~ The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides ~
This was an early novel of Eugenides’, written in 1993 (his famous Middlesex was written in 2002; The Marriage Plot and Fresh Complaint in 2011 and 2017 respectively). It is actually quite nice to see an author who does not churn out a novel a year, but takes the time he needs to craft the next piece of art.
The charm of The Virgin Suicides for me, is largely in the writing style, the distinctive way the author talks directly to the reader, holding the reader firmly at arm’s length from ‘the action’, so to speak. The Lisbon family are seen entirely through the eyes of the omniscient narrator, presumably one of the young men of the neighbourhood, fascinated to the point of obsession with the Lisbon girls.
There are five Lisbon girls, the youngest of whom – Cecelia – first attempts suicide, then convincingly manages it on her second try. Although the plot is already made known to the reader from the outset – all five Lisbon sisters are going to commit suicide – there is some kind of morbid fascination with just how this is all going to unfold and happen. Eugenides is masterly, even in his early writing, at holding the reader enthralled, not exactly guessing, but quite riveted.
The neighbourhood boys watch the Lisbon house with fanatical fascination, an interest that verges on the morbid, but what the novel actually does of course, is project the community’s fears and hang-ups and angsts onto this beleaguered, unhappy family, which they do not understand, as they do not understand themselves. It is as if watching the Lisbon family holds up a mirror to the society itself. In their over-heated and vivid imaginations of the Lisbon girls, their voyeurs also live more vicariously. The watching of the Lisbon girls is more real than real life, in some ways, because it is the product of imaginations transposed onto life:
Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux’s gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand, steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers’ hands and feet are doing. And we’d have to admit, too, that in our most intimate moments, alone at night with our beating hearts, asking God to save us, what comes most often is Lux, succubus of those binocular nights.
p141-142
Eugenides’ writing is so beautifully constructed that he effortlessly leads the reader from thought to thought, from present to future to past, and his punctuation is genius – the comma after ‘admit’, and again, after’ too’, are so contemplative, so painfully honest, so perfectly timed and paced.
The novel does deliver as promised – in the sense that how all five Lisbon sisters commit suicide is followed through to the end – but in another sense, it does not explain why and how come – but so beautifully written is this novel that those initial questions no longer matter by the end, and the reader evolves over the course of reading, to not needing answers to those questions. The novel, of course, is a commentary about the society watching the Lisbons, rather than on the Lisbons; or put another way, the Lisbon tragedy is the prism through which Eugenides deftly records and refracts the norms and expectations of that society, with its particular time-space coordinates.
Recent Comments