The Virgin
Suicides
By Jeffrey Eugenides.
The Virgin
Suicides is funny, and touching, and makes you fall in love with each of the five tragic girls; viewed through the adolescent eyes of the infatuated teenage boys across the street who tell their story.
The titular suicides are regaled with a macabre blitheness; by the fifth death, the boys have become desensitized to the grisly aftermath; casually observing the quirks of the frequently visiting paramedics going about their life-saving duties like they are nothing more unusual than mail carriers, or grocery delivery men.
But where the horrific acts of suicide themselves, through repetition, become another humdrum part of life in a sleepy, middle-American town; the smallest glimpse into the lives of the girls is an other-worldly event to obsess over. The love the boys feel, already unrequited in life, turns into worship in death.
As the novel reaches its final act, every turning of the page brings you inexorably closer to killing off the girls, whose deaths were forewarned in the opening line of the book. You try to resist scanning each new double page spread as trepidation rises, and maintain discipline over darting eyes as the remaining page numbers dwindle. The tension of a conclusion that is already known is exhilarating to bear.
And yet, for the obvious talent Eugenides possesses, writing about themes of death and youth, of yearning and desire; it just feels like he finds it easy, too easy.
This is to the detriment of the soul of the book. From the genre of Great American Novels, The Virgin
Suicides has everything: Unreliable narrators? It has a bunch of them. Non-linear narrative structure? It begins at the end. Coming of age? Teens blooming and budding all over small town America.
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Tree symbolism: the easy way out?
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The Virgin
Suicides is well crafted, perhaps too deliberately? And while it would be unfair to call it a pastiche, it does feel like a homage; a love letter from across the street to Salinger, Steinbeck, Miller, Fitzgerald and Hemingway? Or a debutant coming out, draped in the vestiges of a rich tradition, looking for approval from the literary set?
The Virgin
Suicides has blood, sweat, and tears; but does not feel like a labour of love.
3 stars out
of 5.
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The movie looks cool, imma watch the movie.
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You see, I’m equating Salinger, Steinbeck, Miller, Fitzgerald and Hemingway to the suicidal sirens across the street, and Eugenides to the obsessed boys who obsess over them. Yes, how very droll.
“And how many books by those great novelist have you read?”
*Cough* Two
“How many?”
Two.
“Two?”
I don’t even know who Miller is.
“...”
