The scene is observed passively by a few young teenagers gathered inside a house across the street. The book opens with the scene of an ambulance coming in to pick up the body of Mary, the last of the five Lisbon sisters to take her own life. The story unfolds at a lingering pace as it catalogs the slow decay of a community who gave up its power in exchange for a passive, manufactured brand of happiness. The novel is narrated approximately 20 years after the events by a group of middle-aged men who were then teenagers living in the same neighborhood and obsessed by the five ill-fated heroines of the book. The story takes place in the early 1970s, somewhere in the heart of America. From the onset of the novel, the reader is made aware of the outcome. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides reads like a postmortem investigation into the lives and deaths of five young American girls growing up in a suburb.
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