False Positive

As a child, while waiting for my weekly piano lesson to start, I used to read with pleasure Erma Bombeck's column as it appeared in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. What prehomosexual boy can resist a sardonic housewife? Somewhere in my teenage years, however, I lost the taste, and so it was difficult for me to enjoy Douglas Coupland's latest novel, All Families Are Psychotic, even though the tone of voice was unexpectedly familiar.

"Life is a bowl of chainsaws," says Janet Drummond, the novel's 65-year-old heroine, as she establishes a rapport with Florian, the fey, Eurotrashy villain who is heir to a pharmaceuticals fortune. Bombeck added cherry pits to the proverb; Coupland has added chainsaws. But the sensibility is the same: a comfortable, petulant knowingness about the world. It's wacky out there, or so Coupland would have you believe.

The speech rhythms in All Families Are Psychotic derive from sitcoms. Characters describe each other with tags like "That cheesy slut," and they silence each other with lines like "Drive, Howie." The prose style is aesthetically bankrupt, so much so that a reviewer feels a little silly and priggish for pointing it out. A lake is described as "a very lake-y looking lake." A house is described as "an event in itself." One suspects Coupland of writing badly on purpose, as if he meant to suggest that sloppiness of perception might be raised to a metaphysical disposition--a strategy for approaching the world.

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