Books
All things considered, it is very lucky people don't judge books by their covers. If they did, no one would even pick up Coupland's latest offering. The cover 'art' is facile and enough of a misrepresentation to anger the reader. Consider that. When were you last actually incensed by a book cover? Then there's the title: All families are psychotic. One has to question if this is quite the same D. Coupland who brought us Girlfriend in a Coma and Life after God. All families are psychotic? Well, marginally better than 'All men are bastards' I suppose.
Once past the publisher's self-indulgent mess of a cover, one is sent headlong into a narrative of quite remarkable sensitivity. Anyone familiar with Coupland's balance of plot and philosophical musings will be surprised, pleasantly, one hopes. The plot is, as ever with this author, muddied and subsumed in an extremely detailed and pleasantly random narrative. The grand scheme doesn't come along at pace, in fact, it hardly moves at all. In All Families are psychotic, stuff just happens.
There's no philosophising here, there doesn't need to be Coupland makes his characters do the hard work through pages of wonderfully natural dialogue. All families bases its generalisation around just one: the Drummonds. At the centre of this complex family network is the mother Janet, a motel resident.
Through her, we meet her offspring: Sarah, the NASA astronaut, Wade, the terminally ill criminal and Bryan, the cupid-struck manic-depressive.
The characters are clearly absurd, preposterous exaggerations of trailer-park life. Somehow, though, Coupland's skill for observation and talent for natural dialogue gives the reader a true sense of their humanity. Slowly, the realisation that Janet, Wade and Bryan are all infected with the Aids virus seeps through the pages. No climatic revelations are needed, no 'Look, we need to talk...'. All the reader needs to do is hold on to the jumpy narrative.
The sensitivity of Coupland's work is made all the more ingratiating by his witticisms. The author has the capacity to see, and the dexterity to record, the pathetically human in the broader framework of events. Coupland manages to summarise the anti-globalisation movement in but a sentence. Janet, the mother, tells her daughter that Bryan met his girlfriend in Seattle as she helped him ignite ' a stack of pastel-coloured waffle-knit T-shirts in a Gap'.
All Families... may not have the same kind of depth of musing as Generation X or Girlfriend in a Coma, but you don't feel it lacking here. Coupland's work remains amazingly fresh and without ever descending too far into schmaltzy sentimentality, touchingly human.
Jake Eliot
" At breakfast I say, 'Dude, you said your plan was ONE rock each day.' And Denny says, 'That's all I do. Just one.'
And I say, 'Dude you are such a junkie.' I say, 'Don't lie. I know you're doing at least ten rocks a day.'
Putting a rock in the bathroom, in the medicine cabinet, Denny says, 'Okay, so I'm a little ahead of schedule.'
There's rocks hidden in the toilet tank, I tell him.
And I say, 'Just because it's rocks doesn't mean this still isn't substance abuse.' "
This novel is sick, irresistibly so. Reading it is like picking a scab. If you see anyone reading it on the train, avoid them, sit somewhere else, change carriages, they're obviously dangerously weird. But it's brilliant in a dark, twisted, repulsive, compulsive kind of way. I've been a devotee, for lack of a better word, of Palahnuik's since I first saw Fight Club the film and immediately sought out the book, bound by undeniable and inescapable chains of fascination. Sometimes I'm so busy dissecting them I forget to enjoy them but how can I help that when they're such an unashamed product of the twenty-first century - this is our fin de siecle, godhelpusall, this depraved and unremittingly bleak expression of self-absorption and alienation. What else can you call it other than post-millennial angst? If you thought modernism was fractured and tortured, think again. Palahnuik's work isn't so much a heap of broken images as a heap of broken slogans.
The hero of Choke, Victor Mancini, is a medical-school dropout who pays for his dying mother's healthcare by pretending to choke to death in expensive restaurants. The theory behind this is that the person who saves you will, apparently, feel responsible for you for the rest of their life. When he isn't martyring himself, he's stuck in 1734 in the historical re-enactment settlement of Colonial Dunsboro, which is run by a sadist with a stocks-fixation and populated by various sexually frustrated stoners and other assorted losers. The rest of the time he trawls sex addiction groups for dates and tries to stop his best friend Denny, an ex-compulsive masturbator and now compulsive rock collector, from filling up his house with geological samples. And if you thought that was surreal, I'm not even going to mention where the foreskin of Jesus Christ comes into this. This novel is not for the politically correct or the faint of heart.
In some ways, this novel is typical Palahnuik fare: expect more dysfunctional characters than you could fit in an asylum, expect social satire so bitter you could flavour smoked salmon with it, expect a lot of complex ideas, expect a Plot Twist so sharp it practically bends the book double ... expect the unexpected. And all of this wrapped up in an irresistibly original style, a bleakly comic voice that moves the plot forward with unerring skill and rapidity and even contains its own twisted sense of poetry, not to mention the usual selection of brilliantly witty one-liners that I wouldn't be ashamed to wear on a T-shirt, for example a throwaway comment on prayer-chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."
On the other hand, there are certain features that distinguish Choke from the earlier novels. Victor seems that iota more pathetic as he flails around in his godless and consumerist society, desperately trying to establish his own identity. And, in his own way, he becomes the Redeemer he is afraid to be, bringing purpose to the lives of the strangers who save him and, in turn, saving them from the empty banality of their everyday existence. This novel seems less despairingly apocalyptic than, say, Survivor. The ending as a close to "hopeful" (relatively speaking) as Palahnuik ever gets.
Read this book, you deserve to and, believe me, that's not a compliment. You owe it to society and yourself. It'll make you laugh and it'll make you cringe, it'll make you question yourself, it'll make you question the world. Go and read it. Now. But don't blame me. And, in true Palahnuik fashion, you'll understand when you've read it:
See also: Fight Club See also: Survivor See also: Invisible Monsters Kyra Smith
Without a shadow of a doubt, this comedy has to be one of the most painful books I've read for a while. It's probably very funny - the Guardian thinks so, as does the Observer and the New York Times - in fact, it is witty and well-observed and pleasingly fluid to read but it upset the Hell out of me. I'm not the sort of person who gets misty-eyed over the Andrex Puppy and the sight of a smooshed pigeon on the road won't reduce me to tears but there's something about an unfailingly accurate portrait of two thwarted human beings making each other miserable that wrecks my day. I get enough sarcastic sniping and mindless abuse in my own life, thank you.
This offers a strange contradiction: it's a very good book that I didn't enjoy in the slightest. The plot is agreeably surreal and the portrait of middle class suburbia, thrown into disarray by the unconventionality and impracticality of good deeds, suitably devastating. There are some wonderfully surreal moments, some gorgeously witty one-liners and some of the minor characters are engaging, such as the spiritual healer D.J. GoodNews who got his miraculous powers from taking too many drugs, the streetwise and homeless Monkey who finds himself temporarily adopted and gay Richard who once played an extra in The Bill. Unfortunately the central cast seems to be remarkable only for their persistent unlikeability or, at least, their obnoxious normality. They remind me too much of me. To be fair, the central portion of the book is pleasing enough, as the bleakness yields to a flicker of hope and the humour becomes marginally less bitter but, all too soon, apathy, depression and emptiness drown the lighter elements in shadow. The last chapter is excruciating, particularly since the book's tortured relationship with real life won't allow for any proper closure or a fairy-tale happy-ever-after.
I know it's all deliberate, a mark of the author's skill. I know real life, despite the fact we view it with irony, cynicism and that sardonic brand of gallows humour on which we English pride ourselves, is painful, pointless and pedestrian but, call me a hopeless idealist, I sometimes get an urge to read something nice, where people are kind to each other and, prepare yourself for something radical, happy. It's a decent book if you're feeling particularly cruel or you've hit such a low that reading about people worse off than you will make you feel better. But I didn't like it. It was only duty that kept me reading and a sense of fairness that ensured it received the mark it did.
Kyra Smith
18th Oct 2001