Book Review of The Virgin Suicides
The Decay of Innocence In Jeffrey Eugenides' 1970s Suburbia
Jun 15, 2009
On the outside, the Lisbon house, with its picket fence and Dutch elm tree, fits neatly in the Michigan suburb of Grosse Pointe in the 1970s. Inside, however, it grows more decrepit over time, disintegrating like the Lisbons themselves.
The novel begins retrospectively, with sixteen-year-old Mary Lisbon committing suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. The Lisbon sister are something of an enigma, with a rigid and overprotective Catholic mother and a passive, quirky father who teaches math at the local high school, and the objects of lust and fascination for the neighborhood boys for years. Their deaths only intensify their appeal. Years later, the boys, now middle aged-men, and the neighbors and teachers, all elderly, have not forgotten nor solved the mystery behind their nearly simultaneous suicides.
The Decay of Tradition In a Changing Society
The idea of decay, which serves to explain how the neighborhood later joins the ranks of cookie-cutter suburbia, is a recurring theme in the novel. In the summertime in Grosse Pointe, fish flies, with their pungent odor, coat windows, cars, and even entire houses. Dutch elm trees, suspected of being diseased, are cut down. In the city, cemetery workers go on strike and bodies must be transported to suburban cemeteries for burial. The city is home to the usual riots and gunshots, although the people in the suburbs never actually witness them.
Cecilia, the youngest Lisbon girl and the first one to commit suicide a year before her sisters by jumping out of her window and impaling herself on a fence post, symbolizes a lost and forgotten era. She wears a tattered vintage wedding dress, draws obscure objects in her diary, and keeps a picture of the Virgin Mary in her pocket. She is only thirteen when she dies, but the town, although haunted by her suicide, is not altogether surprised, as she is known as "the weird one." Some months later, Cecilia's suicide seems part of the past.
Mrs. Lisbon is the most conservative character in the novel, adamantly rejecting modernity at all costs. The Lisbon girls go to school wearing last year's clothing, they are forced to go to Mass every Sunday and are forbidden to date until Trip Fontaine, the most popular boy in school, convinces Mr. Lisbon to let him take Lux and the rest of his daughters, along with Trip's friends, on a group date.
When Lux violates curfew after her homecoming date with Trip, Mrs. Lisbon considers this blasphemy and forces Lux to throw her rock records in the fireplace. As punishment, she pulls all the girls out of school, and consequently, Mr. Lisbon resigns from his teaching position. The girls are confined to the house like prisoners, and the outside of the home starts to mirror the inside conditions. The house starts to emit a foul and rotting odor, the yard goes untended, and when the neighbors see fifteen-year-old Bonnie Lisbon out on the porch in her dirty smock made of feathers, she looks emaciated, like she is withering away. Even the mailman refuses to get too close to the Lisbon home.
The best example of the Lisbons' inability to change is the table that still contains the food and punch from Cecilia party, right before she killed herself. Lured to the Lisbon home by the girls, who communicate with them through notes and by playing folk records to them over the phone, the neighborhood boys are excited at the prospect of seeing the girls after they have been held in captivity for months. The boys go down to the basement where they find a table caked with mouse excrement, punch that almost has a skin on it, and moldy ice cream. The dominoes game is set up exactly like it was when Cecilia was discovered dead.
After this disturbing discovery, the boys witness a more horrifying one. Because Mrs. Lisbon refuses to succumb to change, her daughters must become martyrs in the name of traditional values.
After the Suicides
The Lisbon girls' suicides draw a lot of media attention, leaving the neighbors to question their own community, and the Lisbons leave town. Their possessions are all left behind, and the neighbors go through all the Lisbons' belongings. Slowly the boys in the neighborhood learn more about the girls after their deaths than they ever knew of them in life, but they still look at the Lisbon girls as a puzzle and feel cheated that they left the earth too soon while the boys are still stuck in the dreariness of suburban conformity. When a new couple buys the Lisbon home, they erase every trace of the Lisbons by remodeling the home and repainting it. It is then that the boys realize that while the houses in the neighborhood may look different, everyone is still the same.
Incorporating careful metaphors with skillful, often darkly funny, narration, The Virgin Suicides is a novel that both chills and resonates with the reader.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides, Warner Books 1993, ISBN 0-446-67025-1
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