So, remember when I said that I didn't read books too often? Well, after finishing Slam I looked at the growing stack of novels I have next to my bed and picked one kind of at random. It was Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides (1993). Someone had put it on the free table at work and I snatched it up, not really knowing anything about it.
So I started reading it and was hooked instantly. It only took me about three dedicated days of reading to get through it (so about a week, real time) and it was one of the most moving, ghostly reading experiences I've ever had. The story follows the Lisbon Family as all five of the daughters kill themselves over the span of a year, the first of which Cecilia, predates her sisters by a full year. What really grabbed me about the telling of the tale was that the narrator speaks in the "we" and comes from the point of view of one of the boys in the neighborhood who fell in a sort of love with the girls and desperately wanted to help them. After they killed themselves, the boys spend the rest of their lives (at least to the point we find them in the book), trying to figure out why these five young women took their lives.
Another element of the book that got me was the way that Eugenides packed each page with so many characters, either actually involved in the story or just mentioned by name. Almost all of them seem incidental at first, but come back into play later on. The great thing about it, though, is that I never felt lost. Maybe I didn't take much stock in such casually mentioned characters, but they all came back in one way or another, which really makes the reader feel like a part of these boys' (and later mens') club of failed avenging heroes.
The sense of not being able to penetrate another person is one that I've often thought about. Even the girls' own father who lived under the same roof as them had no idea what was going through their heads as they planned an elaborate suicide plan that involved a number of the neighborhood boys. No matter how hard you try to decode someone's thoughts and actions, you just can't get inside their heads. The best you can do is gather accounts to try and put the puzzle together.
Sophia Coppola's adaptation (1999) is pretty faithful to the book, but not necessarily to the version in my brain. But I think a lot of that comes from the basic differences between books and movies. For instance, in the book, you don't really get a sense of the girls as individuals until the narrator does which is well into the book. Of course, in a movie, you can obviously see the differences. Though, I do have to give props to the casting folks for making the non Kirsten Dunst sisters all look pretty similar and easily confused.
Aside from Dunst who nails the promiscuous and evocative Lux to a T, the casting didn't quite do it for me. I didn't get the same feel from Kathleen Turner's mother character as I did in the book, even though she looks almost exactly like how I pictured her. The way its conveyed in the book, it's hard to not feel like she's majorly to blame for the girls' suicides. Again, I'm thinking this is because we actually see her reactions to things like her first daughter's suicide.
I was really most curious to see how Coppola and Co. handled the first person plural narrator of the book in the film (he always uses "we" and never deviates). She got Giovanni Ribisi, an actor I've liked since I randomly rented Suburbia at the age of 16 and developed a pretty deep man crush on. Anyway, he does a great job, but isn't utilized enough to really set the same tone as the book. The lack of entrenchment along with the neighborhood boys leads to more focus on the girls, which almost completely removes the element of being an outsider looking in on them which is central to the novel. Heck, it's hard to be an outsider when you're right in their living room as they play Chinese checkers and watch wildlife shows.
One of the downsides to watching such a faithful adaptation so soon after reading the book (I finished it Saturday in between and after errands I didn't want to run) is that you know when everything's coming and what's going to happen. I didn't feel that way watching Virgin Suicides. I was mostly curious to see how Coppola translated such an artfully crafted novel onto the screen. And kudos to her for doing such a great job. The movie never lags (it's just over an hour and a half) and, while you're nowhere near as firmly entrenched with the neighborhood kids as you are in the book, you still develop an attachment for these girls and desperately want to help them, even though it's a forgone conclusion from about the second line of the script that they're not going to make it.
All in all, I enjoyed both works, though obviously I liked the book better. I can't recommend the book enough to people. Heck, if it only took me a few days to read, you should be able to get through it quickly. But, if books aren't your thing, I also give the movie my thumb's up.
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