All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland

If, according to Tolstoy, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," where does that leave the families that are not so much unhappy as just, well, psychotic?

Depending on your threshold for absurdity, and your willingness to suspend disbelief, the first chapter of Douglas Coupland's novel, All Families Are Psychotic, will either turn you off completely or have you settling into your chair for a good, long read. Coupland immediately assaults us with the gory details: an old lady pops pills in a seedy hotel room where the tap water may or may not be laced with crack; a one-handed female astronaut rises above her thalidomide-tainted origins to soar into space; a con man swears to toe the line for his new, Bible-reading wife and Baby.

It's only in subsequent chapters that Coupland adds flesh to these characters, the Drummond family, and shows us their relation to one another. We begin near Cape Canaveral at daughter Sarah's imminent launching into outer space, an event that doubles as a family reunion. Sarah, despite being a thalidomide baby without a hand, seems to have escaped the demons that haunt her two brothers, Wade and Bryan; she is the family's star, and the cool orderliness that surrounds her in the NASA environs contrasts sharply against the rest of the Drummond family's erratic behavior.

Wade, the oldest, is an ex-con man who has recently reformed because of an HIV diagnosis and the afore-mentioned wife and baby. Bryan, the younger son, is a suicidal sissy who Coupland keeps in perpetual fits of blubbering self-pity. Bryan's girlfriend, Shw (yes, Shw), bullies him and is about to sell their unborn baby.

Now here's the real kicker: Ted, the father, is a bankrupted womanizer who left his wife, Janet, and then accidentally shot her. But it's okay: he didn't really mean to shoot her. He was aiming for Wade instead. And that was only because Wade had slept with his second wife, Nickie.

Wade intercepted the bullet that hit Janet, transmitting his HIV to her. And, of course, he'd already given it to Nickie. And Ted has terminal liver cancer. This is a sick family in more ways than one.

What are we to learn from this harrowing and extremely complicated tale? Coupland isn't clear. He's really too busy keep all his plot details straight, after all. But the tenderness which Coupland shows Janet, who learns to embrace life after realizing its fragility, indicates that maybe we, too, should relax a little. All families are psychotic, after all, so instead of trying to fix our own, we should just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Coupland, Douglas. All Families Are Psychotic. New York: Bloomsbury, 2001. 279 pp.