The author is equally convincing when he describes the older locals' reactions to the suicide attempts. Eugenides risks sounding sophomoric in his attempt to convey the immaturity of high-school boys while initially somewhat discomfiting, the narrator's voice (representing the collective memories of the group) acquires the ring of authenticity. Lisbon, a mild-mannered high school math teacher, is driven to resign by parents who believe his control of their children may be as deficient as his control of his own brood. Her mother forces Lux to burn the album along with others she considers dangerously provocative. The title derives from a song by the fictional rock band Cruel Crux, a favorite of the Lisbon daughter Lux-who, unlike her sisters Therese, Mary, Bonnie and Cecilia, is anything but a virgin by the tale's end. The sensationalism of the subject matter (based loosely on a factual account) may be off-putting to some readers, but Eugenides's voice is so fresh and compelling, his powers of observation so startling and acute, that most will be mesmerized. (Reviewed Apr.Eugenides's tantalizing, macabre first novel begins with a suicide, the first of the five bizarre deaths of the teenage daughters in the Lisbon family the rest of the work, set in the author's native Michigan in the early 1970s, is a backward-looking quest as the male narrator and his nosy, horny pals describe how they strove to understand the odd clan of this first chapter, which appeared in the Paris Review, where it won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for fiction. After this distinctive debut, Eugenides’ second effort should reveal if he can expand his appeal beyond his generation. The evocative reconstruction props up the adolescent atmospherics of that time (the author is now age 32) as much as it ostensibly dissects the tragedy, which the author’s alter ego narrator finds is sadly unfathomable anyway. Did those surroundings spur Cecilia to throw herself from a window, sending the house into a degenerating gloom that bottomed out with the final exits of the final four? One of the boys, a Twelve Stepper now who made it with the bad girl of the bunch, can’t settle his addled mind on a theory, but the rest remember the time, place, and sightings of the pretty Lisbons with the magnified focus of their very furtiveness. Except for school and group outings to two ill-fated parties, the girls’ lives played out confined to their dwelling, a cloistered existence protected by a mother vigilant for their virtue and by a meek father cowed by his feminized surroundings. A nameless narrator, one of the boys, 20 years later collects and weaves together the impressions that friends, neighbors, and parents had of the dead girls. The Lisbon girls, all five of whom committed suicide in the early 1970s, haunt the memories of boys next door in a wealthy Detroit suburb.
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