All Families are Psychotic (Paperback)

True to Coupland's style, the book reads lightning fast. The author punctuates his narrative with clipped dialogue and punchy exchanges that advance the palpable sense of unease and tension running throughout. And amidst the acrimony, Coupland throws a genuine caper into the plot, involving Prince William's farewell letter to his mother, Princess Diana. Add to that the oppressive heat and the postmodern, pop culture junkyard of Coupland's Florida setting, and the entire book brews and builds like a roiling tropical storm. --S. Duda --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

As this darkly funny novel unwinds, we learn that not just Wade but three of the five family members have terminal illnesses. Their love lives are as bleak as their medical prognoses: Wade unintentionally has casual, unprotected sex with his father's young girlfriend, Sarah and her husband are cheating on each other with another couple, and Bryan's violent and unpredictable partner makes him think she'll abort their child while scheming to sell it to unsavoury, suburban baby-traffickers. As one expects in a Coupland story, the usual panaceas for human ills-religion, counselling, drugs-exist only to be mocked for their inadequacies. The story is set in an appropriately illusive landscape of Disney World, cheap Florida motels, and NASA launch sites.

Yet, despite the Drummonds' tendency to get involved in very messy situations, including hostage-taking, theft, shady deals, and public fights (dad Ted, for example, is in serious debt, rolls a daughter-in-law's rental car, and shoots and wounds both his ex-wife and son Wade), there is an odd sweetness to the story, and a very unexpected happy ending. The latter even has overtones of a religious miracle. After all, the epigraph Coupland chose was not the obvious Tolstoyan one mentioned above, but a more contemporary pop-culture quotation from Jenny Holzer, whose electric signs with fortune-cookie-like sayings have adorned art galleries and Time Square billboards:

"IN A DREAM YOU SAW
A WAY TO SURVIVE
AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY."

The overall theme of All Families are Psychotic is the Big One for most novelists: how do we meet the conditions of life (including our own family's limitations) and the certainty of death? Is there any real pleasure or unalloyed joy, let alone love, available to us? "Our lives are geared mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probability," he writes. "... A day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn't."

It's been argued that the true satirist needs a moral core. To show up others as wrong or foolish, you must feel you know something about what is right and wise. Coupland, while exploring the often comic misadventures of the Drummonds, does, at least indirectly, affirm some surprisingly traditional values. Love and hope are worth something, as is honesty (a rare commodity in the Age of Advertising). Even a cynical pharmaceutical millionaire and a very experienced African prostitute turn out to have proverbial hearts of gold in this novel-a tired trope which Coupland almost makes work. Fans of his earlier novels will find enough of his trademark humour and satire to keep them entertained, while those who lean towards more traditional character-driven fiction may be surprised to discover sufficient substance as well. Coupland's work here shows he merits more than his 15 minutes of fame as the chronicler and inventor of Generation X. John Oughton (Books in Canada) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.