Review of All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland
Random House Canada, 279 pp, $34.95
From Extra, October 4 2001

After ten years (yes, Generation X debuted in 1991), it seemed safe to assume that Douglas Coupland, now forty, would be infusing his fiction with the sort of philosophical gravitis that Life After God or Girlfriend in a Coma only hinted at. Instead, Coupland's see-saw battle between the superficial and the profound has tilted irrevocably toward the former. Where Miss Wyoming had strong shades of Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Beauty Pagents?) All Families Are Psychotic sees Coupland dipping heavily into Carl Hiassen's oeuvre. Yes, that Carl Hiassen, the Florida author of airport fiction classics like Stormy Weather, filled with all-too-zany characters, rapid plot twists and B-list bad guys.

Psychotic charts the course of elderly matriarch Janet, her three children (Wade, Bryan, Sarah), their respective love interests (Beth, Shw, Howie), her ex-husband Ted and his trophy wife Nickie -- who find themselves thrust into a family reunion as they prepare to witness Sarah's inaugural space flight in Orlando. Like an endless procession of freaks emerging from a clown car, there is also Florian, the Bahamas billionaire, Kevin, the gay waiter, Cissy Ntombe, a Ugandan prostitute and black market baby aficionados Gayle and Lloyd.

With so many characters, Coupland opts to paint each one in garish monochrome swaths, before slowly bestowing each family member with a more nuanced emotional palette. Only Beth and Janet survive the transformation from two to three dimensions, while the rest unsuccessfully struggle to move past their cartoony genesis.

Everyone is emotionally or physically diseased and it's difficult to take these people seriously when their lives are all cranked up to "11." Without divulging too much, Sarah only has one arm because Janet took thalidomide during her pregnancy. Janet meanwhile, is HIV-positive, infected from a bullet wound two years previous -- a bullet that first passed through HIV-infected Wade -- discharged from the gun of ex-husband Ted. Of the four characters with AIDS in Psychotic, only a minor character named Kevin is gay, a stereotypical homosexual waiter who Nickie describes as "faggy" upon spotting a beefcake calendar in his trailer.

The outlandish coincidences that comprise the plot of Psychotic are so convoluted that they are summarized not once, but twice during the course of the novel. Where to begin? With the restaurant holdup straight out of Pulp Fiction? With Wade, Bryan and Ted trying to make some much needed money by delivering the letter Prince William placed in his mother's coffin to a wealthy buyer of unusual objects? Or with Shw trying to sell her unborn child to wealthy but unfit parents? Or with ... well you get the idea.

As a fast, fun, pot-boiler, Psychotic is above average, and Coupland metes out the surprises with Swiss-like precision. The cereal-box philosophy and pop-culture savvy elevate this book beyond the page-flipping genre, but stops well short of earning the "literature" pedigree. Worse, despite Coupland grasping the Zeitgeist with white knuckles, he's clearly losing his grip. He still churns out gems like "Mauschwitz," and real-life TV families that are "Fuji-film" bright. But Bryan and his girlfriend Shw (short for Sogetsu Hernando Watanabe, "a martyred hero of the Peruvian Shining Light terrorist faction"), meet in Seattle, during the WTO protests, in the Gap, as they set fire "to a stack of pastel-colored waffle-knit T-shirts...." Both ridiculous and too-clever-by-half, Coupland doesn't play this for laughs. Instead, Bryan earnestly refers to this incident when Shw breaks up with him. "Oh, God, I love you, Shw, I love you. Don't you remember we set fire to the Gap together? We destroyed a field of Frankenstein beans together -- it was real."

In the post-Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, post-WTC world, irony is finally (thank God) losing much of its cachet. But kicking the irony habit maybe impossible for Coupland. A few years ago, Oliver Bennett, writing for London's The Independent, pondered the popularity of irony and sarcasm during the 1990s. Bennett namechecked the fiction of Coupland and the ironic detachment within. The same article noted that "[T]he ironic attitude as we know it today probably started as a Masonic code among like-minded people -- often gay, and bound up in camp -- to differentiate themselves from lumpy, literal straights."

Coupland's cultural radar isn't aging well, but his metaphors ("Garish, emotionless music filled the air like the smell of somebody else's shampoo") and sly humor (1950s Toronto is described as "a city of porridge, bricks and sensible rain garments") remain strong. His dialogue is still X-Acto-blade sharp ("The Russians have tissue regeneration experiments on this flight, and I swear, their whole zero-G research program is being run by a McDonald's crew chief"), although one can't help but note that the only people who actually talk like this are characters from other Coupland novels.

There are a handful of moments filled with fresh insight into age, regret, illness and the sexuality of the elderly, but they're crammed into the spaces and pauses of this hectic novel. The offhand nature of these introspections, coupled with the overarching zaniness, remove much of their impact, turning them into easy-overlooked afterthoughts.

Michael Stipe's production company, Single Cell Pictures, has acquired the film rights to Psychotic, a medium better suited to a story filled with plot inconsistencies and larger-than-life characters. Unfortunately, on the printed page, where Coupland's stumbles are forever frozen, the reader can't help but feel disappointed that for once, the movie will be better than the book.