All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland.
Title: All Families Are Psychotic.
Author: Douglas Coupland.
Genre: Fiction, satire, humour.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2001.
Summary: The novel is the tale of the Drummond family, from Vancouver, gathering together to watch Sarah Drummond's space shuttle blast off at the Kennedy Space Center that reunites the Drummond family after many years of estrangement. Several plot points of the book include geriatric HIV, armed robbery, death in Walt Disney World, pharmaceutical drug lords, black market baby sales, Daytona Beach, and suicide attempts.
My rating: 7/10
♥ 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.
♥ Wade felt that at a certain point in their lives, most people passionlessly assess what they have and what they lack - and then go about making the best of it - like an actor who goes from paying leads to playing character roles; like a party girl who goes from being a zany kook to being a cautionary tale for the younger girls.
♥ Janet saw images that to her were more gynecological than pornographic; she could only wonder how it was that men craved these identical, repetitive snapshots, as though one day these men were going to hit upon the ultimate shot that would render all the others unnecessary. Some years back, when she'd first begun tromping about the Internet, she'd been flustered at how even the most innocent of words placed into a search engine triggered an immediate cascade of filth. Apparently there existed no unsexed word in the language.
♥ "Americans think Canada is sort of glamorous. Mysterious."
A snort: "Kee-riste. You must be joking."
Janet couldn't quite believe it herself - a city of porridge, bricks and sensible rain garments - but she had to defend her suitor. "Well, we do worship the queen, you know. And to Americans, royalty's as weird and foreign as communism. Communism with jewels and missing chins."
♥ "You don't know," said William. "Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many thing and we don't know why, and if we do find out why, it's decades later and knowing why doesn't matter any more."
♥ "Family is a good thing, Wade."
"You should see my family. Every single one of us is psychotic."
"All families are psychotic, Wade. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next. Meet my in-laws one of these nights."
♥ Where did the past six minutes go? When time is used up, does it go to some kind of place like a junkyard? Or down a river like the waters beneath Niagara Falls? Does time evaporate and turn into rain and start all over again?
♥ Our lives are geared mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probability. The moment we're able, we insulate ourselves from random acts of hate and destruction. It's always been there - in the neighborhoods we build, the walls between our houses, the wariness with which we treat the unknown. One person in six million will be struck by lightning. Fifteen people in a hundred will experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity. One American in five will be victim of a violent crime. A day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn't. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.
♥ Wade thought about his father. What would the world have to offer Ted Drummond, and the men like him, a man whose usefulness to the culture had vanished somewhere around the time of Windows 95? Golf? Gold? Twenty-four-hour stock readouts? Sailboats? Extra decades of life? Past a certain point, what is there for a man's man in this society? Or, for that matter, here in Florida - a land of massive science projects cooked up by people like his father and his golf buddies - a place vividly in decline, yet brashly on the way up. Wade rifled through his mental snapshot index of the region, his images of dumbed-down theme park attractions, crack dens, the space shuttle, malls bursting with doodads, freeways tangled like electric cord and the nightly evening news that felt like a recurring fever dream. He thought of the burning sun and the beautiful, deadly creatures that lurked beneath muddy waters like bruises waiting to surface.
♥ "Let me think. Nobody's ever asked me that." How have I changed? "You know what? The biggest change is that I stopped believing in the future - which is to say, I stopped thinking of the future as being a place, like Paris or Australia - a place you can go to. I started believing that we're all going, going, going all the time, but there's no city or place at the end. We're just going. That's all."
♥ "Suppose a weird or random event happens to you, like a falling cedar tree crushes your pet cat, or you get held as a hostage in the hold-up of some cut rate diner - or Mrs. Drummond gets AIDS from a bullet that passed through her son's liver - I could blame the tree trimmers for not recommending I top that cedar. I could blame the Florida legal system for - I don't know - something. Or I could say that the bullet was divine retribution for not trying hard enough to make my marriage work. Or - you see what I mean. It's nobody's fault. It's chaos. Just chaos. Random numbers popping up in a cosmic Lotto draw."
♥ Janet pictures a trillion particles of an African monkey brain virus blipping about in her veins like toxic soda water bubbles. I once believed that people never change, that they only becomes more like themselves. Now I think that people do nothing but change. Janet thought of her father the philanderer, and of her mother who must have known all those years. Time erases both the best and the worst of us. She thought it strange how memory is erased in little bits without regard to memory as a whole.
♥ "OK, I know - my superpower - I'd be able to shoot lightning bolts out from my finger tips - great big Knowledge Network documentary bolts - and when a person was zapped by one of these bolts, they'd fall down on their knees and once on their knees, they'd be underwater, in this place I saw once off the east coast of the Bahamas, a place where a billion electric blue fish swam up to me and made me a apart of their school - and then they'd be up in the air, up in Manhattan above the World Trade Center, with a flock of pigeons, flying amid the skyscrapers, and then what? And then they'd go blind, and then they'd be taken away - they'd feel homesick - more homesick than they'd felt in their entire life - so homesick they were throwing up - and they'd be abandoned, I don't know... in the middle of a harvested corn field in Missouri. And then they'd be able to see again, and from the edges of the field people would appear - everybody they'd known - and they'd be carrying Black Forest cakes and burning tiki lamps and boom boxes playing the same song, and the sky would turn into a sunset, the way it does in Walt Disney World brochures, and the person I zapped would never be alone or isolated again."
He and Beth made love that night, separated by latex membranes in all the right places, minimizing saliva, but with an intimacy new to their relationship. Afterwards, Wade couldn't sleep, because he kept thinking about the people who'd show up on the edge of his own Missouri wheat field, and he thought of his family - about how messed-up they were - mentally and physically and emotionally. And Wade thought about all the other families he'd known and how they'd been messed-up as well: autism, lupus, schizophrenia, arthritis, alcoholism, too many secrets, words unspoken, bad choices, money problems... the list was infinite. Nobody escaped.
♥ "eople are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's family. The only family that ever horrified you is your own."
♥ The men erupted into apology. It's not that they're unable to care - it's that it never crosses their minds to do so. They're so unlike women.
♥ Minutes later they were at the local library's Internet browser section. The library's insides were cool and normal-seeming, a place visited by people whose lives contained no randomness, whose families gave one another CD box sets and novelty sweaters for Christmas, and who never forged each others' signatures or had affairs with pool boys named Jamie or girls in payroll named Nicole.
♥ "That's what I always thought death would be like," Janet said. "Me - next to you - together - quietly talking. Maybe for ever."
"That play always scared me crapless."
..."Pretend we're dead. We can say anything we want. We can ask each other anything we want. Wouldn't that be the best thing of all? If life were like that?"
Janet thought about this: "The two of us - dead - I like that."
♥ Life is just so much easier if we simply wing it. Maybe if we wing it properly, we can trick ourselves into winging death, too. Or is that too simple a strategy?
♥ Florian said, "Steven, my boy, having lots of fat people eating a lot of fattening food is a good, good thing for America."
"You've lost me, sir. And Steve is fine."
"Like anything in life, Steve, it's numbers, numbers, numbers. Lots of fat people means lots of happy farmers, happy agrochemical makers, happy teamsters, happy fast-food staffs - happiness and joy for all. Fatness ripples through the entire economy in a tsunami of prosperity."
"Fat people have more medical problems, though. Common sense."
"But that's the beauty of it, Steve. At present we're at the perfect equilibrium point between an obese society and a prosperous society. If all Americans were to gain even one more ounce, the medical system would be overtaxed and the economy would suffer. Were these same Americans all to lose even one single ounce, Steve, the economy would nose-dive."
"I've never thought of obesity that way."
♥ Sarah handed them to Janet who, regardless of the state of her arms, reached back, pulled her hair into a ponytail and quickly snipped off the large lock.
..."Sarah, answer me this - if you were to be out in space, and if you throw an object down to Earth, it would burn through the atmosphere on reentry, wouldn't it?"
"Sure."
"Good." She handed Sarah the ponytail. "Do that for me, dear."
"What - throw it down to Earth?"
"Yes, dear."
"But why?"
"Because people will look up to its trail when it falls down. They won't know it, but it'll be me they're looking at."
"And-?"
"And they'll think they've just seen a star."