All Families Are Psychotic: A Novel - Couverture rigide

Coupland, Douglas

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1582341656 ISBN 13 : 9781582341651

Editeur : Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA, 2001

Synopsis

Book by Coupland Douglas

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter One
Janet opened her eyes — Florida's prehistoric glare dazzled outside the motel window. A dog barked; a car honked; a man was singing a snatch of a Spanish song. She absentmindedly touched the scar from the bullet wound beneath her left rib cage, a scar that had healed over, bumpy and formless and hard, like a piece of gum stuck beneath a tabletop. She hadn't expected her flesh to have healed so blandly — What was I expecting, a scar shaped like an American flag?
Janet's forehead flushed: My children — where are they? She did a rapid-fire tally of the whereabouts of her three children, a ritual she'd enacted daily since the birth of Wade back in 1958. Once she'd mentally placed her offspring in their geographic slots, she remembered to breathe: They're all going to be here in Orlando today.
She looked at the motel's bedside clock: 7:03 A.M. Pill o'clock. She took two capsules from her prescription pill caddie and swallowed them with tap water gone flat overnight, which now tasted like nickels and pennies. It registered on her that motel rooms now came equipped with coffee makers. What a sensible idea, so bloody sensible — why didn't they do this years ago? Why is all the good stuff happening now?
A few days back, on the phone, her daughter, Sarah, had said, `Mom, at least buy Evian, OK? The tap water in that heap is probably laced with crack. I can't believe you chose to stay there.'
`But dear, I don't mind it here.'
`Go stay at the Peabody with the rest of the family. I've told you a hundred times I'll pay.'
`That's not the point, dear. A hotel really ought not cost more than this.'
`Mom, NASA cuts deals with the hotels, and ...' Sarah made a puff of air, acknowledging defeat. `Forget it. But I think you're too well off to be pulling your Third World routine.'
Sarah — so cavalier with money! — as were the two others. None had known poverty, and they'd never known war, but the advantage hadn't made them golden, and Janet had never gotten over this fact. A life of abundance had turned her two boys into an element other than gold — lead? — silicon? — bismuth? But then Sarah — Sarah was an element finer than gold — carbon crystallized as diamond — a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash, sliced into strips, and stored in a vault.
Janet's phone rang and she answered it: Wade, calling from an Orange County lock-up facility. Janet imagined Wade in a drab concrete hallway, unshaven and disheveled, yet still radiating `the glint' — the spark in the eye he'd inherited from his father. Bryan didn't have it and Sarah didn't need it, but Wade had glinted his way through life, and maybe it hadn't been the best attribute to inherit after all.
Wade: Janet remembered being back home, and driving along Marine Drive in the morning, watching a certain type of man waiting for a bus to take him downtown. He'd be slightly seedy and one or two notches short of respectability; it was always patently clear he'd lost his driver's license after a DWI, but this only made him more interesting, and whenever Janet smiled at one of these men from her car, they fired a smile right back. And that was Wade and, in some unflossed cranny of her memory, her ex-husband, Ted.
`Dear, aren't you too old to be calling me from — jail? Even saying the word "jail" feels silly.'
`Mom, I don't do bad stuff any more. This was a fluke.'
`Okay then, what happened — did you accidentally drive a busload of Girl Guides into the Everglades?'
`It was a bar brawl, Mom.'
Janet repeated this: `A bar brawl.'
`I know, I know — you think I don't know how idiotic that sounds? I'm phoning because I need a ride away from this dump. My rental car's back at the bar.'
`Where's Beth? Why doesn't she drive you?'
`She gets in early this afternoon.'
`OK. Well, let's go back a step, dear. How exactly does one get into a bar brawl?'
`You wouldn't believe me if I told you.'
`You'd be amazed what I'm believing these days. Try me.'
There was a pause on the other end. `I got in a fight because this guy — this jerk — was making fun of God.'
`God.' He can't be serious.
`Yeah, well, he was.'
`In what way?'
`He was being so nasty about it, saying, "God's an asshole," and "God doesn't care about squat," and he kept on going on and on, and I had to put a stop to it. I think he got fired that day.'
`You were defending God's honor?'
`Yeah. I was.'
Tread carefully here, Janet. `Wade, I know Beth is very religious. Are you becoming religious, too?'
`Me? Maybe. Nah. Yes. No. It depends on how you define religious. It keeps Beth calm, and maybe ...' Wade paused. `Maybe it can calm me, too.'
`So you spent the night in jail, then?'
`Safely in the arms of a four-hundred-pound convenience store thief named Bubba.'
`Wade, I can't pick you up. I think it's going to be one of those no-energy days. And besides, the car I rented smells like a carpet in a frat house — and the roads down here, they're white, and the glare makes me sleepy.'
`Mom, come on ...'
`Don't be such a baby. You're forty-two. Act it. You couldn't even get to the hotel in time yesterday.'
`I was making a quick detour to visit a friend in Tampa. I stopped for a drink. Hey — don't treat me like I'm Bryan. It wasn't like I started the fight or ...'
`Stop! Stop right there. Call a cab.'
`I'm short on cash.'
`Simple cab fare? Then how are you paying for the hotel?'
Wade was silent.
`Wade?'
`Sarah's covering it for us until we can pay it back.' An awkward silence followed.
`Mom, you could pick me up if you really wanted to. I know you could.'
`Yes, I suppose I could. But I think you should phone your father down in ... what's that place called?'
`Kissimmee — and I already did call him.'
`And?'
`He's gone marlin fishing with Nickie.'
`Marlin fishing? People still do that?'
`I don't know. I guess. I thought they were extinct. They probably have a guy in a wet suit who attaches a big plastic marlin onto their line.'
`Marlins are so ugly. They remind me of basement rec rooms that people built in 1958 and never used again.'
`I know. It's hard to imagine they ever existed in the first place.'
`So he's out marlin fishing with Nickie then?'
`Yeah. With Nickie.'
`That cheesy slut.'
`Mom?'
`Wade, I'm not a saint. I've been holding stuff inside me for decades — girls my age were trained to do that, and it's why we all have colitis. Besides, a dash of spicy language is refreshing every so often. Just yesterday I was hunting for information on vitamin D derivatives on the Internet, and suddenly, doink! I land in the Anal Love website. I'm looking at a cheerleader in a leather harness on the —'
`Mom, how can you visit sites like that?'
`Wade, may I remind you that you are standing in a human Dumpster somewhere in Orlando, yet hearing a sixty-five-year-old woman discuss the Internet over a pay phone shocks you? You wouldn't believe the sites I've visited. And the chat rooms, too. I'm not always Janet Drummond, you know.'
`Mom, why are you telling me this?'
`Oh, forget it. And your stepmother, Nickie, is still a cheesy slut. Phone Howie — maybe he can come fetch you.'
`Howie's so boring he makes me almost pass out. I can't believe Sarah married such a blank.'
`I'm the one who gave birth to her, and I'm the one who has to drive with him to Cape Canaveral today.'
`Ooh — bummer. Another NASA do?'
`Yes. And you're welcome to come along.'
`Wait a second, Mom — why aren't you at the Peabody with everybody else? What are you staying in a motel for? By the way, it took thirty rings for the clerk — who, I might add, sounded like a kidney thief — to answer the phone.'
`Wade, you're changing the subject. Phone Howie. Oh wait — I think I hear somebody at the door.' Janet held the phone at arm's length from her head, and said, `Knock knock knock knock.'
`Very funny, Mom.'
`I have to answer the door, Wade.'
`That's really funny. I —'
Click
The motel room made her feel slightly too transient, but it was a bargain, and that turned the minuses into pluses. Nonetheless, Janet missed her morning waking-up rituals in her own bedroom. She touched her body gently and methodically, as though she were at the bank counting a stack of twenties. She gently rubbed a set of ulcers on her lips' insides, still there, same as the day before, not just a dream. Her hands probed further downward — no lumps in her breasts, not today — but then what had Sarah told her? We've all had cancer thousands of times, Mom, but in all those thousands of times your body removed it. It's lazy bookkeeping to only count the cancers that stick. You and I could have cancer right now, but tomorrow it might be gone.
The motel room smelled like a lifetime of cigarettes. She looked at Sarah's photo in the Miami Herald beside the phone, a standard NASA PR crew photo: an upper body shot against a navy ice-cream swirl background and complexion-flattering lighting that made one suspect a noble, scientific disdain for cosmetics. Sarah clutched a helmet underneath her right arm. Her left arm, handless, rested by her side: Space knows no limitations.
Janet sighed. She twiddled her toes. Ten minutes later her phone rang again: Sarah calling from the Cape.
`Hi, Mom. I just spoke to Howie. He'll go pick up Wade.'
`Good morning, Sarah. How's your day?'
`This morning we had a zero-G evacuation test, but what I really wanted to do was sit in a nice quiet bathroom and test out a new brand of pore-cleansing strips. The humidity in these suits is giving me killer blackheads. They never talked about that in those old Life magazine photo essays. Have you eaten...

Revue de presse :

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

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA
• Date d'édition: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1582341656
• ISBN 13: 9781582341651
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 279