Debut novelist Eugenides is a heavyweight: proof of it is in nearly
every pitch-perfect sentence of this startlingly and very good
book. A group of teenage boys in a Detroit suburb have come
under the siren spell of a group of like- aged sisters, the
Lisbon girls, the eldest of whom, Cecilia, has killed herself by
jumping out a bedroom window onto a fence. Shocked and
dislocated by the fact of young, willful death, the boys are
increasingly fascinated as the always strict and secretive Lisbon
family goes into a kind of cold storage (the other girls
eventually withdraw from school), and the house is let go into
decrepitude (the boys, using binoculars from up in a treehouse,
can see that the other girls have turned Cecilia's bedroom into
a shrine). To rescue the Lisbon girls becomes the boys'
instinctive obsession--and an accepted invitation to the prom
almost accomplishes this. But one sister, Lux, has turned
promiscuous--dooming her and her sisters' chances for freedom
thereafter. Left to them all is death only. Eugenides,
meanwhile, writes just about as well as anyone in recent memory
has about male teenage desire, mythologizing, and half-rational
thought: one unforgettable scene has the boys and the Lisbon girls
communicating on the phone by playing certain popular songs
close to the receiver for each other, third-party messages
heartbreakingly personalized. The boys narrate the story together like
a chorus, moving around in time, ever-haunted, in prose that is
sinuous, untricky, yet polished. They come to recognize that the Lisbon
girls mean life and death simultaneously--and that they will
never get over having got to know this so young. Maybe the most
eccentrically successful, genuinely lyrical first novel since
William Wharton's Birdy. Not to be missed.
