Books › The Virgin Suicides (Bloomsbury Classic)
The Virgin Suicides (Bloomsbury Classic)
355 pages
A hazy, hypnotic elegy for lost girlhood, told through the obsessive memories of the boys who watched them from afar.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like stepping into a sun-bleached, 1970s Polaroid that is slowly curling at the edges. It is a deeply atmospheric, meandering experience driven not by propulsive plot, but by the obsessive, collective memory of its narrators. The prose is lush and hypnotic, wrapping the reader in a hazy, suburban-gothic dreamscape where the scent of decaying elm trees mingles with the sharp tang of adolescent longing. There is a suffocating, elegiac weight to the narrative, capturing the tragic unknowability of teenage girls through the flawed, mythologizing lens of the boys who watched them. It will profoundly delight readers who love lyrical, melancholic literary fiction that lingers like a ghost long after the final page is turned.
- Mood
- dreamlike
- hazy
- elegiac
- suffocating
- suburban-gothic
- Tone
- nostalgic
- obsessive
- melancholic
- mythic
- voyeuristic
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- the mythologization of girlhood · suburban decay · the male gaze · unknowability of others · loss of innocence
- The writing
- Lush, hypnotic, and deeply sensory, anchored by a collective first-person plural that feels both intimately close and impossibly distant.
- The arc
- Moves from morbid, adolescent fascination into a haunting, lifelong melancholia over an unsolvable tragedy.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave atmospheric, beautifully written literary fiction that peels back the manicured lawns of suburbia to reveal the rot and longing underneath.
Content notes
- suicide
- self-harm
- depression
- underage sexual situations
- confinement
About the book
The Lisbons are a Catholic family living in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the 1970s. The father, Ronald, is a math teacher at a private school and the mother is a homemaker. The family has five daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese.
Their lives change dramatically within one summer when Cecilia, a stoic and astute girl described as an "outsider", attempts suicide by cutting her wrists. A few weeks later, the girls throw a chaperoned party, during which Cecilia jumps from their second story window and dies, impaled by a fence post.
The cause of Cecilia's suicide and its after-effects on the family are popular subjects of neighborhood gossip. The mystique of the Lisbon girls operates also for the neighborhood boys, the narrators of the novel.
Lux begins a romance with local heartthrob Trip Fontaine. Trip negotiates with the overprotective Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to take Lux to a homecoming dance, on the condition that he finds dates for the other three girls. After having sex with Trip on the high school football field after the dance, Lux misses her curfew. Consequently, the Lisbons become recluses. Mrs. Lisbon pulls all the girls out of school, claiming that it would help the girls recover from Cecilia's suicide. However, despite her attempt to protect the girls from boys and sex, over the winter, Lux is seen having sex with various unknown men on the roof nightly. A few months after Lux is sent to the hospital because of a pregnancy scare—which her parents were told was simply indigestion—Mr. Lisbon officially takes a leave of absence. Their house falls into a deeper state of disrepair; none of them leave the house and no one visits, not even to deliver milk and groceries. A strange smell coming from the house permeates the neighborhood. From a safe distance, all the people in the neighborhood watch the Lisbons' lives deteriorate, but no one can summon up the courage to intervene.
During this time, the Lisbons become increasingly fascinating to the neighborhood in general and the narrator boys in particular. The boys call the Lisbon girls and communicate by playing records over the telephone for the girls.
Description from Open Library.
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