them — the observation produces fantasy, not understanding
- → Suburban American prosperity does not insulate its inhabitants from despair — it just makes despair less explicable
- → Obsession is not love, and the boys know it, and this is what the novel is about
| Author | Jeffrey Eugenides |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Picador |
| Pages | 249 |
| Published | April 1, 1993 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Readers new to Eugenides and literary fiction readers interested in adolescence, suburban America, and the limits of male narration. |
What the Boys Remember
Twenty years later, the neighbourhood boys — now middle-aged men — are still trying to understand. They have collected evidence: diary entries, photographs, testimonies from the Lisbon parents and teachers and the psychiatrist. They have assembled a case file. They cannot explain what happened.
The five Lisbon sisters — Cecilia (thirteen), Lux, Bonnie, Mary, Therese — lived in a house on Maple Drive in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in 1974. Their mother is deeply Catholic; their father teaches high school maths. Cecilia kills herself first, in the middle of a neighbourhood party, after briefly surviving a first attempt. The parents tighten the family’s already strict rules. The four remaining sisters are pulled out of school. Lux breaks curfew dramatically. The parents seal the house. One year after Cecilia, the other four girls follow.
The Argument
Eugenides’s formal decision — to give the narration to the boys rather than the sisters — is the novel’s argument. The boys loved the Lisbon girls with the intensity that only adolescent boys can love girls they barely know. They constructed elaborate interiors for them from fragments — a glimpse through a window, an intercepted note, a brief conversation. They were wrong about everything. The girls remain, twenty years later, as inaccessible as they were in 1974.
The novel is not a mystery with a solution. It is a demonstration of why some mysteries have no solution.
Our rating: 4.3/5 — One of the great American debut novels: formally original, emotionally precise, and structurally honest about what it cannot tell you.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Virgin Suicides" about?
Five Lisbon sisters in a Michigan suburb in the 1970s. Told from the collective perspective of neighbourhood boys who were obsessed with the sisters — narrated twenty years after the girls all killed themselves in one calendar year. A mystery about the inner lives of girls the boys never understood and never will.
Who should read "The Virgin Suicides"?
Readers new to Eugenides and literary fiction readers interested in adolescence, suburban America, and the limits of male narration.
What are the key takeaways from "The Virgin Suicides"?
The inner lives of young women are not accessible to the men who observe them — the observation produces fantasy, not understanding Suburban American prosperity does not insulate its inhabitants from despair — it just makes despair less explicable Obsession is not love, and the boys know it, and this is what the novel is about
Is "The Virgin Suicides" worth reading?
Eugenides's debut is one of the great American novels about adolescence — not because it explains the sisters but because it demonstrates, formally and emotionally, that they cannot be explained from the outside.
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