There seems to be more regret in the author’s mind for the loss of a time when nice families raked leaves off their lawns in the Fall than there is for the death of any or all of the Lisbon sisters.

The era itself, including its racism and its sexual repression, is presented with unquestioning love. This does not endear his novel to me because he chooses to deploy his skill not to write an elegy that gives meaning to the suicides of the young women, but to write an almost masturbatory reminiscence of what it felt like to be a white boy with no first-hand knowledge of girls, lusting and longing for the Lisbon Sisters, without actually being able to see them as people. The book is set in an American White Middle-Class suburb in the 1970’s and is told, twenty years after the fact, by a man who was a boy at the time of the suicides and who is still sufficiently obsessed by the events to be investigating them, not so much, it seems, to unravel a mystery as to revive the taste of it in his mouth.Įugenides writes well. How the boys felt in the rain is what Jeffrey Eugenides is concerned with, not what it means to be a storm. They are the thunderstorm the boys stand in. The young women here are displayed as curiosities, barely distinguishable from one another, alien to the boy/man describing them, important because of the impact they have on the boys who observe them rather than because of any intrinsic worth. There is no empathy for those women in this novel. This isn’t because I felt too emotionally distraught by experiencing a novel that centres around the death by suicide of five young sisters. I made it halfway through this book and put it away in disgust. The question persists - why did all five of the Lisbon girls take their own lives? This lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life announced the arrival of one of the greatest American novelists of the last thirty years.Normally, I finish the books I start, especially when, like this one, they are well written and well narrated. Although the boys that once loved them from afar have grown up, they remain determined to understand a tragedy that has defied explanation.

The five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric and, now, gone - had always been a point of obsession for the entire neighbourhood. She wanted out of that decorating scheme. Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.

The virgin suicides review book