The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides [Reading as a Writer]

 

 

Image: google.com

 

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is a book about loss, religion and suicides in a neighbourly town in the US. When the youngest of the five Lisbon sisters attempts suicide, the town is shocked. For the parents, it seems a call to restrict the movements of the other girls within the boundaries of religion. The girls are restricted from a social life and the family is unable to come to terms with the loss they’ve faced. Eventually, the school teacher Mr. Lisbon loses his job and with that the family is confined to the house living on all that remains. 

 

The book is a modern classic, and I decided to do the post because I was looking for a book on the first person plural POV with an omniscient perspective and this book fit the bill just right. 

 

The book looks at the story of the Lisbon sisters through the perspective of adolescent boys in the neighbourhood. As the book says, boys with whom the girls had played in the sandbox, fighting over a shovel. The following line from the book introduces the characters, the narrator and their relationship.

 

‘We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under our tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes…’

 

The adolescent perspective pervades the voice and tone of the book. 

‘We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother’s arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every other mongoloid.’

 

‘Now that he had arrived we were able to show the Libon girls all the things we knew about him, how his ears wiggled if you scratched his chin, how he could only say “Heads” when you flipped a coin, never “Tails,” because that was too complicated…’

 

Because of the first person plural POV, the book is able to give an omninscient perspective to the suicides. We hear from the adolescent narrator the incidents that lead up to the climax of the book. The narrator consolidates the anecdotes the neighbours have shared with many of him and his friends to give us the omniscient perspective to the happenings in and around the Lisbon house.

‘It was half an hour before Mrs. Patz’s sister called from Bon Secours with the preliminary report that Lux had suffered a burst appendix. We were surprised to hear the damage was not self-inflicted, though Mrs. Patz said, “It’s the stress. That poor girl’s under so much stress, her appendix just blew up. Same thing happened to my sister.”

 

The same incident from another neighbour’s perspective:

‘Brent Christopher, who had nearly cut off his right hand with a power saw that night (he was installing a new kitchen), saw Lux being wheeled into the emergency room. Though his arm was bandaged and his brain stupefied with painkiller, he remembers the interns lifting Lux onto the cot next to his. “She was breathing out of her mouth, hyperventilating, and holding her stomach. She kept saying, ‘Ouch,’ exactly the way you’d spell it.”’

Through Brent’s retelling we see what happened in the hospital premises thus giving us an omniscient viewpoint. I also especially enjoyed the tone of the retelling, each specific to the character whose perspective we’re hearing, an older Mrs. Patz’s pedantic voice and a younger Brent’s exaggerated, unreliable retelling. 

                                          

The book is also enjoyable because of the writing, the sensorial details make such beautiful imagery that will entertain readers of various age groups. For instance, the contrasting sounds in the following sentence make you sit up and listen.

‘Sound returned only once Lux had gone. Televisions erupted with canned laughter. Fathers splashed, soaking aching backs.’

 

The sense of taste and touch explored in the following are relateable to any reader.

‘Woody Clabault’s sister had the same brand, and once, after we got into his parents’ liquor cabinet, we made him put on the lipstick and kiss each one of us so that we, too, would know what it tasted like.’

 

The contrasting images in this one are beautiful.

‘His hair looked even grayer than usual, but grief hadn’t altered the highness of his voice. He had on overalls, one knee covered by sawdust. “Feel free to use the hose,” he said, and then he looked at the Good Humor truck passing by, the jingle of the bell seemed to trigger a memory, he smiled, or winced—we couldn’t tell which—and returned inside.’

 

The book is full of such imagery and metaphors and is a sensorial pleasure to read. Though, the plot is emotional and sad, the retelling of the story is enjoyable. I leave you here with one last line, that is what the story is about in the author’s writing style.

‘…since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.’

 

Book Title: The Virgin Suicides

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

First Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1993

Latest Imprint: Collins Modern Classics, 2021

NOTICE: 

© 2021 by Donna Abraham Tijo