August 2025
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    I read The Virgin Suicides for the first time recently and something about it was really bugging me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The prose is really good, I understand and resonate with many of the themes it explores, but something about it just ticked me off, and I think I finally understand why.

    The story is largely a critique and exploration of how girls are fetishized, and how their perspectives are often missing from their own stories.
    Having the POV of a story with these themes be from the voyeur themselves is a high risk high reward choice. If it works it can be extremely impactful. If it doesn't, it risks making your entire story come across as hypocritical.

    Lolita is one of my favorite books, and it also completely centers the perspective of the voyeur.The Virgin Suicides is clearly influenced by it. So why does Lolita succeed where The Virgin Suicides fail when their narrative framing is so similar?

    In Lolita, we never see from Dolores’s perspective, and Humbert Humbert is constantly trying to paint a very specific picture of her. However, we do get hints of what her real personality is like through small moments that challenge and contradict Humbert’s manipulative narration. There’s only a few moments like that and they are brief, but they are very effective.

    The Virgin Suicides was trying to do something similar. Just like with Dolores in Lolita, we never get the direct perspective of any of the Lisbon girls. We have brief moments peppered throughout the story that are meant to give us a tiny window into inner world of the girls, and challenge the main narrative.

    The problem is that those brief glimpses into the Libson Girls’ inner world don’t contrast all that much with the fetishized, and idealized perspective the anonymous group of neighborhood boys have of them, it's never really challenged that much.

    I know the vagueness surrounding the personalities and motivations of the Lisbon girls was intentional, but we should still have at least a vague idea of what they're actually like. The personality of Dolores was also vague and heavily obfuscated, but as a character she has far more depth than any of the Libson girls.

    What Humbert Humbert DOESN'T say is just as meaningful as what he actually says, and all the implications made by what information he chooses to leave out, what he focuses on, and those brief moments where we actually have dialogue from Dolores, all of that ends up giving the reader an obfuscated but coherent picture of what Dolores might actually be like.

    In The Virgin Suicides, the picture painted of the Libson girls is incoherent in a way that doesn't feel purposeful. Nothing adds up the way it does in Lolita. All the little details we learn about them feel random. There's a lot of time spent describing Lux but never in a way that comes across as like, unintentionally revealing.

    This makes the messaging of the book come across a bit shallow and hypocritical to me. It doesn't feel like it's actually saying anything meaningful about the voyeurism it's clearly trying to deconstruct. I think it's also really weird that Lux is the only sister that the reader gets to learn anything about, and the others are just like, one single entity.

    I admire what The Virgin Suicides was trying to do and it has some truly beautiful lines. There are some moments that do feel meaningful, and I get why it stuck with people. But overall I found it really frustrating. Am I being too harsh? This is a rare case for me where I didn't like this book but I really wish I did bc it has merit in some ways. Idk

    by 87penguinstapdancing

    2 Comments

    1. Virgin suicides 6/10, a solidly written work with mediocre characterization and prose. Lolita 10/10, deeply upsetting but in the conversation for the single greatest piece of postwar English language prose

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