6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting tale that leads nowhere., September 17, 2008
This review is from: Pharmakon (Hardcover)
This book starts out strong and ultimately fizzles to little more than another tale of a dysfunctional family who blames their father on their lives.
The premise of an ambitious pyschologist/statistical researcher looking to make his mark through the discovery of pyschological pharmaceuticals (in the 50's, long before they became mainstream), and a botched effort which impacts his family, his life and his patients is interesting.
Even the first part of the book holds you in it's grip. The second part is the beginning of the fizzle - and by the end, I felt I had been duped. The story wasn't leading anywhere at all!
I've given it three stars - simply for it's first half. But, I wouldn't recommend reading the whole of it. By the time you get to the end where he wraps up 20 years of a main characters life - in about as many as pages - you know the author, too, couldn't figure out where he'd wanted it to go or what he wanted it to be.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Promising tale falls to postmodern cliches, September 13, 2008
This review is from: Pharmakon (Hardcover)
This book starts out with a bang- "I was born because a man came to kill my father." The author then introduces us to his first set of characters- quirky, spirited, intelligent. It's easy to become invested in these characters and to feel curiosity and compassion for them. For this reader, that sense of engagement made it more disappointing than usual when the author decide to pull a John Irving and kill or crush several of his cast members a third of the way through the book. What motivation could he have had? Just avoiding the cliche of satisfying readers with an interesting story? Isn't this sort of narrative hairpin the predominant literary cliche of the last 25 years?
Anyway, the book never regained my interest. Apparently, it never quite regained the author's interest, either for he never tells what the man coming to kill his father had to do with the putative narrator's conception fifteen months later or birth two years after the attempted murder. Just when the second story was growing on me, it was twenty years later and our narrator and his father's best friend are revealed to have been cocaine addicts! And that's not all. A whole bunch of other stupid, implausible events are given exposition which drags this tale to a less than gripping finale without ever answering the points raised by that first promising paragraph. It never resolves the thread of the crazed, dynamic, tortured man who came to kill his father who is somehow almost completely forgotten.
What a disappointment. What a sad waste of time.
I'm sorry I bought it and even sorrier that I finished it.
This is worse than a bad novel.
It's a promising story withheld.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Frustrating, March 23, 2009
This review is from: Pharmakon (Hardcover)
I don't usually go in for sprawling dysfunctional family dramas, but as I was desperate for an audiobook to keep me company for a long drive, I picked this up. Plus, I had just read one novel about neuropsychopharmacology (Alan Glynn's
The Dark Fields), and figured I might as well read another. The story begins and ends will Dr. Will Friedrich, who, as we meet him in 1951, is an untenured junior member of Yale's psychology department with a lovely wife and a houseful of kids to feed. A quantitative wizard with a huge chip on his shoulder, he's barely scraping by as an academic when a fortuitous eavesdropped conversation sparks his collaboration with another Yale outsider.
The first third of the book details their clinical investigation into the antidepressant properties of a tropical psychoactive, while at the same time building up a rich portrait of the Friedrich family and other characters. There are some fine portraits here, such as some Dutch neighbors, Friedrich's blue blood collaborator, and a strangely compelling Hungarian refugee names Lazlo. Another is Casper Gedsic, a brilliant but neurotic Yale freshman whom the Friedrichs befriend and becomes a subject of the clinical trial. Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished, and Friedrich's certainty that he can help Casper comes back to haunt the whole family and leave a lasting scar.
The middle of the book finds the family relocated to New Jersey in the late '60s. The father's career has blossomed at Rutgers and as a drug company consultant, and the kids are growing up. Unfortunately, everything becomes more of a domestic drama than the early part of the book, and the life starts too ooze out of the story. We get to know the youngest child, Zach, as he struggles to win his father's respect and his brother Willy's friendship, only to slide all too predictably into a stoner lifestyle (gee, how ironic). While Willy comes into his own as an interesting character, sisters Lucy and Fiona remain ciphers, as does a ridiculous pseudo-hippie love interest "Sunshine."
The story drifts into even further irrelevancy in its final stages, as we leap forward in time to the '80s and '90s, to meet up with those zany Friedrichs again. The four children all have their various colorful issues, but by this point it's difficult to care. Meanwhile, the 75-year-old father is cast as the brilliant but controlling aging patriarch unable to temper knowledge with empathy. This is all well written, but not particularly interesting. All the while, I kept waiting for bogeyman Casper to return at the end to provide some kind of dramatic catharsis. Instead, we an absolute disaster of of a nothing ending. The book's themes, characters, and sheer length demand that the author come to some kind of meaningful climax, but instead there's just a tepid fade to black. This is the most frustrating kind of book, a long one that starts well enough to hook you and keeps you just barely engaged enough to want to see how it all turns out, only to crumble at the end. Possibly worth reading if you're a fan of the dysfunctional American family drama -- but that's about it.
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