We see the lives of the Lisbon sisters through the eyes of the anonymous group of boys that narrates the whole book. These boys are obsessed with them; within the first few pages of the book they'd confessed to us that they freely stalked the girls and watched their every move, even before the suicides started. The Lisbon girls, they said to us, were perfect. But it soon becomes apparent that the idea of the Lisbon girls that these boys had in mind is different than the reality. Despite their claims, they don't see the Lisbon girls as they are, only as what they want them to be. The Lisbon girls are perfect because to them they're not human. To them they're a blank canvas in which they could foist their ideas about adolescent sexuality and what a perfect woman is like. They're projecting their fantasies to them; they don't see the girls as living and breathing humans with thoughts and feelings of their own. They talked about wanting to know them better, that their interest in them ran deep, but it's clear that they're saying this as a way to mitigate their guilt, years later. In the present, when the suicides happened, they don't want to make an effort to get to know these girls better, because deep down they know, that if they do, their images of them shatter, and they won't be the "pure" "perfect" Lisbon girls that they adore anymore. They are like Trip, who left Lux alone because he began to see that Lux was not some angel conjured up through adolescent fantasy like he and the rest of them imagined her to be, rather, she was a human being made of flesh with her own thoughts and emotions, complicated in her humanity. Trip didn't like seeing the real Lux and so he left. The boys decry him for leaving, but they would too, if they saw the real girls and not their own fantasy.
This book is blatantly voyeuristic. We are seeing these girls' live through the eyes of others. Because of that, it's very easy to get swept up in the way the boys see them. It's very easy to see the Lisbon girls as angels, as the "pure" and "perfect" girls that these boys convinced them to be. The boys see the girls as possession, and their view of them are colored with paternalism and nostalgia. Every women they encountered later in life are compared to the Lisbon girls and each of these women fell short of the mark, because they're real, because they're made of flesh, because they're not shadows. The Lisbon girls are perfect because the boys convinced them to be. They saw the girls like the way you and I saw a song in your childhood that when you first hear it, years ago, you hate it, but now years later, you've come to like that song, not because it was good, but because it reminded you of the past, of the "good old days." The boys didn't hate the girls, of course, but the girls have the same function to them as the song to us. Maybe, back in the day, the boys did love the Lisbon girls, colored with their own perceptions and fantasies of course, but years later their love's wildly exaggerated and painted thickly with their own sense of nostalgia. The girls, already shadows of the boys' fantasies in the time of suicides, became more distorted with the passing of time.
And that's why I couldn't give the book five stars. Reading this book is like watching a car crash unfolds in front of you, slow motion style, but you can't do anything about it. The girls need someone to help them, but the boys are so busy stroking themselves with the fantasy they conjured up of these girls to see them for who they really are, and what the girls need most is someone to see them as flesh and blood and not some "perfect" "pure" angel. I know this is what Mr Eugenides intends to happen, but still I can't shake the bile that forms in my mouth. While I understand the themes and appreciate the writing, I can't get over my disgust over the boys' patronizing and paternalistic voyeurism to give this book a perfect five star rating.
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