That's not to say that if a man had made 'The Virgin Suicides' it would have been a worse movie, but it's safe to assume it would have been a rather different one. It's a movie adaptation that's filled with love. She connects with the essential purity of Eugenides' story, stripping it down to its bare essentials and cutting straight to everything that's wonderful about it.

There's no irony in Coppola's treatment she nabs all of the book's humor without layering on too many smirks or ironic winks. Sofia Coppola's adaptation of 'The Virgin Suicides' - it's her directorial debut, and she also adapted the screenplay - captures the loveliest visuals and bits of language from Eugenides' book and faithfully, but not slavishly, transfers them to the screen. Leave it to a woman to boil all the excess, leaden moisture out of Eugenides' book and leave just the bare-bones poetry. If all boys had as many exposed nerve endings as they seem to, we'd live in a world with no skyscrapers and no bridges. The book's narrators are a group of boys who've grown into men, but who can't leave their memories of five neighborhood girls, the Lisbon sisters, behind them.

It's a tender and beautifully written book, one that makes the case once and for all that boys can be a sentimental and perceptive lot, but there's one big problem with it: It's so obsessively detailed that by the end it's almost unreadable. Jeffrey Eugenides' novel 'The Virgin Suicides,' set in 1970s suburbia, is a creamy, moonbeam-laden love letter to the girls of the day, in their French-cut T-shirts, bell-bottoms and Love's Baby Soft.

The virgin suïcides book plot