Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany, in 1961. He is the author of the novels Miss Wyoming, Generation X, and Girlfriend in a Coma, among others, as well as the nonfiction works Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead. He grew up and lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany, in 1961. He is the author of the novels Miss Wyoming, Generation X, and Girlfriend in a Coma, among others, as well as the nonfiction works Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead. He grew up and lives in Vancouver, Canada.
All Families are Psychotic
eBook
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ISBN-13:
9781596917569
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
- Publication date: 12/05/2008
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 288
- File size: 692 KB
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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 stumble into every illicit activity under the tropical sun-kidnapping, blackmail, gunplay, and black market negotiations, to name a few. But 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. 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.
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Sometimes the only difference between drugstore novels and Shakespeare is the level of writing. For all their wit and intelligence, Shakespeare's plays have more in common with the plotlines for Days of Our Lives than you would outwardly think. Douglas Coupland, author of Girlfriend in a Coma and Generation X, knows this. His seventh novel, All Families are Psychotic, is a nightmarish, sardonic soap opera about one battered family that falls somewhere between Valley of the Dolls and All's Well That Ends Well.
The fractured Drummonds have just descended upon Orlando, Florida -- like a swarm of flies on fresh roadkill -- for one hell of a family reunion. The baby of the family, Sarah, a one-handed astronaut, is preparing to be launched into space. What should be a cause for celebration, however, is the impetus for scratching familial scabs. Janet, the 65-year old matriarch with a penchant for sex chat rooms and cheap hotels, is dying. The previous year, the philandering eldest son, Wade, met a beautiful redhead in an airport and had a brief midday fling. Unbeknownst to him, the woman was his father, Ted's, new trophy wife, Nickie. When daddy dearest found out, he tracked his son down at Janet's home and shot him, but the bullet cut clean through Wade and entered Janet's lung. Wade, we find out later, has AIDS and has infected not only his mother, via his blood on the bullet, but also Nickie. And then there's Brian, the youngest brother, an unlucky, brooding man who has unsuccessfully attempted suicide three times, and his radical burn-down-big-business pregnant girlfriend, Shw (that's right, Shw -- no vowels). What ensues when all these volatile folks mix it up in the state of Florida is an outlandish and mordantly funny story that involves a black-market baby, a kidnapping, a letter from Prince Charles, and -- believe it or not -- second chances.
Coupland is by far one of our most astute writers -- someone who has his finger on the deathly faint pulse of contemporary society. Though All Families Are Psychotic sounds like a deep foray into the absurd, it is really a novel about healing, the fragility of our relationships with those we love and hate the most, and the all-too-familiar desire for acceptance and redemption. Yes, the world can be a nasty place, but sometimes it's our own internal worlds that do the most damage -- and sometimes you need those psychos in your family to get you through it. (Stephen Bloom)
"[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