All Families are Psychotic
Ratings16
Average rating3.4
On the eve of the next Space Shuttle mission, a divided family comes together...Warm, witty and wise, 'All Families Are Psychotic' is Coupland at the very top of his form. In a cheap motel an hour from Cape Canaveral, Janet Drummond takes her medication, and does a rapid tally of the whereabouts of her children. Wade has spent the night in jail; suicidal Bryan is due to arrive at any moment with his vowel-free girlfriend, Shw; and then there is Sarah, 'a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash' - here in Orlando to be the star of Friday's shuttle mission. With Janet's ex-husband and his trophy wife also in town, Janet spends a moment contemplating her family, and where it all went wrong. Or did it? Perfect for fans of Halle Butler, Iain Reid and Rachel Cusk.
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An enjoyable read which picked up pace as I read it. I liked how the characters were not always as they initially seemed.
Hilarious black humour. Dark, dark humour but the satire is buzzing and sparking with ideas. As nearly always, in a Coupland book the ideas are more important than plot or even character, but after just slogging through Don Quixote, this was exactly what I needed.
Coupland has spent a career infusing the most fun and absurd realities of modern life into his stories of “average Joes” trying to adapt to culture's depleted standards of normalcy and stability. Never defeated, it's fantastic to follow along as his characters—this time, a disparate family oddly reuniting to celebrate their kin's first space-launch—finally give up the ghost and accept their lot as bumbling, mediocre happen-tos, finally daring the world to bring it on. Excellent reading for coming of agers and world-weary loners looking for a blanched ray of hope.
