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.

That's the very first sentence of Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. I've only finished a chapter, and his writing has pulled me back into the world of literature like a smack to the face. I know I just extolled the virtues of Weisberger's writing, and I don't take that back, but this is so different from chicklit that I can't even begin to describe it. Eugenides has such an amazing ability to describe people, places, situations, that within 20 pages, the neighborhood is real and the characters are well-fleshed out, even though it is taking place in an unnamed town and I have no idea what decade he's writing in, let alone what the narrator's name is... (the back of the book says the 1970s.. whoops, I missed that.)

The story begins with a description of the Lisbon family. There are five girls (13, 14, 15, 16 and 17), all living under a super severe mother who refuses to let them out of the house or have a normal teenage social life. You know the type of house - probably a mustard yellow or pea green colored awning sort of house with the shades drawn and such. No one in the neighborhood ever sees the girls interacting with people outside (except for at school). The narrator is the voice of a boy in the neighborhood (and the male population is fascinated by these shut-in girls, to say the least). He's speaking about this particular year in the past tense, so I'm assuming he's retelling his story of the year that the Lisbon girls committed suicide.

Now I don't know if they are all successful (so far only one of them has been) or why they're doing it (though Cecilia's response after her first attempt has been "Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl."), but, given the fact that in the present telling of the story, the father of the once close-knit family is now divorced and living alone in an efficiency apartment, I'm going to venture a guess that yes, at least a few of the Lisbon girls, if not all, are successful in their suicide attempts.

The way Eugenides describes things is amazing. I arrived at this book after reading Middlesex (Oprah told me to) this past summer. Middlesex is an incredibly well-written story about a hermaphrodite female who discovers her family history during her path to find her true identity. And it sounds corny and cheesy and new-agey when I sum it up like that, but I promise it isn't. Eugenides struck me as an author who could write very well and someone who has an amazing imagination when it comes to ideas for novels. It's not that anything in Middlesex was very fantastic or unrealistic, rather, the subject matter was just something I never thought anyone would consider writing about.

Anyway, during the Oprah show chit-chat about Eugenides's book, there was a comment made about how long they had waited for a second novel from him and how they were so glad that Middlesex had lived up to his debut novel (although the debut novel was released about 10 years earlier). His debut novel is The Virgin Suicides, so that's how this book ended up on my list. It's relative brevity at 249 pages also makes it tempting for me as a summer read. And of course the photo on the front cover of Kirsten Dunst made it a must add to the collection. (NB: I'm kidding. I'm actually mortified when I am forced to buy the "movie version" of books... you know what I mean, once there's a film adaptation, there's the push to try to sell the novel and so they change the cover art and then you feel like a poser if you end up buying that one instead of the original one because it took you until the movie came out to get around to reading something so good...)

I'll keep you posted on how it goes. I'm popping an Advil (this heat is too much for me) and settling down with the cats to read this one. If the reading gets to be too much, you'll find me at Target, purchasing Dexter: Season One, and watching that in its entirety.

Meanwhile, I continue to dread the end of Sunday.