C-wod.com

In an attempt to get this site to the next level, intellectually speaking, I’ve decided, at the advice of several friends, to start writing book reviews on the site. I would be afraid of alienating readers, but I suspect there aren’t many left anyway.

Not including my extremely short post on Special Topics in Calamity Physics from the fall, this is the first review.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

After finally finishing Pride and Prejudice, my first taste of some author named Jane Austen, I decided to move on to something a little more recent. Ever since reading Virginia Woolf, I’ve become quite the sucker for lyrical prose. Needing my fill of beautiful, rhapsodic language, I turned to Eugenides’ debut novel, The Virgin Suicides. Originally, I had planned to read his other novel, the Pulitizer-winning Middlesex, but after its being named as an Oprah’s Book Club selection, I decided I didn’t want to be reading the same book as thousands of middle-aged women.

The Virgin Suicides features an unusual point of view: an unnamed first-person-plural narrator. I could go into all sorts of English-major cliches about what effect this may or may not be achieving, but I won’t do that. Instead, let me tell you that, despite the inherent tragedy, as well as a certain creepiness that pervades the book, which is to be expected, the book is just gorgeous. It explores the darker side of suburbia with humor and humanity, with intelligence and warmth. In other words, it doesn’t follow the Chumscrubber route. Here’s one of my favorite passages, which comes fairly early in the book:

The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset. Sounds we usually couldn’t hear reached us now that we were up high, and crouching on the tarred shingles, resting chins in hands, we made out, faintly, an indecipherable backward-playing tape of city life, cries and shouts, the barking of a chained dog, car horns, the voices of girls calling out numbers in an obscure tenacious game—sounds of the impoverished city we never visited, all mixed and muted, without sense, carried on a wind from that place. Then: darkness.

Awesome.

My new mission is to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels by the end of the summer.

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