All Families are Psychotic
The most disastrous family reunion in the history of fiction.The Drummond family, reunited for the first time in years, has gathered near Cape Canaveral to watch the launch into space of their beloved daughter and sister, Sarah. Against the Technicolor unreality of Florida's finest tourist...
show more
The most disastrous family reunion in the history of fiction.The Drummond family, reunited for the first time in years, has gathered near Cape Canaveral to watch the launch into space of their beloved daughter and sister, Sarah. Against the Technicolor unreality of Florida's finest tourist attractions, the Drummonds stumble into every illicit activity under the tropical sun-kidnapping, blackmail, gunplay, and black market negotiations, to name a few. But even as the Drummonds' lives spin out of control, Coupland reminds us of their humanity at every turn, hammering out a hilarious masterpiece with the keen eye of a cultural critic and the heart and soul of a gifted storyteller. He tells not only the characters' stories but also the story of our times--thalidomide, AIDS, born-again Christianity, drugs, divorce, the Internet-all bound together with the familiar glue of family love and madness.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781582342153 (1582342156)
Publish date: September 7th 2002
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages no: 288
Edition language: English
The title is the basic thesis; it's expanded to suggest that one only notices this about one's own family; everybody else's family seems sane and normal. Well, the family presented here are faaaaar crazier than my family, which has a history of real, actual mental health problems. They're nuts in ...
Despite a decent prose style, this was one of those books where I pulled out before fifty pages, because I just didn't find the characters and situations believable enough to invest time and caring upon. We learn before we reach ten pages that Sarah Drummond, a thalidomide baby with one hand, is a N...
The last time I read Douglas Coupland was in the 1990s, and while I'm not sure his fiction will age well over time, I was hoping his talent would transcend the moment in which he wrote. I'm not sure if the book is too dated for me, or if my reading priorities have changed, but I was disappointed. Th...
Ugh, I hate doing this, but I put it down and I just can't bring myself to pick it back up. Most of that's due to a few newer books that I'm just more excited about at present.*edit* I finally finished this on vacation. To be honest the last third or so kind of drug out in a way that I hated, with t...
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.