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. 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an alcoholic repeat tester, a bombastic aspiring actor waiting for his big break as a courtier in "Hamlet," and a withdrawn, Bible-quoting country boy who veers dangerously close to true psychosis.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 Normals indeed. Gilbert's witty and edgy second book, following Remote Feed (1998), narrates the adventures of Billy--young, unemployed, lost--among fellow subjects of an upstate New York institute's experimental drug study. Billy has joined the program to dodge a debt collector and his ailing parents, who want him to help them commit suicide. The other "normals," or study subjects, include two cousins earning money to pay for a relative's operation, a tormented teenager named Do Rami, and one woman. Gilbert pushes the clashing, believable voices in this microcosm toward a violent climax. Although the dialogue occasionally grows too snappy for comfort, it stays smart throughout. As he allows readers to form their own opinions--about the reasons behind the study, about Billy's life outside the study--Gilbert involves us in an intricate and solid metaphorical portrait of the ways people interact. At the book's end, Billy must decide whether to plunge into another study or to go back to his previous life, and Gilbert wisely suggests that there may be little difference between these options. Max Winter Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Gilbert masterfully depicts the casualties of our pill-popping, T.V.-numbed agee. 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 strretch out as long as you can." -- Douglas Coupland David Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. scope and contradictions of contemporary culture