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40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An intriguing read from a writer of gorgeous prose, January 16, 2001
This review is from: Inspired Sleep: A Novel (Hardcover)
Robert Cohen has won numerous awards, and I can't quite understand why his name and sales don't rank right up there with other contemporary writers like Michael Chabon and Tom Perrotta. In INSPIRED SLEEP, Cohen examines the public's dependence on/love affair with prescription drugs such as anti-depressants. Chapters rotate between the perspective of two main characters --Bonnie Saks, a divorced mother of two, and Ian Ogelvie, a psychiatrist/researcher on a project designed to enhance REM sleep and thereby elevate the subject's mood. Saks is an insomniac who becomes a subject in Ogelvie's study at "Boston General" hospital. The novel explores a lot of big issues -- such as the way today's medical researchers are in bed with big pharma -- and all the room for corruption/lapses of ethics that can create. The book also looks at the potential impact of placebos, explained in detail by Ian as expectancy theory -- the idea that merely wanting something to come true can bring about its fruition. It's fascinating to watch the varied perspectives -- Bonnie's a cynic, who is depressed about her life -- and Ian is an idealist, who has complete faith in the medical model, believing that one day medicine can find a drug-related cure for every human ailment -- emotional and physical. As much as this book will get you thinking, though, the greatest joy comes from the way Cohen writes. He drafts some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. If you like this one, go back and read The Here and Now and The Organ Builder. Both are terrific reads as well.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Was It All A Dream?, March 29, 2001
This review is from: Inspired Sleep: A Novel (Hardcover)
I read this lovely book on vacation and was, as a result, a little dubious of its true merit. After all, what isn't a great book when you are on the beach reading it? However, I reread it in my own habitat and am convinved that Robert Cohen is on to something. Bonnie is neither cute nor evil. She is frustrated, disappointed, and anxious about her children, her unplanned pregnancy, her husband's flaky departure to South America and all the other imperfect aspects of her life in Cambridge. On top of all this, she can't get to sleep. She thinks everything else would recede in importance if only she could get 40 winks. Ian Ogelvie is the quintessential academic rising star. Fellowships and grants have rained down upon him since he started school and now, facing 30, he is on the brink of a pharmaceutical breakthrough that could seal his fate...and save Bonnie's neck. So, Cohen has them meet and the results are insightful, funny, critical, and real. It is neither love story nor thriller. It is merely the story of a handful of characters whose desires and fears blind them to simple solutions their lives offer. This novel was witty in the way our own lives would be clever if we weren't desperately trying to figure out where they were going. I don't think it's necessary to rebut the one harsh review written of this book, but I would encourage anyone with the slightest bit of interest in seeing what the fuss is about to click and order. This book will interest you. You know people like these. Some of you, perhaps the most honest ones, realize that you are people like these.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Funny and Thoughtful Novel, February 11, 2001
This review is from: Inspired Sleep: A Novel (Hardcover)
Robert Cohen is a brilliant stylist who whose words are a delight to read, and the premise of this novel proves fertile ground for Cohen's apt powers of observation and deft humor. "Inspired Sleep's" two main characters are Bonnie Saks, a struggling grad student and mother suffering from insomnia; and Ian Ogelive, an ambitious but emotionally confused young researcher working in a sleeping lab. Put them together, and the big ideas begin to fly: academia, the role of anti-depressants in contemporary culture, the nature of marriage, the nature of parenthood, etc. Cohen is especially skillful at piling on the clever observations in witty dialogue that, while never quite believable, never seems exactly unbelievable either. In fact, the quirky nature of these characters seems absolutely apt, for Cohen is interested in putting his finger on the bizarre nature of contemporary society: how we look for meaning in things like prescription drugs and chat rooms. And what he comes up with is a great deal of fun to read. I very much enjoyed Cohen's previous novel, "The Here and Now," though I thought it ultimately suffered from the same problem as a lot of contemporary novels of ideas: it did not know how to end, and the resolution seemed forced and overly intellectualized. "Inspired Sleep" has a much more natural and organic plot structure, which worked nicely in its favor. Like Cohen's previous novel, this one deals with not entirely likable characters who are on a quest to, if not make themselves more likable, at least remove some the difficulties in their lives that render them so unpleasant. In the case of "Inspired Sleep," I feel that Cohen goes a little bit overboard at times with Bonnie. Ian may be a bit of a bumbler in matters of the heart, but his difficulties are ones I think most people can identify with, and his mistakes seem very human. Bonnie, on the other hand, frequently comes across as noting short of a jerk. She is perpetually rude to other people, and she is not charming enough to pull it off. Not that characters need to be likable to be interesting, but I was never entirely certain what Cohen wanted us to make of Bonnie. There is a moment early on in the novel which I loved: Bonnie thinks something rude, and then faces some evidence that suggests she spoke these rude words aloud without meaning too. That device proved very effective, a kind of rudeness we can sympathize with. On other occasions, however, she seems to delight in her verbal cruely, and that left me feeling a bit cold. I don't want to suggest that I subscribe to the Oprah-like belief that for characters to be interesting we must be able to internalize their qualities, but I think if a character is consistantly nasty, it makes it hard to want to follower her narrative or care about her struggles. I feel the need to address a review posted below this one, which complains of the book's dealings with the "bloodless overanalytical tepid world of academia," a comment so problematic and so unfair, I hardly know where to begin. I see no reason why academia should be thought of as more "bloodless" as anything else with the possible exception of surgery or warfare, and I find it infuriating that a reader should criticize a novel because of his or her own anti-intellectual leanings. The observation that "no one in this book actually works for a paycheck" shows that someone was paying poor attention to the novel, since there are several characters who have no relationship with academia, besides which the premise that academics don't work for their paycheck is laughable. Academics work harder, for less money, than just about anyone. This book is not, as this viewer suggests, a faculty novel in disguise. It is something much more interesting than that: it deals with how the ideas that are developed and circulated by academia - both intellectual ideas and scientific ideas (in the form of prescription) medicine - become, for good and for ill, part of mainstream culture.
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