The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides

The book was made into a major motion picture starring Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett in 1999, and therefore found its way into the general consciousness - and now mine. Though decidedly not a Christian book, it boasts excellent writing and raises important questions in the mind of the mature reader.

This story is a page-turner, in the old-fashioned way that makes you want to stay up long past your bedtime with a flashlight under the covers. It's a sprawling, gothically realistic portrait of life in a small town, centering around the teenagers' and grownups' fictional recollections of the untimely demises of five sisters from the overprotective Lisbon home.

What makes the book interesting is that from the very beginning, the author tells you the ending. The first sentence begins, "On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide . . . " So although you soon get the end of the story, you never really get the beginning, and spend the whole book trying to catch up to the middle. It's an innovative storytelling method - and consequently, there's really no worry of giving the plot away.

The narrative is a fictional recollection of a group of teenage boys who were obsessed with the five Lisbon girls during the "Year of the Suicides". Characters from town have been tracked down and give their rememberances and opinions on what caused the suicides. Interestingly, the Lisbon girls (and the boys narrating the story) are the most underdeveloped of all the characters, likely on purpose.

The story reeks of death and dying. One can feel the characters and house decaying throughout the book. There's some great descriptive prose that leaves the reader vaguely nauseated as the girls, the family, and the town rot from inside out. Eugenides doesn't pull punches in his descriptions; he's fully honest from the viewpoint of a teenage boy about the indiscretions committed by one of the sisters, the conquests of a minor male character who is surprisingly well developed, and the way the girls eventually end their own lives.

No answer is given, ultimately, but lots of questions are raised. What really does draw these characters, with such promise in their future, to suicide? What should the response be, and how does this contrast with the response of the characters in the book? The Virgin Suicides forces the mature reader with sharpened powers of discernment to look an unpleasant subject head-on, and twists the traditional coming-of-age story into a town's coming-of-death tale.

The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides