There is a photo of me at my second Christmas. I am somewhere between a baby and toddler, and still my parents’ only child, a title I would keep for another three precious years. Around me is so much swag that some of it towers above me, while an array of smaller boxes make me a little Godzilla, stomping around my city of gifts. I like to tease my parents about this photo. You ruined me for real life, I tell them.
The Lisbon sisters of The Virgin Suicides don’t share this problem. Parental overindulgence is not something Mary, Therese, Bonnie, Cecila and Lux experience in their short lives, which we encounter through lovingly collated pieces of evidence by a group of boys from their suburban Michigan community. Their mother is an unfeeling, stifling disciplinarian, their father is weak and adrift in the sea of women around him. Over the course of a year, the book’s narrator and his friends bear witness as four Lisbon girls attempt to survive the suicide of Cecila, and its effect on the already startlingly spartan rule of their mother. As the girls try to integrate into normal life, the boys collect the pieces of information that will make up a lifelong investigation: reports from the orthodontist that Mary visits in the hope of fixing her teeth, inventories of mysterious feminine toiletries found during reconnaissance, memories of touch and conversation archived like rare historical documents.
The Virgin Suicides cleverly fakes being a book about teen suicide, but its real exploration is into the delicate dynamics that keep a family together. Before Cecilia, the “weird” sister, makes the swan dive into the yard that sparks off the suicides, the Lisbon family is at least a whole unit; their house is odd, ugly, but still functional. After the suicide, the parents lose hold of the children, and the girls lose their small freedoms. Mr Lisbon begins to see children as “only strangers you agreed to live with”, and the family home becomes an extension of its occupants’ relationships, emitting toxic smells, of “bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film … the singed smell of drilled teeth”, or as one of the boys quips, “the smell of trapped beaver”. Meanwhile, adding a dreamlike, echoing quality to the Lisbon tragedy, the town’s beloved elms become diseased, and men arrive to cut them down. It’s hard not to note the symbolism as tree after tree is decapitated and torn out, infested with the virus from the first sick tree. What’s unclear, in the Lisbons’ case, is who carries the virus first – Cecilia, the mother, or generations of ancestors carrying a gene for depression.
While they live, the Lisbon sisters are observed in lots of ways, all of which reinforce their isolation. They are five copies of the same girl, or living myths, like the Kennedys. Sometimes they are five adjacent solitudes with cartoon-like personal quirks, like a bleak sibling version of the Spice Girls (the pretty one, the smart one, the weird one, the oldest, “mean one, pulling my hair …”). It’s no wonder the girls have no comfort but each other, and in the familiar pattern of their five, then four-starred, constellation. Anyone with siblings will recognise the casual way in which the Lisbons know, irritate and protect each other, and the wordless way in which they communicate. And it’s difficult to begrudge their togetherness in the end, even if we can’t understand their actions.
When my brother and sister arrived, I was humiliated, then suddenly their existence was impossible to live without. When I re-read The Virgin Suicides, as I often do, the thing that comes across is always this idea of sibling love, and the way it can be your source of understanding the generation above you, and the world. My love for my siblings is now bigger than a pile of presents, and more important than the most generous harvest of presents I ever had. I think it’s the thing that keeps me returning to this magical book.
