They were once in love with the Lisbon girls, and are now, some 20 years later, trying to piece together the story of their deaths. In the case of 'The Virgin Suicides,' the narrator is a collective 'we,' a group of young men who speak in one voice. In their recollections, actual experiences blur together with the distortions of nostalgia events are re-imagined, extrapolated and heightened in an effort to memorialize and make sense of the past. And both are narrated by observers who recall the larger-than-life events of their youth from the vantage point of middle age. Both novels focus on events that fracture the consciousness of an entire community into a before and after. With its incantatory prose, its fascination with teen-age tragedy and its preoccupation with memory and desire and loss, 'The Virgin Suicides' will instantly remind readers of Alice McDermott's fine 1987 novel, 'That Night.' Not only are the themes of the two books similar, but so also are their structures and narrative methods. Their suicides become a symbol of the innocence lost as adolescents are initiated into the sad complexities of grown-up life, and the lost, dying dreams of a community that finds its collective dreams of safety spinning out of reach. Eugenides, the deaths of the five Lisbon sisters take on the high, cold shimmer of myth. It's not at all the sort of thing one expects to find in a coming-of-age story set in the leafy Detroit suburbs of the 70's and as related by Mr. This terrible event, along with the subsequent suicides of Cecilia Lisbon's four pretty sisters, feels like something out of a Greek tragedy.

Lisbon, as though alone, said, 'Oh, my God.' ' On her second try, her daughter Cecilia had succeeded in 'hurling herself out of the world.' The wind sound huffed, once, and then the moist thud jolted us, the sound of a watermelon breaking open, and for that moment everyone remained still and composed, as though listening to an orchestra, heads tilted to allow the ears to work and no belief coming in yet. Her mind no longer existed in any way that mattered. Eugenides's narrator recalls, 'whether her brain continued to flash on the way down, or if she regretted what she'd done, or if she had time to focus on the fence spikes shooting toward her. Jeffrey Eugenides's piercing first novel begins with a startling and horrible event: a 13-year-old girl hurls herself out of a window and impales herself on the iron fence that runs around her family's house. The Virgin Suicides By Jeffrey Eugenides 249 pages.

The virgin suicides review book