The Normals

With the millennium fast approaching, twenty-eight-year-old Harvard-educated Billy Schine finds himself without prospects, a balled-up bit of litter riding the boom of New York in the nineties. His classmates make millions on Wall Street and the Internet while Billy makes do with a series of temp jobs. He has a girlfriend, Sally Hu, but they're more of a couple by romantic default, sex the only commodity they're willing to trade in. Time flows by without consequence until one day Billy receives a letter from Ragnar & Sons, a collection agency seeking some satisfaction on three years of unpaid student loans. Death is mentioned as an alternative to payment. Now every passerby is a potential hitman, and Billy has to flee. But where? Not home to his unwell parents. Providence delivers Hargrove Anderson Medical, a pharmaceutical company looking for perfectly healthy normals to participate in Phase I studies of their latest experimental drugs. Billy signs up for a fourteen-day trial of Allevatrox, a new atypical antipsychotic for the treatment of schizophrenia. At first, little happens in the research center, the boredom punctuated only by twice-daily appointments with pills and needles. Within the group, battle stories are told from the healing fields of guinea pig, and Billy is pleased. He's rested and well-fed and possibly in love with the lone female in the study. Then the messy side effects hit, and everything changes. The normal world is turned upside-down, the real and unreal merging until spilled blood becomes the only proof of a beating heart. Through the sharp-eyed, self-doubting Billy Schine, David Gilbert exposes the crisis of the contemporary human condition: how to connect? As funny as it is profound, The Normals is a tour de force from a writer of astonishing intelligence and imagination.

About the Author :
David Gilbert is the author of the short story collection Remote Feed. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, and Bomb. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

Review :
"Gilbert masterfully depicts the casualties of our pill-popping, T.V.-numbed age. The Normals is a daring and wildly funny first novel."--Akhil Sharma "Relentlessly intelligent a very good read, and an experience you'll want to stretch out as long as you can."--Douglas Coupland" "The perfect allegory for the times-our Catch-22, our Generation X-a masterpiece of cultural riffing. The first great comic novel of the century."--Andrew Sean Greer "Relentlessly intelligent.a very good read, and an experience you''ll want to stretch out as long as you can." -- Douglas Coupland "Relentlessly intelligent...a very good read, and an experience you''ll want to stretch out as long as you can." -- Douglas Coupland