by Jeffrey Eugenides, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993, 256 pages

Simply reading the title of “The Virgin Suicides” foretells the fate of more than one of its central characters. Within the first paragraph, it’s revealed that all five of the teenage daughters in the Lisbon family will have killed themselves by the time the book ends. Even their methods of suicide are promptly disclosed, with ominous references to sleeping pills, a knife drawer, a gas oven and a “beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.”

The only important question author Jeffrey Eugenides leaves unanswered in the book’s opening pages is “why?” What would lead five perfectly healthy, radiantly beautiful, precociously intelligent young women to take their own lives? Eugenides never quite answers this fundamental question, but compels the reader to come up with his or her own interpretation.

The story takes place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in the early 1970s. Thirteen-year-old Cecilia, the youngest of the Lisbon daughters, is the first to succumb, “slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquility that they had stood mesmerized,” Eugenides writes. 

Cecelia’s inexplicable act leaves the rest of her family—14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, 17-year-old Therese and their ever protective parents—increasingly reclusive and withdrawn. As the girls’ behavior becomes more bizarre and their household sinks deeper into isolation, their neighbors watch with a mix of fascination and incomprehension.

But, in a sense, “The Virgin Suicides” is less about the Lisbon girls than it is about the clique of boyhood friends who obsess over them. The narrative takes the form of a biographical study, complete with various “exhibits,” conducted by a group of men who remain hopelessly infatuated with the girls decades after their tragic demise.

The book examines not only the mysterious lives of the girls, but also their irresistible allure for their pubescent suitors. Even Trip Fontaine, a teenage sexual conquistador, finds himself spellbound by Lux’s enigmatic charms. Years later, when the narrator interviews the adult Fontaine, now a balding alcoholic, it’s implied that he has never entirely recovered from that youthful romantic fixation.

Panning out to view the story in its full context, the novel paints a picture of a 1970s suburb in the face of unstoppable transition. The loss of the Lisbon girls’ innocence, and their lives, becomes a metaphor for the deterioration of their community into a characterless grid of suburban monotony.

This parallel is most poignantly illustrated through the city’s efforts to tear down the neighborhood’s native elm trees, which have become infested with invasive beetles. When a crew arrives at the Lisbon house to remove a cherished tree from their front yard, the girls lock arms and form a human barrier around the trunk. It’s as if they’re shielding the town’s core purity from the detriments of urban sprawl. But their heroic gesture serves only to delay the tree’s inevitable destruction.

“The Virgin Suicides” marked a breathtaking debut for Eugenides, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with “Middlesex.” Director Sofia Coppola made the book into a 1999 movie starring James Woods and Kathleen Turner as the Lisbon parents, Kirsten Dunst as Lux and Josh Hartnett as Trip Fontaine. A reprint of the book emerged in April 2009, demonstrating its lasting appeal. Perhaps readers are still nostalgic for a childhood utopia that may never have existed.