The Virgin Suicides

In a leafy Michigan suburb in the mid-1970s, the five Lisbon sisters, aged thirteen to seventeen, live under the strict, religiously anxious rule of their parents. When the youngest, Cecilia, suffers a crisis that shocks the neighborhood, the family draws inward, and the girls become the fixed obsession of a group of local boys who watch them from across the street, catalogue their every gesture, and fall collectively, hopelessly in love.

Narrated years later by these same boys, now middle-aged men still sifting through the artifacts they hoarded, The Virgin Suicides reconstructs a single devastating year: Lux's reckless romance with the heartthrob Trip Fontaine, the tightening of the Lisbon household into a kind of house arrest, and the slow unraveling that follows. The men can assemble the facts but never the meaning, and their failure to understand becomes the novel's aching center.

Jeffrey Eugenides's acclaimed debut is a hypnotic elegy for adolescence, memory, and desire, written in a lush, elegiac first-person-plural voice. Suburban and mythic at once, it turns the unknowability of other people, especially of girls seen only from the outside, into a haunting meditation on longing and loss.