The Suiciders

by Travis Jeppesen

My friends are merely effigies I keep to remind me of the animal inside my mind. -- from The Suiciders

During the first decade of the second millennium, a group of seven friends -- Zach, Lukas, Adam, Matthew, Peter, Arnold, and Taylor -- occupy an indeterminate house in an unidentified American suburb and replay a continuous loop of eternal exile and youth. Permanently in their late teens, the seven young men are as fluid and mutable ciphers, although endowed with highly reflexive, and wholly generic, internal lives. -Once you learn how to love, you will also learn how to mutilate it... I want to feel so free you can't even imagine... Let's get out there and eat some popsicles. There is work to be done.- Eventually, the group decides to remove themselves from the safe confines of the house and to embark upon a road trip to the end of the world with their friend, the Whore, and their pet parrot, Jesus H. Christ. The Suiciders is their legacy.

Chronicling the last days of a religious cult in rural America, Jeppesen's debut novel Victims was praised by the Village Voice for its -artfully fractured vision of memory and escape, - and by Punk Planet for its masterful balance of -the laconic speech of teenagers with philosophical density.- In The Suiciders, Jeppesen ventures beyond any notion of fixed identity. The result is a dazzling, perversely accurate portrait of American life in the new century, conveyed as a post-punk nouveau roman.

Genres: Fiction

233 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Travis Jeppesen is the author of Settlers Landing, Victims, Wolf at the Door, The Suiciders, All Fall, 16 Sculptures, and See You Again in Pyongyang, among other books.

Reviews

[BAG of Books · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think the basic plot is, this group of drug addict friends wants to make a suicide pact, so one of them kills his cousin. This gives them a "reason" to go through with the suicide pact.

This is a stream of consciousness style novel. I learned while reading this book that I don't like stream of consciousness writing. After I was done, I used it to make cut up paper collages. I like it better as a collage.

[ipsit · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to talk about writing that can go almost anywhere at any time, from word to word, you should be talking about Jeppesen. On its face a novel about a bunch of punk squatters who fuck each other and eat drugs constantly, The Suiciders is really more a mechanism where every line is a weapon in and of itself. Paragraph by paragraph this book just deluges every sort of sense and sentiment in the most hyper-violent language this side of Guyotat or Sade. “TVLand is so much better than the WWW,” it goes. “I need world. I’m fried inside myself tonight. There are so many warblings out there to satiate the hunger that de-defines your spite version. I need a hammer. I will only go into the water if I am holding one.” Big balls, big syllables, big fuck.

[Emma Madden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't even know. Maybe it was good?

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Formal experimentation for its own sake. Fauxvant garde nonsense. Pretentious claptrap. Avoid.

[Iza Cupial · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Experimental fiction!!!

[Matthew Hinea · Rating 4 out of 5]

at times i felt like reading this was 'the best thing ever.' at other times, i felt annoyed by the writing. like maybe it could have been shorter?? at its best, the sentences seem to exist only to entertain you, or to liberate you from the fetters of conventional language use.

my only points of reference for this kind of writing are stein and maybe blake butler. whereas stein seems to write sentences that sound like they should mean something but mean absolutely nothing (except for what they communicate rhetorically), i feel like travis jeppesen writes sentences that have no intention of meaning anything, and actually end up meaning things beyond what they mean rhetorically.

The best sentence from this book that also to some degrees seems to summarize the 'goal' or at least the philosophical background of the project:

"Here, try not to channel someone else's voice for a minute. You can'd do it, can you?" (196)

definitely refreshing to read something so free and fun given the trendy popularity identity-based minimalist realism tho

four stars ****