Recommendations
Books Like The Virgin Suicides
Novels Like The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides is a haunting meditation on female interiority and male desire — five sisters seen entirely through the eyes of the boys who couldn't see them at all. These 8 novels share its elusive, lyrical quality, its preoccupation with girlhood, suburban enclosure, and the way that female experience remains opaque to those outside it.
- 1Buy
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Cal Stephanides tracing the Greek-American immigrant history that produced them — Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel is the natural companion to The Virgin Suicides; entirely different in scope (it spans three generations and two continents) and voice (a first-person narrator rather than a collective 'we') but sharing the debut's preoccupation with what society does to bodies and identities that don't fit its categories
- 2Buy
Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Ruth and Lucille Stone growing up on the shores of Fingerbone Lake after their mother's suicide — Robinson's debut shares The Virgin Suicides's portrait of girls in the shadow of female self-destruction, its meditative lyrical prose, and its interest in the different responses to loss: one sister absorbed by impermanence, the other insisting on the structures of ordinary life
- 3Buy
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Four friends from their college years through middle age, and the buried trauma that shapes all their relationships — Yanagihara's devastating novel shares The Virgin Suicides's portrait of the way that the people closest to us remain mysterious despite proximity, and its willingness to make grief and damage the center of a literary work rather than its context
- 4Buy
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A group of classics students at a Vermont college and the murder they committed — Tartt's debut shares The Virgin Suicides's structure (we know the outcome from the beginning; the novel is the reconstruction of how we got there), its portrait of a group of young people whose interior lives are collectively inaccessible to the narrator, and its atmosphere of retrospective obsession
- 5Buy
Picnic at Hanging Rock
by Joan Lindsay
A group of Australian schoolgirls who disappear at Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day 1900, and the effects of their disappearance on everyone who loved them — Lindsay's 1967 novel shares The Virgin Suicides's central mystery (young women who vanish into something beyond social explanation), its dreamlike atmospheric quality, and its portrait of female interiority as fundamentally opaque to the world that contains it
- 6Buy
The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Susie Salmon watching from heaven as her family navigates her murder and its aftermath — Sebold's debut shares The Virgin Suicides's dead-girl narrator structure (both novels are narrated from after the deaths, with the gap between the outside perspective and the female interior as the subject), its portrait of grief's long duration, and its interest in how a violent female death reshapes the community around it
- 7Buy
Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
Lee Fiora's four years at a New England boarding school — Sittenfeld's debut shares The Virgin Suicides's portrait of girlhood as a state of intense, frustrated longing in which one is perpetually observed and perpetually misunderstood, and its ability to render the social world of adolescence with painful specificity and without condescension
- 8Buy
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney in his suburban college town, the airborne toxic event, and his terror of death — DeLillo's novel is a suburban meditation from the same imaginative territory as The Virgin Suicides: the American suburb as a place where the ordinary surface of life barely conceals an underlying anxiety and violence; where Eugenides focuses on five girls, DeLillo focuses on a family, but both novels treat the suburb as a world in which the threat of death is always present beneath the managed surfaces
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