From the Publisher
Psychosis: any form of severe mental disorder in which the
individual's contact with reality becomes highly
distorted.
Douglas Coupland, the author whom Tom Wolfe calls "one of the
freshest, most exciting voices of the novel today," delivers his
tenth book in ten years of writing, with All Families Are
Psychotic. Coupland recently has been compared to Jack Kerouac
and F. Scott Fitzgerald, yet he is a man firmly grounded in the
current era. The novel is a sizzling and sharp-witted entertainment
that resounds with eternal human yearnings.
In the opening pages, 65-year-old Janet Drummond checks the clock
in her cheap motel room near Cape Canaveral, takes her prescription
pills and does a rapid tally of the whereabouts of her three
children: Wade, the eldest, in and out of jail and still radiating
"the glint"; suicidal Bryan, whose girlfriend, the vowel-free Shw,
is pregnant; and Sarah, the family's shining light, an astronaut
preparing to be launched into space as the star of a shuttle
mission. They will all arrive in Orlando today - along with Janet's
ex-husband Ted and his new trophy wife - setting the stage for the
most disastrous family reunion in the history of fiction. Florida
may never recover from their version of fun in the sun.
The last time the family got together, there was gunplay and an
ensuing series of HIV infections. Now, what should be a celebration
turns instead into a series of mishaps and complications that place
the family members in constant peril. When the reformed Wade
attempts to help his dad out of a financial jam and pay off his own
bills at the fertility clinic, his plan spins quickly out of
control. Adultery, hostage-taking, a letter purloined from Princess
Diana's coffin, heart attacks at Disney World, bankruptcy,
addiction and black-market negotiations - Coupland piles on one
deft, comic plot twist after another, leaving you reaching for your
seat belt. When the crash comes, it is surprisingly sweet.
Janet contemplates her family, and where it all went wrong. "People
are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people''s family. The
only family that ever horrifies you is your own." During the
writing, Coupland described the book as being about "the horrible
things that families do to each other and how it makes them
strong." He commented: "Families who are really good to each other,
I've noticed, tend to dissipate, so I wonder how awful a family
would have to be to stick together."
Coupland's first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
Culture, became a cultural phenomenon, affixing a buzzword and
a vocabulary to a generation and going on to sell over a million
copies. The novels that followed were all bestsellers, and his work
has continued to show a fascination with the digital,
brand-conscious, media-dense culture of contemporary North American
society, leading some to peg him as "an up-to-the-minute cultural
reference engine." Meanwhile, his deeper interests in how human
beings function in this spiritual vacuum have become increasingly
apparent. For example, the character Wade contemplates his father:
"What would the world have to offer Ted Drummond, and the
men like him, a man whose usefulness to the culture had vanished
somewhere around the time of Windows 95? Golf? Gold? Twenty-four
hour stock readouts?" Janet, on the other hand, nears a kind of
peace with life: "Time erases both the best and the worst of us."
All Families Are Psychotic shows Coupland being just as
concerned for the grown-ups as for the kids.
From the Jacket
Praise for All Families Are Psychotic
"[All Families Are Psychotic] works because
Coupland writes as sweetly and cleanly as a vapour trail."
-Elle Canada
"[Douglas Coupland's] focus is always on the moral implications, on
human relationships and feelings. There is an almost spiritual
aspect to his work that makes it emotionally compelling, and
redemption is always at hand to pull his vision back from the brink
of apocalypse. But more important perhaps, Coupland can write
beautifully. . . . we shouldn't ignore writers like Coupland who
have vision and a thing or two to say. . . . Coincidence features
heavily, there is the usual cast of zany characters, an outlandish
series of events, the signature cynicism and wry humour - and
transcendent moments of epiphany. . . . Coupland Country is
ultimately a funny, quirky, compassionate and forgiving place to
inhabit." -Toronto Star
"With All Families Are Psychotic author Douglas Coupland
has completed a seven-novel mission: he's finally moved his
characters out of the rumpus room. . . . offers a better view of
our glittering, behemoth spaceship Earth than most offerings by the
usual literary crowd. . . . Coupland ought to be our guide to
today's chilled, illed psychonauts of inner and outer space."
-Quill & Quire
"There is wit à la early Pynchon or McGuane or Elmore Leonard, and
the story does hum along - amazing twists and turns, snappy
dialogue, meditations on the future, on postwar concerns:
technology, feminism, consumerism, crime, junk culture, genetics."
-The Globe and Mail
"Subtly subversive." -Georgia Straight
"As rich as an ovenful of fresh-baked brownies and twice as nutty.
. . . Everyone with a strange family - that is, everyone with a
family - will laugh knowingly at the feuding, conducted with a
maestro's ear for dialogue and a deep understanding of humanity.
Coupland, once the wise guy of Generation X, has become a
wise man." -People Magazine
"[Douglas Coupland] has ventured past his trademark satirical style
to write an outright farce. . . . [He] has written what is probably
his best novel to date. . . . The intricate pacing [is] more like
17th-century drama - John Webster, Ben Jonson or Molière - than
slacker sitcom, which is truly a revelation. . . ." -L.A.
Weekly
"Although the Drummonds appear to be self-destructing, author
Coupland reveals himself to be, somewhat surprisingly, an optimist.
For him, the new millennium is an era full of promise and potential
miracles, despite the seemingly terminal state of the world."
-Booklist
"Taking whacks at Florida is a bit like shooting a whale in a
barrel, but Coupland does it with precision and originality. . . .
vivid and true." -Washington Post
"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. . . . The entire book brews and builds like a
roiling tropical storm." -Amazon.com
"Chirpy, bright and strenuously zany." -The New York
Times
"Coupland mines tabloid territory for sensationalism, which he then
undermines with ironic self-awareness. The can-you-top-this
atmosphere will keep Coupland's Gen-X readers (the ones who
religiously watch Cops for the laughs) totally amused."
-Publishers Weekly
"It seemed paradoxical that a writer so revered for his hipness
resembled, in practice, nobody so much as Jane Austen.... In the
resultant unravelling there isn't a boring page." -The Literary
Review
"He gets beneath their skin, convincing us that their lives of
Gothic chaos contain their own perverse logic - a postmodern take
on Tolstoy's maxim that 'all unhappy families are alike in their
unhappiness.' For a writer so immersed in the slippery textures of
our time, Coupland reveals old-fashioned concern for the nature of
our social interaction. He questions why we value what we do, and
the price we pay to get it. He confronts our imprisoning luxury,
with its Faustian freedoms. His hi-tech flights of fancy conceal a
baffled humanist; one who echoes G. K. Chesterton's remark that
'people are much more eccentric than they are meant to be.'"
-Sunday Express
"Coupland manages to balance the more weighty strands of the story
with an absurdly satirical vision, without compromising either. At
the same time, he mines the present with such intensity that it
seems like science fiction. This strange, often miraculous fusion
has you laughing, thinking and crying all at once, and suggests
that Coupland's writing is becoming more mature than ever."
-Evening Standard
"The most frightening element of the novel gives the lie to the
truth of its title. Fantastic characters and a beyond-belief plot
are insurance policies for white knuckles all the way, punctuated
with belly laughs." -i-D Magazine
"…being broken is a way of being together. Despite the
meltdown of the family, this book lets us know that we don't need
to worry. . . . Coupland's novel is ultimately optimistic. Like
Anne Tyler, he intertwines the garish and unmeaning events he
describes with a thread of hope, sometimes contained in a
reminiscence of childhood, sometimes projected into a possible
future. . . . Coupland presents us with a heroine rising above the
mess of modern America, an honestly trusting person moving through
the downbeat style and the defeated, disconnected world of modern
America." -Times Literary Supplement
"[Douglas Coupland] is on an incredible creative roll. His
last four novels . . . are so good and so distinctive that they
seem to me to mark a genuine seismic shift in the literary
landscape. Could it be that not everyone is as convinced of
Coupland's brilliance as I am? . . . . This is high melodrama:
divorce, dysfunction, inter-generational sex, marital infidelity,
life-threatening illnesses (everyone has at least one) and
spacemen. But Coupland does not tell it in the florid, intense
style of the melodrama queen. The tone is rather cool and slow,
almost like a song played a beat behind the bar. . . .
sophisticated . . . dreamlike." [full review also compares Doug to
Martin Amis and Haruki Murakami] -The New Statesman
"Coupland has been growing stronger with each subsequent book
and has since Girlfriend In A Coma been making his pitch
for best young writer in America (despite being born and brought up
in Canada's Vancouver) -The Sunday Herald
Praise for Douglas Coupland
"Reading his increasingly assured prose is like watching a teen
idol take on Hamlet and pull it off." -Toronto Life
"The self-wrought oracle of our age." -Saturday
Night
"Douglas Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation
with a fidelity that should shame most professional
Zeitgeist chasers." -Jay McInerney, The New York Times
Book Review
Miss Wyoming
"Equal parts love story and absurdist parable, it seamlessly meshes
Coupland's trademark ironic detachment with an unapologetic
romanticism that has been absent from his previous work. The
intelligence and humour of Coupland's prose engages the mind while
the unabashed yearning of his characters hooks the heart."
-Maclean's
Girlfriend in a Coma
"To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be
hyperbole…. Girlfriend approaches an eccentric jeremiad
worthy of Kurt Vonnegut." -The Washington Post
Polaroids from the Dead
"He bravely commits himself to material that is rich
and deeply felt." -The New York Times
Microserfs
"The novel's real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired
pop-culture references that spin the '70s, '80s, and '90s … and
Coupland uses them with relish." -Entertainment Weekly
Life After God
"Coupland has at his disposal a dazzling array of
tools with which to shape the emotions of his readers: the whimsy
of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, the irony of a young Kurt Vonnegut,
the poignancy of early John Irving." -Bookpage
Shampoo Planet
"Having called Coupland's first book a Catcher in
the Rye for our time, I repeat myself. Nobody has a better
finger on the pulse of the twenty-something generation."
-Cosmopolitan
Generation X
"A groundbreaking novel." -Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in
Baden-Söllingen, Germany, on December 30, 1961, the third of four
boys. When Douglas was four, his family moved to West Vancouver,
where he returned to live after years of travelling. "I spent my
twenties scouring the globe thinking there had to be a better city
out there, until it dawned on me that Vancouver is the best one
going.… I can only do three days in New York before I get psychotic
and have to leave." While his books enjoy popularity in the United
States, half of his novels take place in Canada and about half of
his characters are Canadian.
In addition to winning acclaim as a bestselling novelist, Coupland
is also a visual artist and award-winning designer. The moment
seven-year-old Douglas discovered James Rosenquist in an
encyclopedia, he was destined to be "in the pop world" - by the
time he turned ten, all he wanted for Christmas was a Lichtenstein
poster. Coupland remembers, "My first day of art school was the
first day in my life I could pick up an object and say, 'That''s so
beautiful,' without getting beat up." He graduated in sculpture
from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1984, with a
year spent in Hokkaido, Japan. In 1984 he attended the Instituto
Europeo di Design in Milan, then the following year studied at the
Japan-America Institute of Management Science in Honolulu, ending
up working as a designer in the Tokyo magazine world. Back in
Canada in 1987, he showed enough promise as a sculptor to be given
a show, "The Floating World," at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
To pay his studio bills Coupland began writing about art, and soon
found he was getting more out of writing than sculpture.
Nonetheless, visual art has remained essential to his life. In his
book City of Glass, he examines Vancouver's
post-war architecture, and he recently finished an illustrated
novel with animator Mike Howatson, to be published in Japan in both
paper and "cell-phone format," a global first. His major art show
Spike travels to New York in September. His house is
filled with his own art created from such paraphernalia as plastic
detergent bottles, and is hemmed in by trees ("I dislike views").
In spite of a reputation for an "acute sensitivity to the highly
artificial, consumer-driven, media-soaked details of our
environment," he keeps a Japanese garden and practises the Japanese
art of flower arrangement, combing his yard for "something that's
doing something interesting that week.… It's just a wonderful way
of keeping track of the seasons and time."
Coupland's writing, which includes short stories, novels, essays
and non-fiction, has been translated into 22 languages and
published in 30 countries. He is a regular contributor to the
New York Times, the New Republic,
Wallpaper, ArtForum, Wired and
Time magazine, offering razor-sharp insights into the
pivotal people, places and events that define our modern lives,
from Madonna to moon landings to Dolly the cloned sheep. Many of
his stories and travel pieces can be read on his extensive Web
site, www.coupland.com, along with diaries of his book tours and
collages of tickets and newspaper clippings he has accumulated on
the road.
It was on the basis of an article and a full-page cartoon strip he
had written for magazines that a New York publisher commissioned
him to write a non-fiction guide to the lost post-baby-boom
Generation X. He moved to Palm Springs, California, spent the
advance money and wrote a novel instead. In the winter of 1991, at
the age of 29, he waited for the book's publication, broke and
living in a basement apartment in snowbound Montreal. In spite of
some false starts, Generation X became a word-of-mouth
cult success, eventually selling over a million copies. "But
there's this other parallel universe out there where it didn't work
out, and it always keeps me a little bit humble," Coupland says.
"That alternate universe where I'm still living on hot dogs and
oatmeal."
The book depicts three people in their twenties, overeducated,
underemployed and full of doubts. They leave their empty lives in
the city and move to Palm Springs, where they work at low-paying
"McJobs." The novel's success earned Coupland a reputation as the
voice of a generation, but that title has always seemed inaccurate
to him: "I speak for myself." In fact, his characters have ranged
from the optimistic Global Teens of Shampoo Planet raised
on computers and music videos; to the computer geeks of
Microserfs, Microsoft employees who quit their jobs to
move to California to start their own software company and pursue a
better life; and even to the used-up Hollywood types of Miss
Wyoming, striving to exchange their accelerated, alienated
lives for something more meaningful and redeeming. If there is an
abiding theme in Coupland's work, it might be described as the
soullessness of our society and the human yearning to rise above
it.
Film rights to All Families Are Psychotic have been
purchased by Single Cell, the production partnership between R.E.M.
singer Michael Stipe and Sandy Stern - both of whom had a hand in
the hit film Being John Malkovich. Coupland and Stipe have
been friends for a decade. "We''re both left-handed art school
students from military families. And Capricorn. We just click." He
also recently sold the movie rights to Generation X to the
producers of The Virgin Suicides, but his
countless encounters with Hollywood producers who have optioned his
books without turning any of them into films have left Coupland
clear-eyed and free of any illusions about the movie
business.
In the last few years Coupland switched publishers in order to work
more intensively with an editor whose notes he described as reading
like a "Russian secret service report on what your neighbours have
been saying about you for the past decade". This is part of a move
to get more serious about his writing, and has given him more
confidence about where he's going. He also changed his method of
writing. Previously he would go around with a notepad and pen in
his pocket and take notes of everything, "and then a year later,
chop them all up, like fortune cookie fortunes, and figure out
voices and places and ideas and themes." After years, he's given up
the notebooks: "I just internalized the process."
Bookclub Guide
1) How did you become a writer?
The older I get, the more I wonder. I used to think it was by
accident, but now I don't. In one sense it was because nobody in my
life would listen to me, and if I didn't communicate with somebody,
anybody, I would go mad. I think this is still the case. Sure, in
2001 I know people will listen to me, but I think the early damage
has been done. I still only feel I'm communicating when I'm
writing.
2) What inspired you to write this particular
book?
A very large and strange transformation took over my own family two
years ago with the birth of my niece, who arrived with no left
hand. Sounds simple enough, but the effect was deep and ongoing and
in many senses turned my family inside out, like sleeping bags,
letting us shake out the dust and bedbugs and let the sun do some
healing. The family situation was aggravated by a spike in birth
defects in the part of Vancouver where we live. Hence the title of
the show [Coupland's art show Spike]. The spike made the
papers, and the spike was definitely there, but in the end
there was insufficient energy, will and know-how on the part of the
local medical authorities to ferret out the reason for this spike.
There was no Erin Brockovich.
All Families are Psychotic was one way of trying to accept
this situation and reconcile the fate of my family - and everyone's
family - to those forces out there in the world that can scramble
us at any moment. One character in the book, the daughter, Sarah,
is missing a hand, but in her case, the cause was thalidomide in
the year 1960 - a dreadful morning sickness drug that haunted
Canadian mothers for years. Everyone else in the book has the same
number of quirks and problems as any one else's family - yours,
even.
Writing isn't therapy - it's a way in which we as humans can make
sense of, and come to grips with, our experiences, of taking
something intensely personal and rendering it universal.
3) What is it that you're exploring in this book?
If the book has any moral, it's that in the end, I think we love
each other just as much for what we are as for what we aren't.
That's certainly been the big switch in my mind the past few years.
Oh, what a release it was when I reached that conclusion - this
load was released from my shoulders and it felt almost
Biblical!
4) Who is your favourite character in this book, and
why?
Janet Drummond - the 64-year old family matriarch who had thought
she was of no familial or social value, and who ends up being very
much the core of her family and the social circle around her. She
thinks her life is over, and just then it becomes fantastically
interesting.
5) Are there any tips you would give a book club to better
navigate their discussion of your book?
Hang in there for the first bit. You have no idea what's going to
happen. Trust me. That's true of life, too.
6) Do you have a favourite story to tell about being
interviewed about your book?
This book in particular? No - not really. It's too soon in its life
cycle. But I have a thousand other stories about other books.
7) What question are you never asked in interviews but wish
you were?
I've been asked everything. I think. Wait - I know - people ask me
how "success" has changed me, and truth be told, it hasn't. I'm
maybe a bit more practical and wary of being used, and wary of
sleazeballs who cruise the waters of intellectual property. But
that's it. But nobody ever asks how it's changed the people around
me. It really has changed them, and for years at a time, and mostly
not for the better. It took about seven years for the people in my
life to stop being so weird about everything. That was a long and
lonely seven years.
8) Has a review or profile ever changed your perspective on
your work?
I had the fortune and misfortune of never being edited for the
first two-thirds of my career. I was indulged and encouraged to
pioneer new forms - which is really the biggest gift you can have
as writer. But after a point I got tired of making mistakes I
didn't even know how to identify. I'm a voracious reader, and when
I write I simply try to write what I'd want to read myself. There
was no distance for me. I've really had to "put myself through
Harvard" the past four years, and have made huge qualitative and
structural leaps in my work. But was this triggered by any one
specific review or profile? No. I don't read them - can't
read them - even when they're over-the-moon great. But I can
certainly pick up the background radiation of what they're saying.
People tell me. And for what it's worth, people can be quite mean
when they pretend to be nice. I was on the cover of Time
and not one person phoned or e-mailed. Not one. But when a snippy
bit of nothing, untrue gossip appears in a paper 3,000 miles away,
my e-mail and phone go nuts. It's human nature, but come on people
- like I don't notice this?
9) Which authors have been most influential to your own
writing?
Truman Capote
Nancy Mitford
Richard Ford
John O'Hara
Margaret Drabble
Kurt Vonnegut
Anita Brookner
Carol Shields
Jenny Holzer (she's an artist who works with text)
Joan Didion
David Lodge
10) If you weren't writing, what would you want to be doing
for a living? What are some of your other passions in
life?
Scultpure. Not even a moment's doubt there.
11) If you could have written one book in history, what
book would that be?
It would be presumptuous of me to answer this.
Trade Paperback
288 Pages, 5.21 x 8 x 0.8 IN
September 24, 2002
Random House Of Canada
English
Canadian Author
0679311831
9780679311836