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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.
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
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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.”
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