Customer Reviews

Pharmakon

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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 the myriad ways one fails in the process and how the hope to succeed is never entirely empty. And kudos to Wittenborn for not pretending to have all the answers: this unpretentious novel is a delightful piece of ambiguity.

For all its talk of unhappiness, the book isn't a depressing story. The characters, all seekers of happiness, are earnest in their search, and it's this earnestness that shines through the strongest. And when they do achieve their momentary shreds of joy, the reader easily celebrates with them. Wittenborn's smooth storytelling also allows his audience to breeze through this 400-page book, and the brevity balances well against the novel's more somber aspects.

As much as PHARMAKON is a philosophical and psychological venture into happiness, it's also a novel of family. Told through the perspective of multiple family members (including Casper, whose devastating influence on the Friedrichs makes him something of a "third parent"), the reader gains a multi-faceted insight into the hearts and souls of each of the characters, though some much more than others. We hear Casper's thoughts early on, but later, despite the fact that he is still actively plaguing the family, his voice drops out completely. While this does make him the silent but devastating specter that haunts Friedrich, it robs the novel of the opportunity to see Casper's miseries played out in his mind with the same force as earlier in the story.

At its core, PHARMAKON is intensely earnest. Though most of the Friedrich children are not particularly strong or complex characters, the rest of the cast is superbly drawn and their stories are powerful without becoming overly dramatic (and when one of the characters is a drug addict, this is no small achievement). These memorable men and women honestly and capably tell a story about the exhausting struggle to be happy against an exciting historical and intellectual backdrop. Just don't be fooled by its unassuming nature --- this novel may be exactly the wake-up call our Prozac nation needs.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

Reading Pharmakon can be like an wooden roller coaster ride. It starts off building up with anticipation and then you get that first exciting major drop. Then you get more rises after that, but the problem is that every sequential rise and drop is less exciting than the last. The roller coaster has the excuse of physics to fall back onto, the book doesn't.

The author has divided the book into different "books" each switching the characters they focus on and taking place at different times during their lives.

The first "book" starts off in the 1950s, when a college psychiatrist Dr. Freidrick finding out about a rare plant that has been rumored to cure depression. He convinces a colleague to develop and test the plant as a proper medicine using a group of volunteers as guinea pigs.

Despite it being a double blind test study, Dr. Freidrick decides to involve a troubled suicidal student named Casper. At first it seems as the drug is doing wonders for him, that is until he starts killing at least.

In the second "book" we move forward a few years and the story shifts focus to Dr. Feinberg's young son Zack. Despite having been born after all the events in the first "book," Capsper still has an effect on Zack's childhood.

The story reaches its height of intensity when Casper escapes the mental instution and encounters Zack. But, there is still about a third of the way into the novel, leaving much of the story left.

As we progress to later books we see how Zack and his family progress with throughout the years up in to the 90s. But unfortunately the story by this point has become lackluster.

The book keeps you reading until the end, but never rewards you for doing so. While the story is riveting and the characters are interesting and well rounded the book will leave you feeling flat.

Dirk Wittenborn's novel reminded me a great deal of The Hotel New Hampshire (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by John Irving, a classic tale of a screwed up family told with splashes of surrealism. It's often laugh-aloud funny as well. Telling the story of America's love affair with mood altering pharmaceuticals through that of a psychologist embedded in the industry is a fine device, and the arrangement of the story into four books allowed the author to jump forward through the last half of the 20th century to collect snapshots from three generations of disfunction.

Like most neatly contrived novels it is more amusing than deep, and the first half is better than the last.

This book was a compelling, thought provoking, page turner at the start. By the 2nd half of novel I was saying to myself "if I knew this would end up reading like the "The Wonder Years" I wouldn't have have bothered picking it up at all. I kept hearing Kevin Arnold's adult narrator's voice in my mind as I read the text.

A wealthy-ish baby boomer experimenting with drugs in the 60's who rebels against his Silent Generation parents? Yawn. Who needs to hear another droning tale of another 50 something blaming his parents and childhood for all of his problems?

This book receives 3 stars if only for it's wonderful first half. A book entirely about Casper would have been more interesting.

I would give this probably 3 1/2 stars, but have to round down as it didn't deserve four. Very well written -- it grips you in the early parts of the novel and the characters are all very interesting. But I agree with the other reviews -- after a mid-story climax, the story tends to meander, and it does demand another resolution which the reader never gets. There are many ways the author could have taken the story but disappointingly it takes no path at all. It's almost as if he wanted to tease the reader and disappoint to prove a point.

I don't get the more negative reviews--this may be one of my favorite books of all time! Gripping story about family, history of the 50's and 60's, academia, psychopharmacology.

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