The central question of the book is how do we respond to death. That question is made all the more difficult when there is really nothing that anyone can know about the real circumstances of those deaths. So the suicides of the Lisbon girls, beginning with the gruesome defenestration of the youngest daughter, Cecilia, who dies not from the fall but from impaling herself on a fence. It is a gruesome beginning of the book, and that incident sets into motion each subsequent action of the novel.
The novel works through the deaths of the girls via the chronological events of the late 1970s with the intrusion of a separate narrative strain of the boys who knew the girls, attempting to make sense of the events years later. This second narrative strain works as a commentary on events, but it also pushes the issue of making sense of loss. The boys are haunted by their love, or nostalgia or regret or lust, for the girls years later. These boys, now men, attempt to solve the mystery, collecting evidence after the house is cleared out, compiling interviews with relevant parties, and piecing together their own memories of the events.
But what the boys, and the readers, come to know is that the facts, the evidence, the memories are never enough. They are attempts to capture the ephemeral existence of the Lisbon girls. These were girls who could not be captured in life and they cannot be captured in death. They are, as Shelley wrote in Adonais of Keats, "Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."
