The Virgin Suicides

Written eleven years prior to Middlesex, this is the first and only other novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. The Virgin Suicides is appropriately placed into the subgenre of the 'suburban gothic,' which, to those unfamiliar, concentrates on the same psychology and disturbance that the film American Beauty does.

"'What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.'"

"The Virgin Mary has been appearing in our city, bringing her message of peace to a crumbling world."

"'We baptized her, we confirmed her, and now she believes this crap.'"
"On the shelf stood a photograph of his first wife, whom he had loved ever since divorcing her."

"'It was like anthing else in this sad society,' he told us. 'They didn't have a relationship with God.'"
"'Fuck the Holy Mother,' he said, despondent. 'Fuck God.'"

"It was the only time we ever heard her speak, and we were surprised by the maturity of her voice. More than anything she sounded old and tired."

"She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand."

"A human body falls fast. The main thing was just that: the fact of a person taking on completely physical properties, falling at the speed of a rock. It didn't matter whether her brain continued to flash on the way down, or if she regretted what she'd done, or if she had time to focus on the fence spikes shooting toward her. Her mind no longer existed in any way that mattered."

"Occasionally we heard gunshots coming from the ghetto, but our fathers insisted it was only cars backfiring."

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made our mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

"The first person singular ceases almost entirely, the effect akin to a camera's pulling away from the characters at the end of a movie, to show, in a series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them."

"A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it."

"Though he retrieved his books from his locker, we knew they were only props and that he was destined for capitalism and not scholarship, as his drug deals already augured."

"In the orange light the students' heads look like sea anemones, undulating quietly, and the silence of the room was that of the ocean floor."

"'She was the still point of the turning world,' he told us, quoting Eliot, whose Collected Poems he had found on the shelf of the detoxification center."

"It was all new to him: the memorization of strategic speechs, the trial runs of possible conversations, the yogic deep breathing, all leading up to the blind, headlong dive into the staticky sea of telephone lines."

"'Most people never taste that kind of love,' he said, taking courage amid the disaster of his life. 'At least I tasted it once, man.'"

"WIllard said that once, while they lay together in the field house, Lux asked him if he thought what they had done was dirty. 'I knew what to say. I said no. Then she grabs my hand and goes, 'You like me, don't you?' I didn't say anything. It's best to keep chicks guessing.'"

"We waited to see what would happen with the leaves. For two weeks they had been falling, covering lawns, because in those days we still had trees."

"We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth. Their answers sounded rehearsed, relying on concepts of self-esteem and other words clumsy on their tongues."

"'I ask you: is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse? I'm forty-seven years old and live alone.'"

"(All day, however, his name had been continuously announcing itself against her skin.)"

"'God, I was so young,' he said years later. 'So scared. So was she. I took her hand and we didn't know which way to do it. To interlace fingers or not. Finally, we did. That's what I remember the most. The finger thing.'"

"'Do you think there's a God?'"

"Lux said, in the middle, 'I always screw things up. I always do,' and began to sob."

"'It's weird, I mean, I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then.'"

"'You never get over it,' she said. 'But you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.'"

"It was crazy to make love on a roof at any time, but to make love on the roof in winter suggested derangement, desperation, self-destructiveness far in excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees."

"At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling."

"But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin."

"The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season."

"Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair. Count the drunks in Russia or the suicides at Cornell."

"She spun slowly, and at one point her face broke out of the seaweed of balloons, showing us the reality of the death she'd chosen. It was a world of blackening eye sockets, blood pooling in lower extremities, stiffening joints."

"Their smooth blue hearts looked like water balloons, and the rest of their organs possessed a similar textbook clarity."

"For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on. Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives."

"'Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.'"

"Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn't even had."

"Inside, we got to know girls who had never considered taking their own lives. We fed them drinks, danced with them until they became unsteady, and led them out to the screened-in veranda. They lost their high heels on the way, kissed us in the humid darkness, and then slipped away to throw up demurely in the outside bushes. Some of us held their heads as they vomited, then let them rinse their mouths with beer, after which we got back to kissing again. The girls were monstrous in their formal dresses, each built around a wire cage. Pounds of hair were secured atop their heads. Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived--bound, in other words, for life."

"As we came out into the first alcoholic dawn of our lives (a bleachy fade-in, overused through the years now by the one-note director), our lips were swollen from kissing and our mouths throbbing with the taste of girls."

"We got to see how truly unimaginative our suburb was, everything laid out on a grid whose bland uniformity the trees had hidden and the old ruses of differentiated architectural styles lost their power to make us feel unique."

"In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws."