Items related to The Virgin Suicides

Eugenides, Jeffrey The Virgin Suicides ISBN 13: 9780446670258

The Virgin Suicides - Softcover

  • 3.79 out of 5 stars
    382,409 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780446670258: The Virgin Suicides

Synopsis

Juxtaposing the most common and the most gothic, the humorous and the tragic, author Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling portrait of youth and lost innocence. He takes us back to the elm-lined streets of suburbia in the seventies, and introduces us to the men whose lives have been forever changed by their fierce, awkward obsession with five doomed sisters: brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and pale, saintly Cecilia, whose spectacular demise inaugurates "the year of the suicides." This is the debut novel that caused a sensation and won immediate acclaim from the critics-a tender, wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

JEFFREY EUGENIDES was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford universities. The Virgin Suicides was published in 1993 and was adapted into a motion picture in 1999 by Sophia Coppola. His second novel, Middlesex, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in the fall of 2007.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

 

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, "This ain't TV, folks, this is how fast we go." He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.

 

Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized. But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon's razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities were blue. She didn't say a word, but when they parted her hands they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her budding chest.

 

That was in June, fish&-fly season, when each year our town is covered by the flotsam of those ephemeral insects. Rising in clouds from the algae in the polluted lake, they blacken windows, coat cars and streetlamps, plaster the municipal docks and festoon the rigging of sailboats, always in the same brown ubiquity of flying scum. Mrs. Scheer, who lives down the street, told us she saw Cecilia the day before she attempted suicide. She was standing by the curb, in the antique wedding dress with the shorn hem she always wore, looking at a Thunderbird encased in fish flies. "You better get a broom, honey," Mrs. Scheer advised. But Cecilia fixed her with her spiritualist's gaze. "They're dead," she said. "They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak. They don't even get to eat." And with that she stuck her hand into the foamy layer of bugs and cleared her initials: C.L.

 

We've tried to arrange the photographs chronologically, though the passage of so many years has made it difficult. A few are fuzzy but revealing nonetheless. Exhibit #1 shows the Lisbon house shortly before Cecilia's suicide attempt. It was taken by a real estate agent, Ms. Carmina D'Angelo, whom Mr. Lisbon had hired to sell the house his large family had long outgrown. As the snapshot shows, the slate roof had not yet begun to shed its shingles, the porch was still visible above the bushes, and the windows were not yet held together with strips of masking tape. A comfortable suburban home. The uppe-right second-story window contains a blur that Mrs. Lisbon identified as Mary Lisbon. "She used to tease her hair because she thought it was limp," she said years later, recalling how her daughter had looked for her brief time on earth. In the photograph Mary is caught in the act of blow-drying her hair. Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.

 

When the paramedics were satisfied they had reduced the bleeding to a trickle, they put Cecilia on a stretcher and carried her out of the house to the truck in the driveway. She looked like a tiny Cleopatra on an imperial litter. We saw the gangly paramedic with the Wyatt Earp mustache come out first—the one we'd call "Sheriff" when we got to know him better through these domestic tragedies—and then the fat one appeared, carrying the back end of the stretcher and stepping daintily across the lawn, peering at his police-issue shoes as though looking out for dog shit, though later, when we were better acquainted with the machinery, we knew he was checking the blood pressure gauge. Sweating and fumbling, they moved toward the shuddering, blinking truck. The fat one tripped on a lone croquet wicket. In revenge he kicked it; the wicket sprang loose, plucking up a spray of dirt, and fell with a ping on the driveway. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lisbon burst onto the porch, trailing Cecilia's flannel nightgown, and let out a long wail that stopped time. Under the molting trees and above the blazing, overexposed grass those four figures paused in tableau: the two slaves offering the victim to the altar (lifting the stretcher into the truck), the priestess brandishing the torch (waving the flannel nightgown), and the drugged virgin rising up on her elbows, with an otherworldly smile on her pale lips.

 

Mrs. Lisbon rode in the back of the EMS truck, but Mr. Lisbon followed in the station wagon, observing the speed limit. Two of the Lisbon daughters were away from home, Therese in Pittsburgh at a science convention, and Bonnie at music camp, trying to learn the flute after giving up the piano (her hands were too small), the violin (her chin hurt), the guitar (her fingertips bled), and the trumpet (her upper lip swelled). Mary and Lux, hearing the siren, had run home from their voice lesson across the street with Mr. Jessup. Barging into that crowded bathroom, they registered the same shock as their parents at the sight of Cecilia with her spattered forearms and pagan nudity. Outside, they hugged on a patch of uncut grass that Butch, the brawny boy who mowed it on Saturdays, had missed. Across the street, a truckful of men from the Parks Department attended to some of our dying elms. The EMS siren shrieked, going away, and the botanist and his crew withdrew their insecticide pumps to watch the truck. When it was gone, they began spraying again. The stately elm tree, also visible in the foreground of Exhibit #1, has since succumbed to the fungus spread by Dutch elm beetles, and has been cut down.

 

The paramedics took Cecilia to Bon Secours Hospital on Kercheval and Maumee. In the emergency room Cecilia watched the attempt to save her life with an eerie detachment. Her yellow eyes didn't blink, nor did she flinch when they stuck a needle in her arm. Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under her chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

 

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen&-year-old girl."

 

The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecilia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese). They were short, round-buttocked in denim, with roundish cheeks that recalled that same dorsal softness. Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils. No one could understand how Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had produced such beautiful children. Mr. Lisbon taught high-school math. He was thin, boyish, stunned by his own gray hair. He had a high voice, and when Joe Larson told us how Mr. Lisbon had cried when Lux was later rushed to the hospital during her own suicide scare, we could easily imagine the sound of his girlish weeping.

 

Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers. But the plump arms, the brutally cut steel-wool hair, and the librarian's glasses foiled us every time. We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn't come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons, or on Sundays when the family drove in their paneled station wagon to St. Paul's Catholic Church on the Lake. On those mornings Mrs. Lisbon assumed a queenly iciness. Clutching her good purse, she checked each daughter for signs of makeup before allowing her to get in the car, and it was not unusual for her to send Lux back inside to put on a less revealing top. None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh.

 

Only one boy had ever been allowed in the house. Peter Sissen had helped Mr. Lisbon install a working model of the solar system in his classroom at school, and in return Mr. Lisbon had invited him for dinner. He told us the girls had kicked him continually under the table, from every direction, so that he couldn't tell who was doing it. They gazed at him with their blue febrile eyes and smiled, showing their crowded teeth, the only feature of the Lisbon girls we could ever find fault with. Bonnie was the only one who didn't give Peter Sissen a secret look or kick. She only said grace and ate her food silently, lost in the piety of a fifteen-year-old. After the meal Peter Sissen asked to go to the bathroom, and because Therese and Mary were both in the downstairs one, giggling and whispering, he had to use the girls', upstairs. He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled pan ties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space. In the bathroom, running the faucet to cloak the sounds of his search,...

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherGrand Central Publishing
  • Publication date1994
  • ISBN 10 0446670251
  • ISBN 13 9780446670258
  • BindingPaperback
  • LanguageEnglish
  • Number of pages256
  • Rating
    • 3.79 out of 5 stars
      382,409 ratings by Goodreads

Buy Used

Condition: Good
Item in good condition. Textbooks...
View this item

FREE shipping within U.S.A.

Destination, rates & speeds

Buy New

View this item

US$ 13.31 shipping from United Kingdom to U.S.A.

Destination, rates & speeds

Search results for The Virgin Suicides

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Softcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00084848323

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 4.62
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 4 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Softcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Acceptable. Item in acceptable condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00085262257

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 5.07
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 5 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Softcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00085279837

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 5.07
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 5 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Softcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Very Good. Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00086129751

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 5.07
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 2 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Softcover

Seller: Goodwill of Colorado, COLORADO SPRINGS, CO, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Acceptable. This item is in overall acceptable condition. Covers and dust jackets are intact but may have heavy wear including creases, bends, edge wear, curled corners or minor tears as well as stickers or sticker-residue. Pages are intact but may have minor curls, bends or moderate to considerable highlighting/ writing. Binding is intact; however, spine may have heavy wear. Digital codes may not be included and have not been tested to be redeemable and/or active. A well-read copy overall. Please note that all items are donated goods and are in used condition. Orders shipped Monday through Friday! Your purchase helps put people to work and learn life skills to reach their full potential. Orders shipped Monday through Friday. Your purchase helps put people to work and learn life skills to reach their full potential. Thank you! Seller Inventory # 466SK8001X83

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 5.09
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Softcover

Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Very Good. Very Good condition. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp. Seller Inventory # K09B-02995

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 5.79
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Softcover

Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Good condition. A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains. Seller Inventory # L15N-01892

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 5.79
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Softcover

Seller: New Legacy Books, Annandale, NJ, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: VeryGood. Fast shipping and order satisfaction guaranteed. A portion of your purchase benefits Non-Profit Organizations, First Aid and Fire Stations! Seller Inventory # 5FS0000014CG_ns

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 2.49
Convert currency
Shipping: US$ 3.49
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Grand Central Publishing, 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used paperback

Seller: The Maryland Book Bank, Baltimore, MD, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

paperback. Condition: Very Good. Reprint. Used - Very Good. Seller Inventory # 1-K-4-1682

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 2.21
Convert currency
Shipping: US$ 4.20
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Eugenides, Jeffrey
Published by Warner Books (NY), 1994
ISBN 10: 0446670251 ISBN 13: 9780446670258
Used Paperback

Seller: ThriftBooks-Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Paperback. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.55. Seller Inventory # G0446670251I3N10

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 6.47
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 2 available

Add to basket

There are 40 more copies of this book

View all search results for this book