All
Families Are Psychotic is a great title for a novel, and story lives up to
the promise.   The book may be part of an emerging
darkly comic genre in which highly dysfunctional families facing very
contemporary sorts of problems come together to create mayhem and adventure and
with a touch of magical realism or fantasy, achieve some form of
resolution.  Maybe Jonathan Franzen’s The
Corrections is the best example of the genre.  The memorable Will@epicqwest.com
also fits this description, although while that novel has themes of extreme
psychological states and liberal use of medication, Coupland’s novel has the
equally modern theme of HIV infection. 
This is a substantial work with a complex plot, demanding the readers’s
attention.  It opens with Janet Drummond
waking in a Florida motel in the morning, taking her cocktail of medications
and thinking about her children.  She
and the rest of her family are on their way to Cape Canaveral to witness her
daughter Sarah go into space.  The rest
of the plot defies easy summary, and its very richness is what helps to make
this work so enjoyable.  At times, the
flow of events moves so quickly with such explosive violence that it loses all
claim to realism, but through it all, the Drummond family retain some sense of
purpose and even calm.  At one point,
Jill is with her ex-husband’s current partner Nickie and her daughter-in-law
Shw (yes, Shw) are at a franchise restaurant when the place is suddenly held up
by two men with rifles who are soon shooting some of the customers.  In most novels such an episode would fill a
chapter at least, but here the event is done in three pages, and the characters
have soon moved on to more pressing issues. 
Other reviewers (quoted on the book cover) stress the emotional realism
of the story, but this seems a stretch to me. 
It does show the tensions between the members of a highly fragmented
family and the passions that still keep them talking to each other, yet it is
implausible to suggest that ordinary people would react to each other in
anything like the ways that the Drummond family do.  The appeal of the story lies precisely in how bizarre this family
is, even though many readers may be able to relate some aspect of their own
experience to the craziness of Coupland’s novel. 

© 2003 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review. His main research is on philosophical
issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction