Despite a decent prose style, this was one of those books where I pulled out before fifty pages, because I just didn't find the characters and situations believable enough to invest time and caring upon. We learn before we reach ten pages that Sarah Drummond, a thalidomide baby with one hand, is a NASA astronaut. Not just a mission specialist mind you--and that alone would have been hard enough to buy--but the pilot of the space shuttle mission about to launch. Soon after that, we learn that "astronauts are always tiny, chosen for their lack of body mass." Well, I guess a lack of a hand might help there, but really I was soon convinced Coupland had never even googled "astronaut" or "NASA."
Sarah's older brother Wade has AIDS. From what I can gather from before I left, he gave it to his mother via magic bullet when his father shot him and the bullet passed through him hitting his mother. Oh, and the reason his father shot at him was because he learned Wade was sleeping with his stepmother--who then gets AIDS. The other brother Brian, who has tried to commit suicide three times, brings his pregnant girlfriend to the shuttle launch. Her name is "Shw" in honor of "Sogetsu Hernando Watahabe--a martyred hero of the Peruvian Shining Path terrorist faction."
By the time we learn that Wade is bringing his father into a drug deal, I decided that it wasn't simply the Drummond family or all families that are psychotic, but the author. And not in the whacky surreal way that allowed me to go with the flow and laugh.
