The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

What it's about (from Goodreads): This beautiful and sad first novel, recently adapted for a major motion picture, tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year-old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter’s spectacular demise by self-defenestration, which inaugurates “the year of the suicides.”

What I learned: This is a hard one for me. I'm not really sure what I learned from this book. I finished it several days ago - and have read another book in the meantime - and I'm still thinking about it. What really stuck with me was the unusual narration: it's in first person plural, written from the point of view of the girls' male contemporaries. The book is written two decades after the fact so that the boys aren't really boys anymore, but the tone feels more like teenage boys. This is, ostensibly, a story about five sisters who all committed suicide, but I really think that it's a story about how people perceive other families. I never got to know any of the sisters other than one or two unique qualities that defined them in broad ways (Cecilia was the strange one, Lux the slutty one (for lack of a better term), etc.). There was very little dialogue throughout the book and the reader is stuck inside the heads of the male classmates of the girls. These boys are almost creepily obsessed with the Lisbon family. I am still unsure how I feel about this book, but it's a little unsettling. If I had to pick one thing I learned from this book, it's that people think in very different ways. The boys' constant vigilance of the Lisbon house, girls, and the girls' actions is so different from anything I could imagine doing. Even other people in the neighborhood keep an eye on the house, seeing enough to tell stories decades later. No explanation is ever given for the girls' suicides and Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon's feelings and reactions are never clearly shown. I feel like this book is a commentary on modern life and I should understand it as an allegory or something, but I'm having a hard time seeing it.

If you've read The Virgin Suicides, what did you learn?