Volume 40, Number 11 · June 10, 1993
Martyrs on the Block
By Alice Truax
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 249 pp., $18.00
During the last decade, some writers from the generation that grew up in the suburbs have returned to this previously discredited site and reinvented it. Neighborhoods that once seemed impervious to magic of any kind have become increasingly popular settings, in novels and movies, for the fabulous and the bizarre. Beautiful women appear naked on respectable front porches, strange constellations rise in the night sky over identical rooftops; fathers and punks engage in epic battle on modest front lawns. Alice McDermott, David Lynch, Alice Hoffman, and Steven Spielberg all explore fantasies of suburbia with varying measures of affection and irony. Jeffrey Eugenides, who has just published his stylish novel The Virgin Suicides, belongs in this list.
Review, 2021 words
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