The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Even when Lux breaks curfew, Mr.and Mrs. Lisbon believe the problem is located somewhere out in the world, not in Lux herself, so any threat can be alleviated by essentially jailing their five daughters in the house. According to the Lisbons’ moral logic, home should be the safest place, protected from external dangers, global and local. Then comes the more frightening realization, as in a horror film: the call is coming from inside the house. All the ballast of the suburban world, the tended lawns and neighbors and roomy, practical cars can’t keep the danger away when the source is psychological, a mystery coiled in the adolescents themselves, a realm beyond the reach of even the strictest of parents. The book is an elegy, not only for the dead girls, but for the boys’ own adolescent selves. Their relationship with the Lisbons was fundamentally a fantasy, but the intensity and scope of their feelings was real, perhaps realer than anything that followed.