The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

This book doesn't try to make a secret of what the story is about--it's all there in the title, and the narrators give it away within the first few pages that all of the Lisbon sisters end up committing suicide. So you're never surprised by what they do or what happens, so I don't think that is the point of this book. This book is really about the boys, the nameless narrators, who spend their teenage-hoods obsessing over and fantasizing about the Lisbon sisters, and watching their lives disintegrate and eventually kill themselves over the course of a year. Their interest in them--which lasts for decades, as far as I can tell from the format of the book--is intense, and I kept being put off by it and wondering why they were so obsessed. Eugenides must be making a point about how they saw the girls and how they never looked at them as people. When the girls finally commit suicide and basically arrange for the boys to find them, they say, "We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out." They spend decades afterwards trying to find out what happened and to really get to know them as much as they could through the pictures and evidence left behind. This seemed a little unbelievable--they hint a few times at how they have been unsatisfied with the rest of their lives after their brief encounters with the Lisbon sisters, and I don't feel like their associations with them justified that sort of long-lingering reaction.

The writing in this book is beautiful. I've read one Eugenides book before and I remember thinking the same thing about that one--it was beautifully written, even if the story itself is disturbing. I listened to an audiobook a few months ago by a librarian talking about her favorite books and she goes on and on and ON about how much she loves this book and how it's her favorite book ever, and I would definitely not agree with her on her level of obsession with this book. It was definitely, definitely worth a read, wonderfully written and thought-provoking, and almost un-put-down-able. I read it in only about two days and have neglected all my Saturday chores this morning to finish it off (while Tommy is out with the kids). But I think it was a little too creepy (in the stalker-ish way of the boys who apparently spent their entire adolescence staring out their windows to catch glimpses of the girls locked up in their house across the street) and too depressing (when five sisters in the same family all commit suicide) to be one of my favorites. I don't think I will want to see the movie for the same reasons--I feel like it would be too depressing for me.