The novel The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides can be described as a novel about youth and lost innocence, a perennial subject for novelists, but treated in this novel in a different and highly effective way. The novel is set in the 1970s well into Middle American territory, raising all of the social attitudes of that time and place and showing once more that youth is not always the innocent time adults would like to believe it to be.

             For that mater, the comfortable existence of the people in this novel is itself an illusion. The novel is set at a time when many of their verities were being challenged by change in the country, change that middle-class Americans resisted and that in some ways left them behind. This community was the result of white flight to suburbia from a decade before, with the men (primarily) traveling some distance to work in the city, then to return home to the suburbs. The streets of suburbia are regular and much the same for block after block, allowing those who lived there to be with people just like themselves, in some ways fearful of people not like themselves, meaning the people they left the city to escape, meaning the poor and black for the most part.

             It is quite clear from the start of the novel that there is something deeply wrong in this otherwise complacent community, and more particularly with the girls in one family, the Lisbon family. These girls have attempted suicide, each in turn, with the first (Cecelia) succeeding. A statement she made to her doctor on a normal visit some time before her suicide was telling. When the doctor tells her she is not old enough to know how bad life gets, she answers, "Obviously, Doctor . . . you have never been a thirteen-year-old girl" (Eugenides 7). This statement shows the distance between the adult world and the world of this girl and others like her, an the attempted suicides of the other girls in the family shows that any lessons taught by Cecilia's suicide were not learned by the parents or the community.