Chapter 1 Summary

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides reads like a post-mortem investigation into the lives and deaths of five young American girls growing up in a suburb. From the onset of the novel, the reader is made aware of the outcome. The story takes place in the early 1970s, somewhere in the heart of America. The novel is narrated approximately 20 years after the events by a group of middle-aged men who were then teenagers living in the same neighborhood and obsessed by the five ill-fated heroines of the book. The story unfolds at a lingering pace as it catalogs the slow decay of a community who gave up its power in exchange for a passive, manufactured brand of happiness.

The book opens with the scene of an ambulance arriving at the Lisbon's house to pick up the body of Mary, the last of five...