The Normals: A Novel [Hardcover]

David Gilbert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Billy Schine is a wanted man, in the worst possible way. A glum, rudderless 28-year-old Harvard grad, he has defaulted on his student loan, and the brutish collection agency that has taken over his debt is not playing around. To escape, Billy quits his temp job and hightails it out of Manhattan to be a guinea pig in an experimental drug trial. As the title of Gilbert's witty first novel suggests, Billy is part of a healthy control group used to ferret out the possible side effects of an anti-psychotic. Gilbert, author of the short story collection Remote Feed, surrounds Billy with an oddball cast of normals, including an aspiring actor who practices his craft by faking symptoms and an oversexed femme fatale on a very self-involved quest. But the book's most compelling action is interior, as Billy grapples with his place in life and tries to come to terms with his parents' kamikaze love for each other. Fast-paced and winningly insouciant if sometimes self-consciously showy, this is a fine debut that uses humor to tackle some very serious issues, including questions of medical ethics, the search for grace and the meaning of love.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Two weeks as a human guinea pig in a pharmaceutical company's drug-testing facility seems like a good idea to twenty-eight-year-old Billy Schine, pursued by debt collectors and desperate for money. But he hasn't counted on the other "normals" with whom he is confined, as they await the possible side effects of an antipsychotic drug. These include a budding nymphomaniac, an alcoholic repeat tester, a bombastic aspiring actor waiting for his big break as a courtier in "Hamlet," and a withdrawn, Bible-quoting country boy who veers dangerously close to true psychosis. Everyone here is trying to avoid the realities of life beyond the ward, and much of the novel's antic humor derives from Gilbert's unerring grasp of America's varied forms of self-medication. But what makes this first novel memorable is its exploration of the contradictory desire both to escape the world and to be plunged back into it.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (September 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582344566
• ISBN-13: 978-1582344560
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,284,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Horribly, Painfully, Fatally Overwritten, October 28, 2004

By 

Failure31 (SF, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Normals: A Novel (Hardcover)

I bought this book without ever having heard of the author, on the basis of the premise alone, which I thought was terrific. I knew I was in trouble on page one, when he referred to a small stack of boxes as a Frankenstein's monster. Uh-oh. A Clever Guy. He knows how to use metaphors, he just doesn't know how to use them well. It only gets worse from there; one can actually watch the author struggle to bend the prose around in order to describe things for which he's thought up clever things to say. Trouble is, the many, many, MANY descriptions, always weighted down with surprisingly terrible metaphors, don't provide any insight, only distractions.

I found myself almost shouting at the book at times; for example, the sentence: "Mirages from earlier times-bakeries and butchers mostly-float between handbag boutiques and restaurants. "Really?" I thought. "The bakeries and butchers FLOAT?" But fine, I'll overlook that one too if we can just get to the plot. Maybe when he has to make the character DO something, he'll stop doing that. I don't know if he ever did get around to writing the actual book or if I quit it with several hundred more pages of leaden adjectives yet to come, but I gave up on page 46. I just couldn't take it. Shame, too. It's such an interesting premise. Somebody should write a book that uses it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars All Dressed Up, But No Place to Go, December 5, 2005

By 

Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Normals: A Novel (Hardcover)

I discovered David Gilbert's THE NORMALS by chance and picked it up with delicious anticipation based on its story premise. Billy Schine is a drifting and disaffected young man, as distant from his Asian girlfriend as he is from his parents, college educated but working as a temp, buried under $60,000 worth of student loans - a "normal"GenXer. In a misguided effort to evade a knee-breaking collection agency, he enrolls as a human guinea pig in a paid pharmaceutical research project for Hargrove Anderson Medical (HAM). Along with a dozen other people, Billy commits to a paid, two-week study in which the physical and psychological effects of an unspecified drug will be carefully monitored to establish its baseline impact on the unsick, the "normals."

Given this premise, an infinite range of possibilities blossoms before one's eyes. Could THE NORMALS be another ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, with every subject saner than Randall McMurphy (Jack Nicholson's character in the movie)? Could it be an exploration of the irrelevance of the concept of normalcy in modern society? An attempt to redefine it? Or maybe it could be an examination of the role of pharmaceuticals in a grossly over-medicated society? Or a treatise of the ethical quandaries of drug testing, or their misuse and manipulation?

So many choices, none taken. Mr. Gilbert, inarguably a gifted crafter of cutting sarcasm and a wonderfully clever wordsmith, opted instead to surround his Everyman with a carnival sideshow of dysfunctional characters and a bizarre plot twist that moves his story from comic cynicism to outlandish science fiction. Billy Schine's "normal" colleagues turn out to be freakish stereotypes: a lone female striking a nymphomaniac's pose, an religious zealot named Jay ("Do") Rami who suffers from violent impulses and refuses to bathe, a pair of thuggish droolers named Ossap and Dullick who ultimately reveal a bizarre political agenda, a self-styled acting genius named Lannigan who shaves his entire body, and a misfit named Frank Gershin whose hobby involves paying exorbitant sums to have gunshot wounds inflicted upon himself (body piercing and cutting apparently having given way to stronger stimuli). Billy befriends a black version of Nurse Rached who, like all similarly stereotyped black women, really has a heart of gold (her name is Joy, naturally) beneath that gruff exterior. He also discovers that the doctor in charge of monitoring and administrating these studies, Honeysack, is also an absurdly unlikely researcher into cryogenics who is looking for a volunteer. Combine all this with the simultaneous saga of Billy's father's imminent plan for a double suicide of himself and his Alzeihmer's-afflicted wife, and the entire brew makes the cast of characters from Gilligan's Island the The Addam's Family look like "the normals."

The dissolution of Gilbert's premise and plot line is particularly disappointing when set beside his estimable writing talent. His prose is sparklingly pyrotechnic, filled with wonderful observations and memorable turns of phrase that make you want to dog ear every page and highlight for future recall. Gilbert's writing alone makes this book a worthwhile read, and it promises the hope for deeper and more meaningful things to come.

Good satire can be entertaining and funny when it has a point. The problem with THE NORMALS is that it's only point seems to be that there is no point, that life is simply too absurd to take anything seriously. This is fine as the world view for an eighteen-year-old adolescent, but it's simply not the stuff of good literature. The book's paperback cover cites an irresponsibly lavish quote from Publisher's Weekly, "Gilbert writes in the vein of Vonnegut, Heller, and Kesey, updated for the 21st Century." If THE NORMALS is 21st Century Vonnegut, woe betide us for the next ten decades. Readers in 2099 will still be celebrating Mr. Vonnegut's genius, but by then, THE NORMALS will have faded to dusty yellowed parchment -- or its digital equivalent.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars disappointing, November 19, 2004

By 

zabend "We're back, baby" (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Normals: A Novel (Hardcover)

Gilbert is a very bright and able writer. I had read the reviews for "The Normals" and liked the premise very much - overeducated New Yorker, up to his eyeballs in debt, decides to get out of town and participate in a risky drug study.

The problem is Gilbert feels compelled to describe everything in copious detail. This gets so bad that it slows down the story. Some of his observations are dead-on and I laughed hard. However, most of the time I felt he was trying too hard.

The ending was terrible and I skimmed the last 40 pages.

I hear good things about "Remote Feed" and will try that next. Gilbert needs to relax and just let the story flow a bit more. Hopefully the next novel he writes will be his "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" or "Motherless Brooklyn." He certainly has the talent.