All families are psychotic : a novel

SUMMARY: 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, withAll 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: ''Whatwouldthe 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 Psychoticshows Coupland being just as concerned for the grown-ups as for the kids. "It is the year 2001 and the Drummond family, reunited for the first time in years, has gathered near Cape Canaveral to watch the launch into space of their beloved daughter and sister, Sarah. Against the Technicolor unreality of Florida's finest tourist attractions, the Drummonds and their intimates manage to stumble into every illicit activity under the tropical sun - kidnapping, blackmail, gunplay, and black market negotiations, to name a few. They can't seem to avoid disaster at every turn, but what could deteriorate into talk-show cacophony in the hands of a different writer becomes the stuff of a modern epic with Coupland. For all their madness, the only real sin binding the Drummonds together is their fallibility.". "Even as the Drummonds' lives spin out of control, Coupland reminds us of their humanity at every turn, hammering out a hilarious masterpiece with the keen eye of a cultural critic and the heart and soul of a gifted storyteller. As he circles back and fills us in on the Drummonds' various pasts, he tells not only the characters' stories but also the story of our times - thalidomide, AIDS, born-again Christianity, drugs, divorce, the Internet - all bound together with the familiar glue of family love and madness."--BOOK JACKET.