Content note: The novel contains graphic death scenes and deals with suicide extensively. This review also discusses suicide and death quite briefly.
Bingo square: Earth day: the novel deals with pollution and decay and environmental ruin
I was by way of being a movie buff for a while in the early 2000s (which is how I found Pajiba), and I watched Sofia Coppola’s 1999 adaptation of The Virgin Suicides then, and read the book afterwards. I think it was that way around–I remember being surprised at the visceral nature of the rot in the novel, which Coppola’s film, a dreamy and golden and somehow still dark and heart-rending masterpiece elides considerably (and understandably, considering the medium). We inhale chemical pollution and burning rubber from motor plants, we smell decay, we smell entrapment and emotional claustrophobia, we smell desire, which is not an ethereal scent in the novel, it’s animal. Eugenides’s novel is Gothic at heart, I think (and probably others have as well)–it harks back to the Old Gothic, the late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century novels about medieval girls confined in towers or dungeons in the middle of forests, forced to deny their selves and their desires, forced to sit in corners and tell their rosary beads, waiting for rescue or death. 
But this is early 1970s Detroit (I think? I forget if Detroit is actually mentioned in the book or if I remember that from the film, despite the fact that I reread the book two days ago), this is a leafy suburb (although it gets progressively less leafy over the course of the novel as the trees that line the street are cut down due to a Dutch elm beetle infestation), and this is America. The five Lisbon girls are in high school; their family is Catholic, and their mother is doing her best to stamp out any potential sins of the flesh among her daughters. We don’t actually get to see what their family life is like from the inside–our narrator is a ‘we’ voice, a group of boys at school with the Lisbon sisters who watch them in classes and corridors and playing fields, and from across the street, and continue to watch them, in a way, after their deaths–the title of the novel is a spoiler, not a metaphor. The boys are obsessed with piecing together the girls’ lives through various artefacts and interviews, haunted by the thought that the sisters remain unknowable and unsaveable. I don’t want to say too much about the suicide elements of the novel but I do think that resisting metaphor, resisting turning the girls and their deaths–and perhaps anyone and their deaths–into symbol and thereby diminishing them, or accepting the illegibility of things that seem to be patterns, and indeed the illegibility of other people, are some things that Eugenides might be trying to evoke here? I don’t know. It’s stunningly written but it’s not at all an easy novel, on many levels–it’s brilliant and complex and treads a lot of very finely balanced fine lines–your mileage may well vary as to how successfully.
One of the things that the ‘we’ narrator comments on is the temptation to link the girls’ deaths to their environment–not just their cramped and surveilled quarters within their home, but also the wider social and political context. This is the 1970s, the Vietnam war is happening, Mrs. Lisbon forces one of her daughters to burn her vinyl rock records, releasing acrid fumes into the air. Everything is poison, everything is decaying: all the parents in the suburb seem somehow at a loss, as if the world they are complicit in building is vastly disorienting.
“[T]hey said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realised that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.”
A lot of this resonates today, of course, perhaps even more than in 1993. I don’t have kids but I’m in my early forties and I’m really fucking tired and angry and anxious all the time, especially when I look at the young people and little ones in and around my life. But there aren’t easy single answers or resolutions to any of this–so I guess the next best thing–after voting and recycling and boycotting the worst-polluting corporations and maybe AI and trying to care about each other and ourselves–is to write about it? Art has to matter somehow, right, any act of creation in the face of the negation of death. It fucking has to.
Title quote from ‘Make it With You’ by Bread (1970), quoted in the novel.
