July 30, 2001
The Drummond family at the center of Coupland's new novel resembles a month's worth of soap opera plots. Wade Drummond and his mother, Janet, both have AIDS. Janet, 65, was infected when her ex-husband, Ted, shot Wade through the side of his stomach and the bullet lodged in Janet's lung. Ted shot Wade because his son had accidentally had sex with Ted's second wife, Nickie. In consequence, Nickie is also HIV positive. Wade's brother, Bryan, a frequently suicidal musician, has hooked up with the self-named Shw, a young anarchist. Shw has told Bryan she wants to abort her baby, but secretly she is planning to sell it to Lloyd and Gale, a seemingly normal Florida couple with kinky secrets. Now, all the Drummonds are having a family reunion in Orlando. They are gathered to support Sarah, the successful member of the family, as she is about to be shot into space. Although slightly crippled, being a thalidomide baby, Susan has made a career as a scientist and an astronaut. Her bland husband, Howie, is covertly sleeping with Alanna, the wife of Gordon Brunswick, Sarah's mission commander—and Sarah is secretly having an affair with Gordon. The item that sets this crew in motion is a letter from Prince William left on Princess Diana's coffin. It has somehow come into possession of a sleazeball named Norm, who wants Wade and Ted to convey it to a billionaire Anglophile based in the Bahamas. Complications, naturally, ensue. Like Chuck Palahniuk, Coupland mines tabloid territory for sensationalism, which he then undermines with ironic self-awareness. The can-you-top-this atmosphere will keep Coupland's Gen-X readers (the ones who religiously watch Cops
for the laughs) totally amused. Author tour.
September 15, 2001
You may think that your family is the most psychotic, but meet the Drummonds: shady errand-runner Wade, the oldest, is HIV-positive and has infected his mother, Janet, in a scenario too complicated to relate here; paterfamilias Ted has prostate cancer but clings to his virility via trophy wife Nickie, who is also HIV-positive; born-loser Bryan has impregnated hippie hell-child, Shw; and baby sister Sarah, the seemingly normal one, is about to undertake a space mission for NASA. Coupland, who dubbed the post-boomer babies "Generation X" with his book of the same name, continues his sociological study here. Divorce has dented the Drummond children, who grew up in the 1970s, as well as their parents, but in Coupland's contemporary America that makes them all the more vulnerable to reunions. Unbelievably awful and miraculous things happen in the days leading up to Sarah's launch in Florida, where they all convene, but the subplots descend into lame-brained slapstick. As anyone in a psychotic family can tell you, chaos is often predictable, and it is here. The vignettes on Janet, who, at 65, has recently broken out of the 1950s wife mold in which she was cast, add some needed depth, but it's not enough to take readers to the moon and back. For larger collections. Heather McCormack, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
July 1, 2001
The launching of the space shuttle prompts a family reunion as the Drummond family gathers in Florida to witness one of their own, Sarah, take off on a mission into outer space. Family reunions, typically, are opportunities for relations to take stock of themselves, patch up differences, and/or maintain feuds. So it is with the Drummonds, who, despite their eccentricities, just may be the quintessential, twenty-first-century, middle-class family--only more so. There's the matriarch, Janet, serene at 65 and dying of AIDS; ex-hubby Ted, a philanderer, who shows up with his trophy wife, Nicky; eldest son Wade, also with AIDS, along with his pregnant wife, Beth, whom he met when she thought she had AIDS; brother Bryan, the family depressive, who, after several suicide attempts, now has a reason to live; and Bryan's girlfriend, with the unlikely name Shw, whom he met while setting fire to a Gap at an antiglobalization protest and who is carrying his baby, which, unbeknownst to him, she plans to sell. And then there's Sarah, the family overachiever, who is missing a hand because mother Janet used thalidomide for morning sickness and whose husband, Howie, is cheating on her with the wife of one of her fellow astronauts. Although the Drummonds appear to be self-destructing, author Coupland (" Generation X" [1992], " Girlfriend in a Coma "[1998]) reveals himself to be, somewhat surprisingly, an optimist. For him, the new millennium is an era full of promise and potential miracles, despite the seemingly terminal state of the world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)