Virgin Suicides

Wry and wistful, melancholy yet flecked with a dark thread of humour, Eugenides's novel is a remarkable debut to say the very least. The protagonists of the title are a group of adolescent sisters who kill themselves, one after the other, in a Seventies summer that stays immaculately preserved in the memories of the young boys who hero-worshipped these elusive creatures from afar. Set in suburban America, it's a bizarre story and one that in lesser hands could easily have tumbled into the melodramatic, but everything is handled here with enviable fluidity and the potentially macabre becomes instead gently luminous. It's told retrospectively and collectively by all the boys, represented with a single voice as they look back at their youth two decades on and remember the fascination that the Lisbon sisters exerted over their prosaic lives, endowing everything with a touch of mystery. As they piece together their story from fragments of information presented in the form of exhibits, the lives of these girls become almost a touchstone of youth, a melange of memory distilled into a single bright image. Virtually imprisoned inside their claustrophobic home, not by malice but by sheer ignorance, the sisters find different ways to assert their individuality and Eugenides's description of the ball, their only date, is heartbreakingly poignant in the way it depicts the quartet grabbing every moment of delicious freedom like drowning swimmers gasping for air. Despite the sad subject there are many humorous touches like the image of the brassiere casually draped over the crucifix, but one of the book's most moving moments comes near the end when, desperate for contact and slowly sinking into their final spiralling despair, the girls play snatches of plaintive songs down the phone, the boys responding with cheerful anthems of teenage hope they intend as salve to the girls' loneliness. Beautifully written and intensely poetic in style, this novel may be an acquired taste for some but no one could deny the power of imagination necessary to conjure this haunting vision of a family slowly torn apart by the spectre of suicide. (Kirkus UK)