The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993 and was Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel. He had published short stories before it, and the book appeared in a period when American fiction was full of suburban gothic material, but the novel's narrator is unusual: a collective male voice that is now middle-aged, still obsessed, and aware that it never understood anything at the time.

The novel's subject is the community as much as the family. The Lisbon daughters are known by their reputations rather than their characters, and the story is assembled from what the boys could see from the lawns and driveways of the neighbourhood: the ambulance, the tree being cut down, the shoes on the porch, and the parents' decisions about dances and dates. Eugenides keeps the girls at a distance from the reader on purpose, which is what makes the book an accusation rather than a case study, and the parents' religiosity becomes the machinery of the tragedy.

The book was adapted for film by Sofia Coppola in 1999 and has remained in print and in reading lists since. Eugenides went on to write Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003, and this novel is generally described as the short, colder book that established him. Its structure, with a collective narrator recalling events decades later, is the reason it is still discussed in writing classes.