The Virgin Suicides was, in a nutshell, eerie and morally upsetting
(as many of my peers have expressed in last week’s posts). There were a few
somewhat sweet moments that
temporarily fooled me into feeling dreamy and quixotic with the narrators over
the Lisbon girls. For instance, the boys’ musical conversations with the
sisters seemed endearing, like a testament to their undying devotion to the
girls. Then again, the clash between the boys’ overly cheesy love songs and the
girls’ darker songs of angst demonstrated that they were blind to the cries for
help embedded in the songs the girls played to them over the phone.
I think a bigger reason why no one tries to really help
these girls is because of the dreamy apathy that results from a comfortable,
predictable lifestyle. Middle-class suburbia serves as the backdrop for a host
of lost people who revolve lazily around the most lost of them all, the
Lisbons. The Lisbon girls spend a lot of their time frivolously, sitting on the
lawn doing little because of their parents’ restrictions. However, everyone
else in the neighborhood sits around, too, and they don’t have demented parents
monitoring their every move. There’s a lot of watching each other rot away
their days; no one is able to break out of their stupor and find a higher goal
beyond this bubble of bourgeoisie boredom.
The girls may have become disillusioned with the lost
paradise they lived in, to the point where their apathy and lack of drive drove
them to the ultimate escape. Meanwhile, all the other children didn’t consider
what they were given, which might be what the boys were referencing near the
beginning when they muse on the girls’ ageless wisdom. We all find out that the
boys grow up to be middling middle-aged men or worse (I’m looking at you,
washed-up Trip Fontaine). Perhaps this is the more obscure takeaway of this
novel: having enough and mindlessly accepting it will get you nowhere.
-Ly
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