‘Families are like fudge…mostly sweet but with a few nuts.’
Unknown
Douglas Coupland (Girlfriend in a coma, Generation X) has been perceived as a brilliant, fast paced writer ever since his debut novel hit the eyes of the common reader. It seems Coupland has hit the brakes in All Families are Psychotic in fear of getting a literary speeding ticket.
The novel is not unlike other works of Coupland, that is to say that all his characters are still looking for peace and meaning in their lives whilst they wander in concrete jungles and commercial woods. That is there and is again given the Coupland treatment. However, what makes this novel more interesting and dull (simultaneously) is that all the characters in this novel are together in a family.
The Drummonds superficially appear to be ‘not your average family’ and as you get into the novel, they seem to emerge like the Adams family. For, the family is quite unique in its strangeness. A brief character introduction can reveal much:
Ted Drummond – The father; he divorced Janet and moves in with a younger Nickie, only to find that she’s slept with Wade, his son. Goes and shoot Wade.
Janet Drummond – The mother; she has got AIDS because when her infected son Wade is shot by Ted, the bullet passes through his liver and hits her as well. She is one of the main protagonists in the novel and wonders where it all went wrong for the family.
Wade Drummond – The eldest son; conman, smuggler, shifty. He moves out of the house when young, is HIV positive and wants to have a baby with his ex-junkie girlfriend, Beth.
Bryan Drummond – The paranoid android of the Drummond family. He has always been a fuck up and a liability. Depressed and always complaining. Is having a baby with Shw, his vowel-less girlfriend who wants to sell the baby to make money.
Sarah Drummond – The daughter of the family who is set to fly into space in a NASA shuttle, an event to attend which, the whole Drummond family meets in Florida. She has only one arm due to her being a thalidomide child but that doesn’t stop her from fulfilling her dream of being an astronaut. She is the most stable person in the Drummond family and the one member who has made something out of her lives. Everyone else is busy finding themselves.
So now you’ve met the Drummonds. However, the novel does not exclusively deal with the family’s quirkiness; it merely takes that as an ingredient to make a broth that boils for a whole week. In this broth of a plot, you come across Prince William’s letter to his mother Diana and how it exchanges hands to end up in a very ‘big’ place. You also meet, Norm who is a jack-of-all-trades and master of them all. He has a couple of tricks up his sleeve that can save the whole Drummond family.
The novel is not badly written and has several funny twists-and-turns but it is still nothing like Coupland’s older works and seems a little mainstream. However, that is something that comes attached with a title like the book’s. What I really liked about the book was the way it portrays the mechanism of not just an American family but the machinery of the modern family unit as a whole and how it could be smoothed to function well. I thought my family was psychotic and trust me, I still do. But what the book made me realize is that in some way, every family has its members and they are all different and driven to different ambitions and desires and perhaps that is what makes a family what it is: sweet yet nutty.
The novel is not unlike other works of Coupland, that is to say that all his characters are still looking for peace and meaning in their lives whilst they wander in concrete jungles and commercial woods. That is there and is again given the Coupland treatment. However, what makes this novel more interesting and dull (simultaneously) is that all the characters in this novel are together in a family.
The Drummonds superficially appear to be ‘not your average family’ and as you get into the novel, they seem to emerge like the Adams family. For, the family is quite unique in its strangeness. A brief character introduction can reveal much:
Ted Drummond – The father; he divorced Janet and moves in with a younger Nickie, only to find that she’s slept with Wade, his son. Goes and shoot Wade.
Janet Drummond – The mother; she has got AIDS because when her infected son Wade is shot by Ted, the bullet passes through his liver and hits her as well. She is one of the main protagonists in the novel and wonders where it all went wrong for the family.
Wade Drummond – The eldest son; conman, smuggler, shifty. He moves out of the house when young, is HIV positive and wants to have a baby with his ex-junkie girlfriend, Beth.
Bryan Drummond – The paranoid android of the Drummond family. He has always been a fuck up and a liability. Depressed and always complaining. Is having a baby with Shw, his vowel-less girlfriend who wants to sell the baby to make money.
Sarah Drummond – The daughter of the family who is set to fly into space in a NASA shuttle, an event to attend which, the whole Drummond family meets in Florida. She has only one arm due to her being a thalidomide child but that doesn’t stop her from fulfilling her dream of being an astronaut. She is the most stable person in the Drummond family and the one member who has made something out of her lives. Everyone else is busy finding themselves.
So now you’ve met the Drummonds. However, the novel does not exclusively deal with the family’s quirkiness; it merely takes that as an ingredient to make a broth that boils for a whole week. In this broth of a plot, you come across Prince William’s letter to his mother Diana and how it exchanges hands to end up in a very ‘big’ place. You also meet, Norm who is a jack-of-all-trades and master of them all. He has a couple of tricks up his sleeve that can save the whole Drummond family.
The novel is not badly written and has several funny twists-and-turns but it is still nothing like Coupland’s older works and seems a little mainstream. However, that is something that comes attached with a title like the book’s. What I really liked about the book was the way it portrays the mechanism of not just an American family but the machinery of the modern family unit as a whole and how it could be smoothed to function well. I thought my family was psychotic and trust me, I still do. But what the book made me realize is that in some way, every family has its members and they are all different and driven to different ambitions and desires and perhaps that is what makes a family what it is: sweet yet nutty.
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