This is a very well-written book, with beautiful imagery. I found it almost poetic; that said, however, that is all it seemed to be. A well-written book about absolutely nothing. I felt nothing for the characters, could never find any of their motivations, and in the end, just got nothing from reading it.

I first read this book about 4 years ago. I hadn't read many novels in the recent past because with a busy schedule and a new baby, I had a hard time concentrating long enough to get through the first chapter of most books. However, I was able to read this entire book in 2 days. I couldn't put it down! I found myself reading during my son's nap time, when I really should've been sleeping myself- but I just had to get through this book. The entire story is amazing, and the writing style of the author is very refreshing. You really sympathize with all of the characters, from the troubled young girls, to the boys who are infatuated with them; and even the mother who almost pushes her daughters to suicide, still somehow gets your sympathy by the end of the book. Definitely an incredible novel, and one that I will never get tired of reading.

I saw the film when it first came out, and while I found it beautiful, there was something about it that bothered me, that kept me from really LOVING it. Once I read the book, it came full circle for me; everything that made me "question" the film made sense and made me REALLY appreciate it. The book is perfection, playing out like the dreamiest and most delicious (and often times intensely dark) surreality; it's an almost ideallic suburbia. The Virgin Suicides is one of those books where you underline and highlight and copy down passages wishing you'd thought of them. Jeffrey Eugenides has mastered the english language and I would easily recommend both this book and Middlesex to anyone who loves fiction that you can't put down and can never forget.

To say this is a book about a group of sisters who kill themselves is like saying Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" is about a whale. Yes, in a sense. But Melville's book really concerns human obsession: the whale is just a maguffin. You don't get to see a diary of Moby's day ("rose from the deep, had a few thousand kelp, pondered the meaning of life", etc.) because it isn't about him. It's about Captain Ahab, his desire for vengeance, and the dubious ability of human beings to chase unattainable things to a ruinous degree.

Similarly, The Virgin Suicides takes an extreme case, that of the suicides of five sisters from the same family. But there is no description of what the girls thought when they decided to take their own lives, no smug psychology that gives a pat final answer: "so it was their religious parents", or "fluoride in the water that was to blame". Instead it insinuates a corollary of detail from an unidentified and distanced observer to the drama. This brings the monotony of small-town life into the narrative; the noseyness of neighbours; the attention of the media; the desires of adolescent boys... everything except the impetous(es) that led the girls to do what they did. The suicides, like the various narratives in Kurosawa's "Rashomon", are a maguffin for what we could coldly call the real themes: the inevitability of conjecture over a single incident, the obfuscation of a single god-like point of view, or rather, and much more importantly, this point of view's refusal to even claim to have an easy explanation.

Like the whale in Moby Dick (or, say, the mysterious, murderous truck driver in Spielberg's debut film "Duel") the white whale of The Virgin Suicides remains a mystery. Perhaps this is because the book is not really about the suicides at all. Perhaps Melville chose the whale precisely because if cannot speak. It has no voice so as not to give explanations: that is the glory of nature. The girls have no voice because they need none: it is not about them. It is merely that in the most extreme cases one finds the most mundane aspects of human experience: the domesticated desires of humans to watch, touch and participate within a community. Eugenides triumph is that he gives us the motivations of people without offering us the sideshow of what they so eagerly desired to see. The Virgin Suicides are in other words the empty spectacle of a society which claims to understand causes but only feeds into its own chain of obsessions.

I purposely waited to watch the movie (and yet to do so) until after I read this book but I think even seeing the trailers to the movie changed my perspective on what the book would be about. I didn't realize the point of view would be of the boys from across the street, and I gotta tell you, I was left wanting a lot more.

I know part of the intrigue of this book is that you're left with unanswered questions, but in the end I felt a little cheated. I would have enjoyed hearing the girls' thoughts and really known what went on in the house. It was an ok read. I enjoyed it overall, but really didn't get much out of the book.

I'm probably in the minority here so take my criticism with a grain of salt. This was just my 2 cents.