The Drummond family has a set of relationships a little bit more
complex than most. For example: Janet Drummond, the mother, was infected
with HIV when her ex-husband, Ted, shot their son, Wade, after finding out
that Wade had slept with his second wife (though he didn't know she was his
stepmom at the time); the bullet that passed through Wade (who was already
HIV-positive) ended up inside Janet. Take the four of them, throw in a suicidal
younger brother with a girlfriend who's planning to sell their baby, and send
them all down to Orlando to watch Sarah, who was born without a hand (Janet
took thalidomide in the '60s) on her first shuttle mission for NASA, and you've
got the setup for All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland's seventh
full-length book.
It's been ten years since Generation X, and life, at least the publishing
aspect of it, has come not quite full circle for Coupland (who turns forty this
year), as I meet him in the offices of his latest publisher, Bloomsbury USA,
which are located just a few stories below the offices of his first publisher. (In
fact, both imprints are now divisions of a much larger conglomerate.) The
first deli we try is just locking its doors when we arrive, so we slip into a coffee
shop a few doors down and find a table in the back--Coupland snapping pics
with his digital camera the whole time; many of them will end up in the visual
tour diary at his website.. His
literary success has fluctuated over the last decade, but he remains
fundamentally optimistic. "I never go to a movie without at least a minor
expectation that this will be the movie that changes my life somehow," he
says. "Of course, it almost never does. But I would never want to write or read a
book that didn't have some hope, however slight, for the possibility of
transformation, a feeling of strength or freedom that you didn't have
before."
RH: I was rereading your two previous novels, Girlfriend in a
Coma and Miss Wyoming, and the plane crashes and
plagues in those novels resonate very differently, at least for me,
after September 11th.
DC: I was in a plane two weeks ago, and I had to get something out of my
carry-on. Every single person in the plane stared at me, ready to pounce if I
pulled out anything unusual. That's new... I've always liked J. G. Ballard. I
grew up in a west coast variant of John Cheever land, and I've always been
interested in scenarios and situations that can knock you out of the solipsistic
trance you get in those suburbs, hopefully galvanize you or raise you to some
new level or perception. If you go through my books, they're a collective
index of things that can go wrong, albeit sometimes very rare or unusual
things, and jar people out of their usual middle-class sensibility.
My fascination with disaster, specifically aviation disaster, goes back a decade
now, I think to the annoyance of all my friends. I'm sure Freud would have
something to say about it, since my dad used to be a jet fighter pilot in the
Canadian air force, and after he retired, we'd still fly around in his seaplane
on weekends.
RH: All Families Are Psychotic has one of its roots in an
event that occurred within your own family recently, when one of
your relatives gave birth to a daughter missing a hand...and that
this was part of a series of birth defects in the Vancouver area.
DC: When I first started writing the book, on one level the motivation
was very simplistic: Maybe I should write something so when my niece gets
older, she can look at it and aspire to something big. Then it became largely
about my mother, who is also named Janet and lives in the same town...but the
similarities end there. Now, I'm realizing that this is largely about
environmental paranoia. I didn't even know it at the time--and that's what
happens when you write. It can be five years down the line before you realize,
"Oh, shit, that's what I was writing about." In this case, I realized it within the
last month. I was touring in England and it just hit me. Scenes I thought were
simply noir were reflections of this inner paranoia.
RH: How did you decide to set the story in Florida?
DC: Everybody thinks I chose Florida as the setting because it's so weird.
I chose Florida because NASA's there. If NASA was in North Dakota, the story
would be there. But once I got down there...it's like the Life and Death State.
Everything's either ten minutes old or covered in kudzu. It's utterly
primordial. If you put a Dairy Queen or an Oldsmobile or even litter inside this
environment, it becomes instantly ironic and also iconic. Eventually you
realize that everything in Florida is just a metaphor for everything else. It's a
happy accident that I found this place that fed or enabled all the weird
fantasies I was having.
RH: When you're working out the plot of a novel like this, with
all sorts of bizarre twists and turns, do you ever get to a point
where you look at how it's unfolding and wonder if you've taken it
too far in a certain direction?
DC: No...with any book I've done, I've never begun unless I know every
word of the last chapter beforehand. It's like going on a road trip from New
York to LA. You know roughly the route you'll take, even if you don't know
the exact route. You know the destination.
I began writing All Families during that wonderful film year where
Being John Malkovich, Go, Magnolia... all these really great
films came out. I thought it was like a challenge to fiction writers--can you
match the pace at which things are going right now? This book takes place in
its own universe, and it has a few laws which are specific to that universe, to
do with things like speed and coincidence. I make no bones about that.
I think Americans are trained to expect a more bucolic type of novel than
what I write. I come from the visual art world--in fact, I only know one other
writer really well, up in Vancouver, named William Gibson. Anyway, the art
world is split into two camps. There's theoretically or critically based art,
which is what you see in Whitney biennials, and then there's people who draw
incredibly lifelike eagles and wolves and horses with perfect technical
acumen. Those two spheres will bump into each other, but they'll never
overlap. I think that same division exists in the written world... and I'm never
going to write that second kind of novel. I'm very lucky. I get paid to
experiment. Really, every book's an experiment. Some are more succesful than
others, but... it's a great gig. If I was to sit down and try to write a novel about
cedar and snow, it wouldn't work. It's just not me.
RH: Funny you should mention Gibson, since you're both
looking at the artifacts and events of pop culture; he just jiggles
them a bit and sets the story a few decades into the future.
DC: The three other writers that I'd want to be grouped with, despite all
our different backgrounds, are Chuck Palahniuk, J. G. Ballard, and Kurt
Vonnegut. But those aren't the books that influenced me. My influences were
mainly British women novelists after World War Two, writers like Margaret
Drabble, Muriel Spark, or Jean Rhys, probably because that's what was around
the house when I was growing up. And text-based art starting from the '70s,
like Jenny Holzer.
Here's a dirty secret: I always wanted to be in one of those "twenty in their
twenties" articles, or "thirty under thirty," and I was always one month too
old. It's a very synedochal way of saying I always wished there were other
writers I could hang out and talk about things with, the way my painter
friends all do. I always feel like a fifth Beatle with them, even though I know a
lot about painting and can talk about it on their level.
RH: That's weird, because you've always been portrayed in the
media as the representative of an entire generation of writers.
DC: What happens with me... left wing people think I'm right wing, the
right wingers think I'm left wing, people in the center think I'm an
extremist, Canadians treat me like an American, Americans somehow think of
me as British, the British know I'm Canadian... I'm not "Can lit," I'm not "Brat
Pack," I'm not in the McSweeney's crowd, I'm not genre... I feel like I'm on
one little branch sticking out of a tree where everything is growing the other
way.
I really think I go buggy sometimes from lack of a community. An editor can
only do so much on the phone from three thousand miles away. I'd just like to
talk about what I do. You know how people get stuck up in a cabin for the
winter and go squirrelly...or those German shepherds raised by Deadheads who
abandon them after they're no longer cute puppies, but they're unfixable
because they've never been trained properly? Sometimes I think that's me.
RH: You're very active in the art world, though.
DC: That's where everyone I know is. That's my social milieu in every
sense. When I get into a city, that's who I call.
I've been given a little bit of input over the years in how my books look, but
not much, because in the end, it doesn't matter who you are--the company
always gets veto power. Microserfs was the nicest one; I got to choose a
really thin acid-free paper from Finland, so it's a thin book that's really a
thick book in disguise. And the paper never yellows; it's got a great toughness
to it.
RH: Have you ever thought about going the Dave
Eggers/McSweeney's self-publishing route?
DC: I don't know why I would do that. I enjoy working with my editors.
I've been writing for eleven years now, and I've never experienced anything
egregiously evil. I mean, debates over cover design...who gives a fuck? It's not
that big a deal. I've never been censored. I don't have any beefs against the
publishing process.
When people have a bad time with publishers, it's usually because their
editor's left, or they're stuck in a two-book contract. Those are the two biggest
booby traps in publishing. I've never met anyone with a two-book deal who
wasn't bitter and fucked-up by the end of the process. One of the worst things
that can happen to a writer is for his editor to call and tell him that he's going
to a different publisher, so you'll be dumped onto somebody who doesn't know
your book or care anything about it.
Fr the longest time, I wasn't being edited at all, and I just got tired of it. I said,
"You're editors, dammit, edit! I want to learn!" And I learn very practical
things, like with All Families, where my editor explained that if I was
going to use flashbacks, they have to be in chronological order. That makes
good structural sense, and I never would have figured that out on my own.
The only real problem I ever had with a publisher was with Generation
X, when St. Martin's just wouldn't print the book, even with the huge
demand. They were convinced the demand was going to die out soon, so they
kept waiting for that to happen. It was a horrible experience, and fortunately
there was a technicality in our deal, so I was able to get out of having to work
with them ever again.
RH: What comes next?
DC: I've got a book that's coming out in Japan, and only in Japan, in
mid-December. And I'm in the middle of a big sculpture project. I have an idea
for the next book, but there's a couple things I want to do first.
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