The Virgin Suicides

Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, published in 1993, opens with one of the most arresting first sentences in contemporary American fiction-”On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her life, neighbors were trying to figure out exactly why”-and sustains the tension of that opening across a novel of unusual formal ingenuity and emotional restraint.

The five Lisbon sisters-beautiful, mysterious, sequestered by their parents, all dead within thirteen months-are narrated by a collective “we”: a group of men, now middle-aged, who as teenagers were obsessed with the girls and who have spent the intervening decades assembling evidence, interviewing witnesses, and trying to understand. The use of a collective narrator composed of adult men narrating their adolescent obsession is one of the novel’s most telling formal choices: the sisters are never directly rendered, only perceived through the filters of desire and projection and incomplete information.

Eugenides understands what the narrator cannot quite admit: that the “we” loved not the sisters but its idea of them, and that the mystery of the suicides is inseparable from the mystery of what the narrators failed to see. The girls’ rebellion against their parents’ terror was not legible as rebellion until after it had already been completed in the only way left available. The suburban setting-Michigan, mid-1970s, lawnmowers and car exhaust and first loves-is rendered with evocative precision.

The Virgin Suicides is a slim novel but a fully achieved one: it knows exactly what it is and does not attempt to be anything more. As an elegy for lost girls and for the failure of love that does not adequately see its object, it has not been improved upon.