Our March Book Club meeting got pushed to mid-month, so that post will be coming next weekend. In the meantime, another book from my Reading Challenge has been crossed off - The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.
If you don't/can't grasp this premise of this book from the title, then let me spell it out for you: five sisters commit suicide in the span of 18 months. Now after that, the rest of this post shouldn't come out as too many spoilers. However, please note this book is utterly depressing and sad despite being beautifully written. It paints a very vivid picture of life in the Lisbon household and yet never comes to a solid and satisfying ending. Which is part of why I really like this book.
First, I want to talk about the format of the novel. There are only five chapters. Is that supposed to represent the five Lisbon girls? It's not clear. I thought at first there would be one death a chapter, because that made sense, but that was also not the case. Each chapter varies in length as well. Then, I thought, maybe each chapter focused on one sister each, but that also turned out to be unfounded. I wonder what the author's intention was with so few chapters...
Anyway, on to the story! What follows is more of a summary of the book with a few of my thoughts dappled in. I am not going to assume to evaluate or decrypt this book and its story. I think everyone should develop their own thoughts and conclusion.
Narrated by a group of the neighbourhood boys, The Virgin Suicides, details the lives and deaths of the five Lisbon girls over the course of 18 months. The whole novel is told from their outside perspective and observations. The story takes pieces from the past and present as the boys, even many years later, are still trying to put together a conclusive reason as to why the Lisbon girls committed suicide. Throughout the book they list pieces of evidence they've collected that seem to give rhyme to reason, or context to behaviour, but nothing ever appears to provide an answer.
Starting with the attempted suicide, and then death, of the youngest daughter Cecilia, the novel is quite graphic in its descriptions of certain topics. At other times the narration is kind of aloof and dream-like, such as when the boys get a hold of Cecilia's diary. The boys appear to have a very good look into the lives of the Lisbon girls, but not one part of the book is ever told from the girls' perspective. The whole saga is stories or insights they've cultivated from their own brief encounters, or from those who also had their own brief turn in the girls inner-sanctum. Their most reliable source was Trip Fontaine, the school pretty-boy and resident womanizer. He fell in love with second-youngest, Lux, until it all fell apart at the homecoming dance when she returned home three hours after curfew. After which the Lisbon house became a maximum security prison.
The boys' sightings and encounters with the girls become scarce and they take more liberty with their day-dream scenarios, but these are punctuated by truthful accounts of what they do see. The burning of the Lux's records, to her having sex on the roof with strangers, and the girls circling the elm tree in their front yard to save it from getting cut down. The girls start to reach out to the boys via secret letters and Morse code using lamps in their bedroom window. Eventually this culminates in the final night when the rest of the Lisbon girls take their lives while the boys are at the house expecting they're actually there to save them.
They are never able to come up with a conclusion as to why all the girls died. The media focuses on their lives, but not why they committed suicide. The neighbours gossip about why they did it, but are only "mildly shocked" when the four girls do it in the same night. It's like they all expected it to happen at some point, it was just a matter of when. The boys find it so much harder to move on, even carrying it on into their adult lives and relationships.
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The movie was made six years after the novel was published, in 1999. Directed by Sophia Coppola, the movie has a very washed out quality to it, but I can definitely say the music is excellent. It really sets the mood and tone throughout the movie. Trip Fontaine's intro set to Magic Man by Heart is an absolute high-light of the film. Despite the big-name actors like Kirsten Dunst (Lux) and Josh Hartnett (Trip Fontaine) in the movie, it was the small details from the book that Coppola incorporated into the movie that made it a good adaptation for me. (I'd seen the movie before, a long time ago, but really only remembered two parts of it.)
Many of the more graphic things were left out of the film, but I still found it stayed quite true to the novel. I also found that the narration was more third-person than focusing on that it was the boys who were telling the story. (One of the actors playing the neighbourhood boys reminds me of an ex-boyfriend oddly enough.) It stood out to me while watching, that Cecilia's death takes a back-seat in the movie, whereas in the book it was a constant theme and was referred to quite often. The biggest thing I noticed was that Lux Lisbon is very much the main character - in both book and movie - despite the boys being the narrators and there being five Lisbon girls. I didn't really catch onto that until the movie was just about over.
Overall, I really like the book and the movie. Both are great together and as stand-alone without one another. I prefer the novel for being more in depth with characters, environment, story-arch and setting the tone, but that is always hard to put onto screen, no matter what the adaptation.
April Book Club book has been started and next reading challenge choice has been chosen; Transcendental by James Gunn, book one of the Transcendental Machine trilogy. (Not to be confused the with the other James Gunn, director of The Guardians of the Galaxy movies, fyi.)
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