The Virgin Suicides: A Novel (Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition) (Picador Modern Classics, 2)

I had so much fun reviewing THE MARRIAGE PLOT that I resolved to review THE VIRGIN SUICIDES next and lastly to read and review MIDDLESEX. That sounds self-indulgent of me, I know, but on the other hand self-indulgence is the main characteristic of this whole new spawn of American book reviews caused by the onset of electronic publishing, so mine should fit in quite well.Almost every one of the 440 reviews of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES begins, after the obligatory cold blanket assignment of stars, with the reviewer's statement of whether she or he liked the book, cold blanket again, followed by a tract of triteness and cliche very apt to contain the expression "it's" spelled wrong--three more cold blankets seemingly intended to deaden any real thought or sign of life in an actual reader.The best discussion of a book begins in neutrality, with focus on what it was we just read. Some people sense this. So they try to summarize without knowing a difference between true summary, which is highly selective, and "factual rehash," which is not. What we mostly get are fifth grade or reading group book reports which aren't even reviews much less literary criticism. Who other than author, publisher and agent cares whether someone liked a book or not when, clearly, that somebody is a human goose who is an insult to real geese and may not even know how to read?The trouble, you see, is that all writing but especially a book review is autobiographical (so fire away--I don't mind).A special issue of "Grosse Pointe Magazine" lies in front of me right now, a seriously dumbed down journal actually containing a theme to pull its various articles together. The theme, "Mom is wonderful," finds adult expression in those exact words or close to them, but the sole sign of life in this magazine issue is reproduced portraits of their moms by pre-schoolers in watercolor.Where else could dull editors with no sense of irony, people who never absorbed Philip Wylie's famous statement, "Mom is a jerk," go in search of life in Grosse Pointe? They had to turn to the pre-schoolers, just as Jeffrey Eugenides turned to five sister Lolitas, pre-teen and young teenagers sequestered together, each more gorgeous than the last.Has the age for true life in Grosse Pointe gone down in the decades since Eugenides penned his expose? That's possible.But please don't misunderstand. You'd be wrong to conclude that I don't like Grosse Pointe. It's a scatological point, surrounded by water, in the language of its French founders and as Eugenides reveals near the end of the book. Believe me, one can always go to The Dirty Dog to hear great jazz, and at each meeting of the Christ Church foyer groups, there always are two or three persons who demonstrate that the ready made idea that all any adult in Grosse Pointe ever cares about is money is totally untrue. "Wherever there are four Episcopaliens together," one parishioner took it upon himself to explain soon after I arrived, "there's always a fifth."The Eugenides crowd seems headquartered slightly down the road in Roman Catholic, not Episcopalien surroundings, but Greeks in America have always had trouble choosing the most appropriate local religion after Greek Orthodox. Remember, one of the five teeny-boppers at the core of Eugenides' first novel is named Mary, yet not one of the almost five hundred reviewers, including me, saw fit to look into that.One reviewer, obviously very sexually repressed, can not fathom what the boys in their tree house can possibly see in the five girls of the nearby, eye-level Lisbon household.This reviewer needs to come to Grosse Pointe in May (used to be in June), when the threshhold, recurrent and central image of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, zillions of fish flies, emerge from beneath the surface of Lake St. Clair. At the Pier Park, where I go to hit tennis balls, the chitin from their bodies, regurgitated by swarms of ravenous gulls, forms a mountain forty feet high. When I first moved here, my partner took me to a shorefront branch of Andiamo's chain restaurant, since gone under, and while we were seated on the porch, the fish flies "attacked, " and four women at the next table began to shriek.The word shriek gets no quote marks from me but the word "attacked" does. A fish fly, as Liv Ullman once said about sex, "never hurt nobody." The fish flies are about an inch and a half long--a special breed of Mayfly--and to better understand them, one must realize that sex is what they are all about. They have sex and promptly die. They've been coming every May for the half century my 98-year-old friend Frieda Johnston has lived here and have never missed.The fish flies explain the young girls who also die very young and are very sexy, don't you know. Here's my question: Is the death of the fish flies or that of the young girls tragic as so many of the 500 projecting reviewers, often moody teeny-boppers themselves, think? Furthermore, are the deaths of these girls even sad when we consider what lies ahead for them? Grosse Pointe is a very pleasant place, a carefree island almost--but not quite, because of an underlying horror which perhaps is best expressed in the word "banal" and in terms of repressed fear (e.g., of all the blacks in Detroit who have to come to Grosse Pointe if they want to Trick or Treat) or of brain and breast cancer ever since the spraying and destruction of elms that Eugenides writes so well about.Rick Moody, another student of John Hawkes at Brown, tried to find the same repressed feelings and sublimated terror and unrealized human potential on the gold coast of Connecticut but not with the same success as Eugenides. His novel, THE ICE STORM, also like THE VIRGIN SUICIDES made into a movie, was mostly a dreary tract about swapping of Stepford wives although it contains a truly terrifying and beautiful image of a live power wire thrashing about in fallen ice. All of us students of John Hawkes, of course, are familiar with THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathaniel West, which is probably the best thing ever written about Los Angeles, California and in much the same way.As most of the fish fly reviewers are quick to try and push you into thinking, MIDDLESEX is much better than THE VIRGIN SUICIDES except for two admirable persons who think the opposite. I reserve judgment, but have heard that MIDDLESEX sprawls like THE MARRIAGE PLOT. THE VIRGIN SUICIDES does not sprawl. It is all self-contained, like Grosse Pointe, Michigan. It is lyrical and wonderfully surreal and yet is true to the real place in which it is set, and its (look, Ma, no apostrophe) tight structure is true refreshment .I am willing to bet, before I read MIDDLESEX, that THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, not MIDDLESEX, is the reason that Jeffrey Eugenides received his Pulitzer Prize just as THE PAINTED BIRD, not BEING THERE was the reason that the late Jerzy Kosinski received his.It is not just the Amazon reviewers who are sleepy in their heads and slow to develop consciousness. Yes, Pulitzer committee members, like people on any committee anywhere are just like that, too.

Gorgeously written. At once deeply knowing and incredibly shallow. Voyeuristic and blind to reality. The story is told from the POV of a group of boys through one of their representatives. They're intrigued by a family of five teenage sisters who live in the neighborhood, with an apparently domineering, religious mother and a passive, weak father. The girls are nicely fleshed out, as much as they can be from an outsider's POV, anyway. Each has a distinctive personality. The shallowness comes from a certain misogyny on the writer's and narrator's part. What could be have been more beautiful is cheapened by the fact that all the boys ever see is their chance of a sexual relationship with the girls. But underneath that misogyny is more than meets the eye. The end feels karmic in a way, a payment for the voyeurism and complete lack of understanding on the boys' part, to look past the misery, emptiness, and desperation of the girls who needed real help and got only horny boys who thought they could cop a feel. The blind eye of an entire neighborhood allows the demise of these girls, as does the passivity of the father and the extremist beliefs of the mother. All at once beautiful and heartbreaking. A worthwhile read. Do be aware that there are some uncomfortable ideas and contents that are no longer timely, but the book was written in the 90s. The final chapter irritated me and in a way cheapened the rest of the book for me. I would have preferred skipping it.

Granted I had heard of Jerry Eugenides pulitizer prize winning novel Middlesex and Sofia Coppola's movie The Virgin Suicides but never really gave it much thought to sit down and read one of Eugenides' books. Upon shopping for fiction-lover brother this past August, I did some Amazonian research and came up with a list of ten or so titles I thought would fit him and his literary tastes. Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," made it to the top of the list. So I did the easy thing and ordered it from Amazon and just before wrapping it I took a closer look at the subject matter...hmmm 5 or 6 sisters all kill themselves and that's pretty much the plot of the book...and had second thoughts about unleashing this black macabre upon said brother. Thus, a second gift purchasing of The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) became the substitute stand-in as I kept "The Virgin Suicides," to read and screen first before unleashing such dark subject matter on another.And on a selfish note, boy, I'm glad I kept it. Good creative writing where sentences are crafted well and language is used uniquely and the narrative is skilled to weave a story wins me over every time, despite subject matter. From a person who has read a few books in his days, Eugenides won me over on the first page. "They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, 'This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go.' He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began." That's a sentence. In fact its two sentences. In it, along with the book's first sentence, we get pre-announced that this book is going to be about a group of teenage sisters that end up killing themselves and thirteen months time elapsed it will take for the story to unravel. Many authors would think that's putting too much out there in the beginning revealing the big reveal on page 1. It works wonderfully for Eugenides' tale though.The story is told through a Greek Chorus narrator of a group of nosy pubescent boys who investigate and obsess over the Lisbon sisters to no end. And just like the classic tragedy, this story harkens back to a Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. We don't blink twice about our teenagers being exposed to Romeo and Juliet's star-crossed love affair ending in suicide and murder but the subject matter of Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," can be daunting and vexing. The novel is loosely based on a real life event of which I'm not too sure about the details so these kind of things evidently happen. Eugenides just turns it into a moral tale about the ultimate selfishness of such acts and while doing so spins a yarn so perfectly catching the awkwardness and thrill that comes along with growing up in America that you become a believer that this isn't just a black comedy but a tale that reveals something true of the human soul and psyche...an aim for all good literature.So there is a pinnacle moment in the book of which I won't tell of as to not give anything away should you read it. I read a lot of Stephen King books as a kid growing up and though "The Virgin Suicides," isn't a horror book, this piece of writing in a few paragraphs achieves a chill in the bones as much as a novel full of King's Pet Cemetaries or haunted Colorado hotels do. Just listen to this writing, "How long we stayed like that, communing with her departed spirit, we can't remember. Long enough for our collective breath to start a breeze slowly through the room that made Bonnie..." And that's all I'll reveal. The rest you just gotta read for yourself, dear readers.I'll hand off this book pre-screened to the brother now, with a caveat, I want it back to read again someday. Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides," highly recommended but not for the faint of heart. --mmw