mwana 's Reviews > The Virgin Suicides

All wisdom ends in paradox.

This book came at me at an interesting time in my life. For that, it will remain a memorable bookmark in the tumult. The story is about the eponymous virgins, five sisters, the Lisbons, who get embroiled in the miasma of adolescence and the misery of puberty. A stage of life characterised by the growing awareness of the meaninglessness of life. Usually, this is the best time to introduce a teenager to Linkin Park or Taylor Swift. There is no middle ground. (Before Taytay, there was Kelly Clarkson).

The one thing that stood out for me was the prose, for I could not tell you what this book is about to be honest. Is it a slice of life about the life and times of this sleepy town? Or is it about the symbolic ephemera of girlhood? Perhaps an allegory of the current way of life

The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens...

The book has no hurry to explain itself to you. It even is possessed of such keen self-awareness. When the young girls die and their parents decide to put the house on the market, it has to be gutted to make it suitable for sellers. But even then, it didn't reveal more to our narrators than what we'd been told this far,

...we learned little more about the girls than we knew already. It felt as though the house could keep disgorging debris forever, a tidal wave of unmatched slippers and dresses scarecrowed on hangers, and after sifting through it all we would still know nothing.

Don't miss the forest for the trees. Even though the meaning of the book is idiosyncratic to every reader, the wordplay is just... whew. arrived every morning with the hopeless expression of a man draining a swamp with a kitchen sponge.

Paul Baldino still commanded our fear and respect. His rhino’s hips had gotten even larger and the circles under his eyes had deepened to a cigar-ash-and-mud color that made him look acquainted with death.

Most of our parents attended the funeral, leaving us home to protect us from the contamination of tragedy.

The book is very casual with its weaponisation of poetic observation, as though seducing readers into embracing suicide. But that's the thing. It's not a trojan horse for some discourse about suicide or the inevitability of death. It spares us an opportunity to engage with us on a soapbox about suicide. There are enough of those. The suicides just... are. The narrators do try to find out why all five sisters would decide to die and in such different fashions. But they're the only ones who accept it as an endnote to the short lives of the Lisbon sisters. Neither tragic nor emblematic of anything. It just is. It's almost refreshing to read a book that isn't attempting a desperate underhand to try to get you to see a side or another. The boys even realise the futility of trying to fit the girls into neat little pathologisable boxes,

the Lisbons’ sadness was beyond comprehension

In the end, we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.

I kept reading, not because I was desperate to find out why five young girls who were normal, healthy with a functional father and a high-strung mother, parents symptomatic of suburbia, would choose such a way to end things, but because the language just kept leading me on.

This book could have segued into Eugenides' checkout receipt from CVS and I'd still have kept reading it. There were times I wondered if it was trying to tell me to stop worrying so much.

“Shit,” he said, “what have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.”

But no one country has a monopoly on troubled suffering or rumination of misfortune. Even the self-important citizens of the world's wealthiest third world country can attest to that. Or perhaps, suicide is inevitable in some people like psychosis, some are simply genetically or environmentally predisposed to die this way.

“With most people,” he said, “suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn’t mean the chambers were empty.”

Then again, the book does ask if suicide is a selfish means of escape. As someone with suicidal ideation, at no point was I triggered or questioning why this happens to me. It seemed to demystify something that is painfully human, normal, as though pointing out the futility of pessimism or the indignity of optimism. Maybe it's just enough to be.

Only the Lisbon girls will ever fully understand why they chose their destiny. A fateful punctuation in the otherwise mindless lives of these people. When Mary, the final daughter takes her life, the boys were attending a debutante's ball. The dichotomy of such spectral stages of life made it easier to digest the deaths of these teenagers. Not because they should be consumable, but because, ultimately, to be human is to die. I don't know what I'm saying. Perhaps this is the best pointless book I've ever read.