Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Grosse Pointe, a suburb a dozen or so miles to the east. He was seven years-old during the 1967 Detroit riots, and the afterimages were indelible. He didn’t realize why he wrote The Virgin Suicides, his debut novel, published in 1993, for many years. “I think psychologically, emotionally, the real influence was the experience of growing up in Detroit,” he remarked to The Paris Review. “While I was growing up, the city was becoming depopulated—there were the riots, all the buildings were falling into decay, they’re closed up, they were burned out, my grandfather’s bar was torched and burned. So growing up there you just saw things giving in to entropy. It left in me a sense of evanescence, that things are impermanent.”
John Lee Hooker released “The Motor City Is Burning” in 1967, a song that would also appear as the final track on his album Urban Blues. A response to the violence and devastation of the riots, Hooker’s song is cinematic:
Well, it started on 12th and Clairmont, this mornin’
I don’t know what it’s all about
The fire wagon kept comin’
The snipers just wouldn’t let ‘em put it out
Hooker and his band play the song with a swing, but at a mid-pace; the spiky details and the blend of disbelief, bitterness, and fear in his voice keep everything at a threatening simmer just below the surface. (The song is credited to Hooker’s producer, Al Smith, but Hooker always insisted that he himself wrote it, that he’d lived it.) Over 465 people were injured and 43 people died in those July and August riots. Property damage exceeded fifty million dollars, and more than 2,500 stores were burned or looted, nearly 400 families displaced by fire.
Can loss lead to beauty? For many years I photographed abandoned buildings, in DeKalb County and the surrounding rural counties where I live, in northern Illinois, and in small towns and cities that I’d visit across the country, where emptied buildings waver stubbornly against time. The stories that those structures and vacant lots told often transcended their origins, about which I was usually clueless; the particulars of domestic or civic politics blurred to reveal stark statements of universal harm, that which we’ve endured, in small and large ways, forever. I guard myself against sentimentalizing ruins, yet I also recognize something essential in them, gloom and decay, sure, and profound griefs that I’d never known (or haven’t yet), yet also a stoic and poignant stand against those losses.
Because something is gone, that doesn’t mean that it goes away. We often clutch at stories, real or those we imagine, that can help give our lives meaning against randomness and disorder. The Virgin Suicides tells the story of five sisters living in suburban Detroit —Theresa (age 17), Mary (16), Bonnie (15), Lux (14), and Cecelia (13)—who collectively decide that they wish to end their lives. Cecelia is the first to die (she throws herself out of a bedroom window in the midst of a party with several neighbor boys, who, as grown men, narrate the novel). Over the following months, fish flies ominously materialize and coat everything in sight, the local cemetery workers go on strike, and the girls float through their grief over Cecelia, one by one turning inward, though the more extroverted Lux begins to act out, engaging in a relationship with the local teen heartthrob, Trip. After Lux misses curfew on Homecoming night, the girls are pulled out of school and placed on lock down by their punitively strict, helplessly mourning parents.
Trapped in their house, which slowly decays over time, the girls essentially vanish from view—though the daring Lux is occasionally spotted fucking random men on the roof—and yet they are never far from the boys’ curiosity and longing. As the novel’s collective narrator, the boys obsess over the girls, who are made present by their absence in the boys’ imagination, dreams, and fantasies. Eugenides’ first idea was to have the whole town recall and grapple with these events, “and then little by little as I wrote from the older people’s point of view [and] the younger people, I realized that the greatest heat was being generated whenever I was in the adolescent boys’ point of view, because they were so focused on the girls, and there was an erotic and romantic element attached to their witnessing of the girls.” The boys are eventually lured by the girls to their house, where the boys discover the remaining girls’ suicides. The girls’ things are donated to charity, their parents divorce, the town moves on. The boys will remain haunted by what they see.
Over the course of the novel, the narrators try desperately to familiarize the Lisbon sisters, to un-strange them. Though they live just down the street, they could be eons away. “I’m trying to write a modern-day myth when I write a novel,” Eugenides once remarked. “I want it to be a fairy tale on a certain level, in that it has a timeless quality.” Inside of their crumbling home, the girls move most graphically, and most meaningfully, in the boys’ heads, where they become modern-day myths, unreachable, barely knowable, charged with meaning. Before the girls are snatched from society, one or two boys score rare visits to their homes, marveling at the Catholicized living rooms and intimate bedrooms, sacramental interiors imported from another planet. “I noticed everything about houses like that because they were absolutely different than my own,” Eugenides said, adding, “I used to say it was like going on safari to an exotic location.”
In one remarkable scene in a novel that’s stuffed with extraordinary passages, the boys get drunk on Woody Clabault’s parents’ liquor. After discovering that Clabault’s sister owned the same brand of strawberry-flavored lipstick that Lux once furtively wore, that night the boys make Woody “put on the lipstick and kiss each one of us so that we, too, would know what it tasted like. Beyond the flavor of the drinks we improvised that night—part ginger ale, part bourbon, part lime juice, part scotch—we could taste the strawberry wax on Woody Clabault’s lips, transforming them, before the artificial fireplace, into Lux’s own. Rock music blared from the tape player; we threw ourselves about in chairs, bodilessly floating to the couch from time to time to dip our heads into the strawberry vat…”.
The verdict? “It was Lux’s lips we tasted, not Clabault’s.”
In one of my favorite scenes in the novel, the boys resolve to reach out to the locked-down sisters by calling them on the phone, gathering shyly at Joe Larson’s house—Larson lives directly across the street from the Lisbons, so close and yet so far. The first attempt goes awry, thwarted by nerves and an unsecured Bell Telephone connection. On the second attempt, still barely able to speak, the boys play records from their collection for the girls.
The narrators confess that time has wiped away the name of the first song that they played down the line, but they vividly recall the girls’ response: “Next day, same time, our phone rang. We answered it immediately, and after some confusion (the phone was dropped), heard a needle bump down on a record, and the voice of Gilbert O’Sullivan singing through scratches.” The boys admit that the song had never meant much to them; until that moment, it had been a parent’s sentimental favorite, “speaking as it did of an age we hadn’t reached, but once we heard it playing tinily through the receiver, coming from the Lisbon girls, the song made an impact.” O’Sullivan’s “elfin voice” could’ve been mistaken for one of the girls’, while the melancholic lyrics “might have been diary entries the girls whispered into our ears.”
Though it wasn’t their voices we heard, the song conjured their images more vividly than ever. We could feel them, on the other end, blowing dust off the needle, holding the telephone over the spinning black disk, playing the volume low so as not to be overheard. When the song stopped, the needle skated through the inner ring, sending out a repeating click (like the same time lived over and over again).
The despondent “Alone Again (Naturally)” was an international hit for O’Sullivan in the summer and fall of 1972, and its presence in the novel helps to time- and date-stamp the events. Other songs the boys and the Lisbon girls play for each other that afternoon include James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” Cat Stevens’s “Where Do the Children Play?,” the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,” Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen,” Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” Carole King’s “So Far Away,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and Bread’s “Make It with You.” All of these songs were released between 1968 and 1975, the bulk of them riding the airwaves in the early ‘70s, becoming mainstays in suburban adolescents’ bedrooms and basements. Nowhere in The Virgin Suicides does Eugenides explicitly reveal what year the novel is set, a nod—a sharp one—to the dreamy, gauzy feel of the book, where events feel tactile, so near, yet also take on the timeless, mythic quality for which Eugenides was striving.
When director Sofia Coppola released her film adaptation of The Virgin Suicides in 2000, she set the story definitively in 1975. I love the novel beyond measure, and I have a cool relationship to the film (as I often do with adaptations). Eugenides once remarked that if he were an emotion, he would be longing. That sense of aching and desire—for the boys to know the unknowable girls, and, later, for the boys-as-men to carve some meaning out of being made to witness the girls’ suffering—permeates nearly every page of the novel, the mood intensely, almost uncannily dream-like. When I read the novel, I drop deep into the bottomless interior lives of these innocent, besotted boys and the bitter and clueless men. By necessity, in film, access to interiority is limited; unless a movie is committed to an experimental, avant-garde, and thus uncommercial approach, it must give us primarily the representational exterior world, how it looks outside our window, the occasional voice-over or point-of-view shot substituting for the richness and pensive enchantment of an interior life.
“What I realized is you write a book and you give it to someone to make into a film, the film is the dream,” Eugenides said when asked about Coppola’s adaptation. “If the book had a dream, that would be the film, it wouldn’t be the life of the book. It would exist as a correlative to your life, but also altered, and sometimes unrecognizably, so the book exists on its voice.” The film retains the novel’s choral narration, and the girls remain gazed at from a distance, “and you’re not sure which one is which, what are they really like, it’s all subjective.” Yet he added, pointedly, “As soon as you have an actress playing these roles, the weight of the girls increases, they become real.”
In the song-swapping scene in the film, the actors and actresses indeed become real, looking the part, the boys wearing shag haircuts, wide-collared shirts, and bashfully gawky grins, the girls’ long, shampooed hair brushed and diaphanous. Coppola and her set designers outfit each bedroom with the correct period stereo equipment and informally scattered LPs and 45s. There are the requisite chunky rotary phones in both homes, mod U.S. flag art and a Bionic Woman poster in the boy’s room, delicate animal figurines on the girl’s dresser next to a four poster bed with a floral bedspread, pink curtains, and a rose-decorated wooden ferris wheel. A clever split screen visually links the boys and girls as they trade songs and messages in code, a friendship that they can’t have otherwise.
Coppola’s of-the-era music choices are on the nose: she adds to the scene Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me” and the Bee Gees’ “Run to Me,” and on the soundtrack includes the Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe,” Al Green’s “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart,” Heart’s “Magic Man” and “Crazy On You,” Electric Light Orchestra’s “Strange Magic,” and 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”—those last four songs are especially evocative—as well as contemporary tracks such as Sloan’s “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” (released in 1996) and, throughout, incidental music from the French electronic dream pop duo AIR, trippy, trance-like tracks that they composed specifically for the film. Eugenides acknowledged that featuring AIR avoided a purely retro soundtrack, and “made the movie a new thing,” adding, “When you hear that music, you feel the atmosphere, you feel the movie, and, strangely enough, I feel my book even though the music had not been written when I wrote the book. That was one of the triumphs of the film.” All of these tracks work to conjure that wistful place in all of us where pop music lives, no matter the era that it’s made or our age when we hear it.
The gestures of those boys and girls trading songs—lost in the dreams of each other, and in the songs’ soundtrack of longing and dejection, curiosity and shyness—is infinitely touching. If The Virgin Suicides or some like tale was set in the 1980s or ‘90s, the boys would drop mix tapes in the Lisbon mailbox under cover of night; in the ‘00s and ‘10s they’d sail CD-Rs, their inserts ornately, painstakingly illustrated, through a recklessly open bedroom window. In the ‘20s, streaming playlists or TikToks, if the Lisbon girls were allowed phones. What we can’t say, a song sings for us.
Well, the motor city's burnin'
Ain't a thing that I can do
I just hope, people
It'll never happen to you
—sang Hooker back in the summer of 1967, the song in his hands, and then ours, putting the lie to the argument that running from fire meant that our backs wouldn’t be burned. The city of Detroit paid the price, its infamous and endless blocks of abandoned factories and homes a story that everyone knew, was embarrassed about but couldn’t turn away from. The city and surrounding areas’ economic collapse was due only in part to the riots, and they’ve have come a long way since then—on my most recent visit to Detroit, last summer, those empty blocks of gravel and patches of grass where buildings once stood contrasted with bustling rebuilding efforts in the downtown area. But a kind of stain exists that’s hard to scrub away. I grew up in the Washington D.C. suburbs; when I’d drive down Sixteenth Street toward the Old Downtown in the 1980s, the scars of the city’s four-day riots of April 1968 were graphically visible, still, the looting and property damage having cast a minor key threnody that sounded in certain blocks well into the 1990s and 2000s, when urban renewal arrived to the District.
“I brought a grief for my hometown and all the things that I saw going wrong with the city, from my birth to becoming a man, a great city going through great difficulties, and the trees dying, the industry dying, population dwindling,” Eugenides said. “I had this feeling of something running out and running down, and that quality is really what infuses The Virgin Suicides with its sense of impermanence.” Such transience is embodied in those bedrooms, those boys and girls a decade from the riots, avoiding the blighted areas on their parents’ commands, or because of their own fears. What they have now are the songs, played for each other, that, though they end, never fade away, like the same time lived over and over again.
Eugenides has remarked that the novel has never left him. “It doesn't seem to fade, maybe just getting past it now as old as I am and moving on to more adult concerns, but that was a very formative, strong, dramatic time of my life, and it was easy to write a book about that.” He added, “It's almost as though, if a lot of my life is shrouded in darkness, there’s a spotlight that glows in the years 14 to 17, or something like that, and it never goes off.”
Joe Bonomo's most recent books are Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and A Life in Baseball Writing and Field Recordings from the Inside: Essays. Find him online at No Such Thing As Was and on Instagram at @__bonomo__.
Photo credit: Joe Bonomo