The Pangs of Adolescence

In the ambit of contemporary American literature, Jeffrey Kant Eugenides is one of the most prominent names. Born on March 8, 1960, in Detroit, Michigan, Eugenides had a mixed heritage, with his father having Greek heritage while his mother having British and Irish heritages. At a young age, Eugenides resolved to walk the path of becoming a writer after a high school reading requirement, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man left a deep impression on him. The first step to fulfilling his dream was pursuing a degree in English at Brown University. His choice was driven by his desire to study with John Hawkes, a renowned American writer whose works were admired by Eugenides. He also earned a master’s degree in English from Stanford University.

His path to writing success started with writing short stories. In 1986, his story Here Comes Winston, Full of the Holy Spirit earned him the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship. The path to success is not always straightforward nor is it guaranteed, as the young writer would soon realize. Despite the promising start to his career, Eugenides encountered a rough patch. He moved across cities before settling in New York City to work as a secretary for the Academy of American Poets. It was also while staying in New York that Eugenides came across fellow struggling writers such as Jonathan Franzen. Eugenides’ next big break came in 1990 when the first chapter of what would be his debut novel was published in The Paris Review. A year later, the short story won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

As destiny would have it, the short story would be Eugenides’ stepping stone toward literary success. In 1993, the story was officially published as a full-length novel carrying the title The Virgin Suicides. Set in the 1970s in suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the story revolved around five sisters, the daughters of the Lisbon family: Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese. Equally attractive, they were born into a devoutly Catholic family. Ronald, the family patriarch, worked as a math teacher at the local high school. The matriarch, on the other hand, concerned herself with the upkeep of the family abode and looking after the children and her husband. Everything seems to be in order. The Lisbons were the portrait of a typical suburban American family.

“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

~ Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

Without any preamble, the opening sequence of the novel involved an ambulance arriving at the Lisbon household. The ambulance was called in to retrieve the lifeless body of Mary Lisbon, the last of the sisters to take her own life. The title already provided what the story was about but the story commencing on such a note carried a shock factor. The string of suicide among the sisters started interestingly with Cecilia who, at 13 years old, was the youngest of the five sisters. During the summer break, she attempted to take her own life. However, it ended in failure; she slit her wrist in the bathtub. She was able to survive only because of a neighborhood boy, Paul Baldino, who snuck into their home and found her.

Upon consulting a psychiatrist, it was recommended that Cecilia be given social outlets beyond school. As such, their parents allowed the girls to host a house party. The neighborhoods were invited, a privilege as boys were rarely invited to the Lisbon household. Again, this is the 1970s. It was awkward, especially at the start but soon enough, everyone started warming up. However, Cecilia remained insouciant to the swirl of events happening around her. She ignored the boys. She ignored her sisters. She was hopelessly lost. She then excused herself. In the blink of an eye, for the second time, Cecilia attempted to take her own life. This time around, she succeeded.

Suicide can be unsettling for those who orbit around the one who took his or her own life. It is even more troubling for those who get to witness their fellow take his or her own family. How will one respond? History, unfortunately, shows that there is no written rule on how to respond. Some will register shock. Some will feel incredulous about what they witnessed. Some will be enveloped in sadness. Some will be in denial, commencing the stages of grief. The Lisbon parents’ actions following Cecilia’s death baffled the neighborhood. Well-meaning neighbors dropped by to extend their condolences but the family remained distant. The Lisbon house, meanwhile, lacked warmth. Its condition was dismal and deteriorating.

The most drastic response, however, came from Mrs. Lisbon. The Lisbon matriarch responded by keeping a tighter rein on her surviving daughters. She kept watch of everything they did. Her action, however, further isolated her daughters from their peers, and the family from the community. With the Lisbon family shrouded in a blanket of mystery, the neighborhood teenage boys’ curiosity was further piqued. It was through these boys that the story of the Lisbon girls was recounted. When they told the story when they were already in their middle ages, two decades after the fact. They only wanted to get to know the girls better but there was a voyeuristic quality to the way they observed the sisters.

“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

~ Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

All was seemingly back to normal, even when school resumed during the fall. The Lisbon couple has also loosened up, at least to some extent. They even permitted their daughters to attend the Homecoming. Although all of the Lisbon girls were equally beautiful, it was Lux who captured the attention of Trip Fontaine, the local heartthrob. The novel is anything but uneventful. A string of events resulted in the girls being withdrawn by their mother from their school. Their father was forced to withdraw from his work after facing increasing pressure and backlash from the parents of his students. With the Lisbon household falling into disarray, the remaining sisters made a suicide pact. Mary, however, managed to survive. But just like her younger sister, this did not hinder her from following through with her pact with her sisters.

Death and suicide were palpably the novel’s overriding themes. In broad strokes, the story highlighted mental health. Eugenides subtly underscored possible catalysts – such as forced social isolation and the negligence of the individuals charged with looking after the wellbeing of their wards – that result in drastic actions such as taking one’s life. This is the 1970s and the stigma surrounding mental health is much greater than it is in the contemporary. The term depression, although ubiquitous in the story, was used loosely. There was no mental health care to speak of and those who struggled with it dealt with it on their own terms. But in the story of the Lisbon girls, clarity was never reached as to the reasons behind their ritual suicide. There was no suicide note. It was a mystery. Was it perhaps an act of teenage rebellion? One can only surmise.

Eugenides’ debut novel, however, does not reduce itself to a mere exploration of a sensitive and complex subject. Rather than a singular act of defiance, there was a progression between the occurrences of these deaths. In between the novel’s primary literary device, the novel was a broad exploration of a plethora of subjects. The novel was a vivid depiction of suburban life. Life in the suburbs was mundane. As life flows, there was nothing unremarkable. Any disruptions, regardless of the magnitude, can easily upset the natural flow of things. They disrupt the dynamics of the suburbs which are often projected as paragons of peace. The mundane also pushes individuals to seek distraction elsewhere, such as getting to the bottom of a string of suicides. Everyone wants to escape mediocrity.

Life in the suburb is also dominated by gossip compounded by scandals. In small communities, small movements can cause ripples. Anything out of the ordinary becomes the subject of gossip, even if it is arbitrary. This preoccupation with scandals can be morbid, even fatal. Everyone wants to know what is the tea. Everyone wants to know what is happening. Everyone is nosy. It was this natural tendency for nosiness that drove the teenage boys to observe the Lisbon girls, almost to a voyeuristic extent. Sure, the hormonal changes they were experiencing at this age were a factor but there was also an angle of curiosity.

“Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire and brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now – I have lost my gift. It’s as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.”

~ Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

The novel explored the obsession with happiness, an offshoot of the pursuit of the American dream. There is an unexpected pressure to project happiness. Everyone in the community is expected to be happy. This makes the Lisbons stand out as the household was bereft of it. Any whiff of happiness was instantly pushed away. Beyond loss and suburban life, the novel explored love and the tumultuous phase of adolescence. The novel then transforms into a coming-of-age story, particularly for the teenage boys of the neighborhood. The death of the Lisbon girls, the objects of their teenage fantasy, was a springboard for their own growth. Nostalgia and memory were also prevalent subjects.

The novel’s various elements were adeptly woven together by Eugenides’ prose. There was an atmospheric quality to the story as Eugenides vividly mirrored the prevailing attitude of the period. Suicide is a complex and difficult subject to grapple with, even in the literary world where poetic license allows writers to push the limits of their imagination. Eugenides, the brilliant writer that he is, managed to build the story around it while shrouding it with an air of mystery. The readers were handed second-hand accounts, from the narrator and his fellow young male who observed the Lisbon girls from a distance.

The Virgin Suicides easily invites intrigue. Suicide, after all, is a complex and sensitive subject. However, the novel is more than a story of suicides and senseless deaths. It is a finely layered exploration of various subjects, such as adolescence, death, mental health, and grief. Suburban life was a major catalyst in the story and this was vividly captured by Eugenides. Eugenides is, without a doubt, an engrossing storyteller. He would even win the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. His abilities as a riveting storyteller were already palpable in his debut novel. The Virgin Suicides was a resounding and memorable debut novel, a masterpiece that transcends time.

“The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams.”

~ Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Ratings

82%

Characters (30%) – 25%
Plot (30%) – 23%
Writing (25%) – 22%
Overall Impact (15%) – 12%

It was through must-read lists that I first encountered Jeffrey Eugenides. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex immediately caught my fancy. As expected, it was a memorable read, easily one of my all-time favorite reads. I wasn’t much of a fan of The Marriage Plot but this is not going to stop me from reading the book which commenced his literary career. Because I have been looking forward to the book, I made The Virgin Suicides part of my 2022 Top 22 Reading List. Admittedly, it did take me some time to warm up to the story. It was a little darker and heavier than the first novels by Eugenides I read. While I was a little underwhelmed at first, I was reeled in when I pieced all of the book’s elements together. There was a sea of differences between the three books. But I guess this is the charm in the works of Eugenides as they are individually distinct.

Book Specs

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1993
Number of Pages: 243
Genre: Literary, Bildungsroman

Synopsis

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys – commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

About the Author

To learn more about Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jeffrey Eugenides, click here.