Used book – Les Normaux, David Gilbert, Jean-luc Piningre

After brilliant studies at Harvard, Billy Schine, twenty-eight years old, residing in New York, prefers to take on multiple temporary assignments rather than risk choosing the wrong path by seeking a real job, a career plan that would inevitably limit him in his self-definition. Everything would be more or less fine if he weren't being pursued by Ragnar & Sons, a debt collection company pressing him to repay his student loan as soon as possible, and whose threats grow more distressing day by day. So, when he learns that the pharmaceutical company Hargrove Anderson Medical is looking for healthy volunteers for a study on an atypical antipsychotic, Billy sees it as the perfect opportunity to escape daily contingencies and the wrath of his creditors for a while. He therefore commits to spending two full weeks at CRAH, the Center for Animal and Human Research, alongside a team of young "normal" guinea pigs like him: Do, his psychotic roommate obsessed with the Gospel according to Saint Luke; Rodney, a notorious alcoholic accustomed to experimental centers; Lanningan, a second-rate actor eager for thrills; and Gretchen, an intermittent nymphomaniac addicted to the Weather Channel. On the agenda: balanced meals, pills to swallow, and repeated blood tests, not to mention long hours absorbing everything on television and anxiously observing the appearance of announced side effects... Perfectly crafted dialogues, unrestrained humor, and an endlessly renewed sense of formula, David Gilbert delivers a falsely nonchalant debut novel that inventories our daily annoyances and pins down with almost surgical acuity all the contradictions of our modernity. A delightful reading experience that acts as an effective remedy against mediocrity.