Death and the maidens
Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides Abacus $118 WHAT possessed 13-year-old Cecilia Lisbon to slit her wrists then, wounds barely healed, ruin her first and last party by impaling herself on a spiked metal fence? Clad in her habitual outfit, the wedding dress with the shorn hem, did Cecilia see herself as a bride of death? Did the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary found clutched in her sodden hands after her first suicide attempt symbolise her rebellion against the religious tyranny of her upbringing? Plain screwy, figured the neighbours, until like lemmings the rest of the Lisbon girls took their lives.
Lux, 14, grey with carbon monoxide in the family car. Bonnie, 15, swinging from a rafter in the basement. Mary, 16 (recently out of hospital after almost succeeding in the gas oven) and Therese, 17, stuffed to the gills with sleeping pills.
They were beautiful, these five doomed sisters. ''Short, round-buttocked in denim, with roundish cheeks that recalled the same dorsal softness,'' reminisces the narrator.
He doesn't identify himself, but is easy to conjure up: the quiet, observant one among the boys in that cosy model of suburbia who all fell under the same spell. The merest glimpse of those mysterious, infinitely desirable Lisbon girls and hormones and hearts would go into overdrive.
This is a first novel and Jeffrey Eugenides has made a huge impact with it, winning comparisons with J D Salinger and John Updike, even David Lynch. Middle America meets the twilight zone? Something like that.
We see the sisters as one might in a film on rewind. There, on page one, goes the last of them, borne by the now resigned paramedics. Scenes of the sisters as they used to be flash by - Therese at a science convention, Bonnie at music camp - then the shutters start to close.
Now we are dependent on the boys for a voyeur's fevered glimpse, a suspiciously coloured second-hand account. Peter Sissen, the only one ever allowed in the Lisbon house (and only once) reckons he cased their inner sanctum - ''He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties . . . of a crucifix draped with a brassiere'' - but you know how adolescent boys can exaggerate.
Later you wonder at the adults. Surely not all were oblivious to the terrible sickness and desperation seeping from that blighted house along with the growing stench? Virgin Suicides is not about youth suicide. It's not strictly about virgins either. What Lux gets up to on the rooftop disqualifies her umpteen times over and given half a chance, her sisters would join her.
They cannot. Fate has condemned them and unlike their would-be saviours, they know there is only the ultimate escape.
Like the great Greek tragedians, Eugenides creates an awesome inevitability about his heroines' deaths. He goes one better. This triumphantly original novel is also shockingly funny.
