A literary comic masterpiece.

The Normals is an electrifying and ambitious first novel chronicling a young man’s two-week stay at a drug testing center.

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.

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.

"David Gilbert's The Normals attacks its subject, our essential aloneness amidst the swirl of contemporary culture, with a surgical wit and daring imagination. A savage and funny first novel." --Jane Mendelsohn, author of I Was Amelia Earhart and Innocence

Praise for Remote Feed: “Gilbert’s dead-on mimicry of conversational rhythms makes even the most ludicrous exchanges sound plausible…wickedly funny.”—New York Times Book Review

“Hilarious and unnerving.”—Vanity Fair

“The short stories in David Gilbert’s Remote Feed speak volumes about the ways modern men seek adventure and comfort.”—Sarah Nelson, Glamour

"Here it is at last, the perfect allegory for the times--our Catch-22, our Generation X--a masterpiece of cultural riffing so ingenious, so hilarious and enthralling, you will dogear every page and quote aloud to friends. Surely the first great comic novel of the century." --Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli

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