the ocean always dreamed blue dreams

Following is a second book from my list of unfinished books I started in 2010.

The Virgin Suicides

Their names were Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese, and they were destined, like Peter Pan, never to grow up.

They lived and died in the novel "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides, which covers the last year of their lives in the upscale community of Grosse Point, Michigan. Adolescence is a strange time. Your body is not your own any more and the world has become a surreal landscape through which you must move. Some kids adapt easier than others, but that is not the case for the Lisbon sisters. To all appearances they would seem to have everything. Loving parents, the possibility of a good education, their whole lives ahead of them.

But the youngest sister, Cecilia, attempts suicide as the book opens. She survives for awhile, still wearing a worn wedding dress, her feet dirty, but at the one party she and her sisters are allowed to give she makes a second successful attempt, the irony of which hangs heavy in the air. The one adult decision she makes ended in death.

The only truly obvious note in the book is that it is too easy to blame the parents for what happens. Very little is revealed of the girls. They appear to be a single entity in the story and there is little dialog. There are odd flashes of insight into their lives and their minds,. like lightning on a dark night, but it is impossible to piece together any sense of the sister's individuality, of their family life, or even of their relationships to one another. What little is revealed seems ordinary beyond the pale, leaving their reasons for their suicides even more puzzling. Journal entries detail food they'd eaten ("they all detested creamed corn"), the inside of their bedrooms as seen by one neighborhood boy ("He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds..."), and their return to school in September after the death of their sister, in full view of the whole school ("Bonnie had picked a simple bouquet of late-season dandelions from the school green. She held them under Lux's chin to see if she liked butter."), but despite these glimpses of a foreign country, they are more mysterious than ever.

There are several religious references, and descriptions of them disappearing once and for all into their house make them seem like girls from the middle ages who've been given to God against their will, or as though they were living in a seraglio, young daughters of a sultan's household being readied as a royal wife,at any rate kept safe for something finer than anything this world had to offer. This although the parents are portrayed as rather colorless people, as parents too often are in novels and movies. What did their parents have in mind? Their father seemed ready enough to let the girls grow up, but their mother, perhaps in a grotesque satire of love, of wanting to keep her children safe, curled around them like a python and squeezed the life out of them. They had tried, once, to let them go to a school dance. Luz, the one sister given the most personality, ran off with Trip, who had longed and lusted for her. They consummate their relationship on the football field, then Trip takes a powder and leaves Luz to make her way home by herself. The damage is done, however. Their mother, having lost one child, is unable to handle her daughter's overt sexuality, never mind that it had ended in disaster. The girls' are withdrawn from school, and their downward spiral into desolation begins.

As the book begins with a death, so it ends, with the collective deaths of the rest of the sisters.The neighborhood boys who had watched them from afar with the heated lust you can only feel for something you can never have, seem linked with the girls' in their inability to grow up. The girls, much like the young protagonist in "Dead Poets' Society," are unable to envision a life beyond the sere emotional desert in which they currently reside. So, too, the boys, while longing for the lush pleasures of sensual freedom they scent in the visages' of the five sisters, are unable, once the girls move beyond them into death, to grow into anything resembling a satisfactory adulthood. They live on the edges of their fantasy, scarred forever, thoughts of the elusive Lisbon girls "making us happier with dreams than wives...and the snow came down and the sky was unremittingly gray." I see them standing like Gatsby in his yard looking over the bay to the green light beyond, his arms outstretched in yearning; so they seem to stand, looking at the green light that was the Lisbon sisters, arms outstretched, forever yearning, forever seeing through a glass darkly.

Eugenides writes like an overgrown garden, and his evocation of youth cut short is an Eden whose residents have never left.

Qimmissung
January 2011