Panic in Detroit

My survey of American lit class finished reading The Virgin Suicides last week, and although Eugenides struts atop a blood-soaked misogny fence throughout the novel, we decided that his slutty highwire act simultaneously performs a sobering critique of normative femininity. His pubescent Catholic coven is morbid, "febrile," indistinguishable, "miasmic," and barren. From Lux, the rooftop stranger-fucking gargoyle, to Cecilia, whose first failed suicide opens the novel, and second successful self-skewering emits "the sound of a watermelon breaking open," the girls are rotten. Bonnie's "long neck was thin and white and she had the rickety painful walk of a Biafran, as though her hip joints lacked lubrication." Even the maternal grandmother's house is remarkable only for its "dead vegetable garden."

Nonetheless, rather than the masturbation material a novel about 5 budding young women crammed into the same house and desired by every boy on the block could devolve into, Eugenides instead offers a critique of the money shot the flower of teenage femininity customarily yields. Rather than creepily lusting after his daughters, Mr. Lisbon is irritated by the "effluvia" of his brood as, "the odor of all those cooped-up girls had begun to annoy him." The one male allowed to enter the Lisbon hermitage flees the house after a bathroom visit reveals that one of the girls has a mustache and she waxes it, and that at least one of the girls (Lux), "was bleeding between the legs that very instant, while the fish flies made the sky filthy and the streetlamps came on."