Twenty-eight-year-old Harvard-educated Billy Schine finds himself suddenly 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 must make do with a series of temp jobs. He has a girlfriend, Sally Hu, but they are a couple only by default. Then Billy receives a letter from a collection agency, seeking satisfaction on three years of unpaid student loans. Death is mentioned as an alternative to payment. Now every passer-by is a potential hit-man, and Billy has to flee. Providence delivers Hargrove Anderson Medical, a pharmaceutical company looking for perfectly healthy 'normals' to participate in Phase I studies of their latest experimental drugs. So Billy signs up for a fourteen-day trial of a new atypical anti-psychotic for the treatment of schizophrenia ...Through the sharp-eyed, self-doubting Billy, 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.