50 States of Literature: Next Stop, Michigan

Michigan: The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides — Eugenides’ debut novel captures in one masterful stroke both the comfort and suffocation of the 1970’s northern suburbia. The unnamed narrator illuminates the comfort of routine and community in this the ice-bound hamlet, where “the snow fell every week and we shoveled our driveways into heaps higher than our cars... and old man Wilson sprang for his annual extravagant display: a twenty-foot snowman, with mechanized reindeer.” The very nature of The Virgin Suicides is the foregone conclusion of self-destruction and tragedy—the book opens with the revelation that all five Lisbon girls, the objects of our narrator’s affection, will commit suicide by the novel’s close. Yet the awkward tenderness of first love and the comforting rhythm of small-town life remain. In the end, we “are certain only of the insufficiency of explanation,” and for this the setting could not be more perfect—the sameness and numbing quality of the “elm-lined streets” and the beauty of a young boy’s childhood in the snow.

"50 States of Literature" is an online series featuring one book from a different state each week. Check back next week for another installment.