Pharmakon

Dirk Wittenborn's PHARMAKON presents the dual acting powers of Mark Deakins and Lincoln Hoppe, who add powerful verbal support to a novel of suburban life in postwar America. One American family's struggles in 20th century America come to life in this gripping saga.

A richly drawn tale of academia, psychiatry, homicide, romance, insanity, and family dynamics. Filled with suspense, twists and unpredictability that add immensely to the appeal and readability of this classy novel.

It's 1952 and William Friedrich is unhappy. He is an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, with an intelligent and earnestly charming wife and four children he loves. Yet he lacks tenure, struggles through the chaotic monotony of home life with five mouths to feed, and is so poor he can barely afford a new suit to replace the one he purchased from the Salvation Army. His wife, stuck at home with the seemingly impossible task of raising four children on virtually no budget, suffers from depression. His kids aren't all that contented either --- and who can blame them when they have a father constantly analyzing them? But to the outside world Friedrich is a member of a new generation of psychologists striving to draw the field in line with more scientific disciplines. With a colleague, he succeeds by creating a pill --- a veritable wonder drug --- that does more than any mere anti-depressant (though drugs like SSRIs are decades away); the drug, appropriately called "The Way Home," supposedly makes people happy. One of the initial test subjects, a brilliant but socially inept student named Casper, seems like a poster boy for the drug. He doggedly climbs the social ladder from stuttering, depressed loner to Yale Old Boys Club centerpiece, thanks to his newfound confidence and sense of self-worth. Yet Friedrich detects a degree of fakery in all of Casper's changes, and when the test is over and the drug runs out, he's proven right. Casper sinks to rock-bottom depression before setting out to kill the people who stole his life from him. He pays a visit to Friedrich's home, and after deciding not to kill William in front of his wife and children, murders his colleague instead. The Friedrich family is changed forever as they must come to terms with the "accidental" (or so the police reports say) death of a child and the stain that Casper's violence has left on whatever form of happiness they possessed. Wittenborn writes with a refreshing directness using smooth, to-the-point sentences and simple but powerful paragraphs. Because of this simplicity, his emotional passages are clear, crisp and linger just long enough to retain their sharpness: "out on the water, standing against a current that could be gauged, thinking only about how to think like a fish, my father could relax and stop thinking abut what would make him happy and actually be happy." His statements about happiness are as ambiguous as the subject itself, and PHARMAKON (a Greek word that means both "cure" and "disease") probes its characters' moments of joy, sorrow, frustration and everything in between to define the mysterious term. I say "define," but the novel has no strict agenda; while it clearly believes that a pill (or other recreational drugs for that matter) can't bring pure happiness, it's not sure anything can. Even less certain is whether we have the slightest clue how to be happy ourselves. The closest answer the book gives to the question "How can I be happy?" is to show t

Dr. William T. Friedrich suffers from "Sock Moments," catatonic moments of stillness which he cannot explain but which obviously arise from a series of seemingly innocent, unforeseen events. A former Yale University professor, Dr. Friedrich made a decision motivated by the desire to make a meaningful difference in the lot of psychologically ill patients but also fostered by the "publish or perish" mentality of the scholarly competitive world of Yale academia. The decision was to explore, with one of the few female Yale professors - Dr. Bunny Winton - open to academic collaboration, the pharmaceutical benefits of "gai kau dong." This plant is made with kwina, grown only in New Guinea, and Dr. Friedrich has had the foresight to purchase enough to fill a small factory. After testing this concoction on rats and even accidentally experiencing its effects himself, Dr. Friedrich decides to try the drug on an obviously mentally ill patient, Casper, who is saved from suicide by Dr. Friedrich's wife. Transformed to an almost megalomaniac state, Casper is now enraged because he no longer has the substance that freed him from his darkest, crazed moments. But what no one realized is that Casper is now a highly intelligent madman bent on revenge. Dr. Friedrich knows how ill Casper is, calling him a "highly functioning obsessive compulsive with marginal schizophrenic tendencies;" but realizing most human beings, including himself, could similarly be diagnosed, he decides not to check Casper into a psychiatric hospital. That decision proves to be the worst Dr. Friedrich ever made! The rest of the novel deals with the effects of Casper's devastating revenge, two acts that twist the sanity of the entire Friedrich family. It's a poignant, sane yet insane series of circumstances that will move any reader with a beating heart, the search for reason and well-being in a world gone awry, a thriller to readers but the nightmare to those living the experience! Pharmakon: A Novel is a fascinating look into the world of pharmacology, the world whose pills and panacea have more far-reaching effects than its designers and testers foresee. It's a world where those possible side-effects and contraindications accompanying any medication for the mentally challenged become a chilling but all to real reality! Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on August 2, 2008