Bookreporter.com - PHARMAKON by Dirk Wittenborn

PHARMAKON
Dirk Wittenborn
Penguin
Fiction
Hardcover: 9780670019427
Paperback: 9780143115670

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

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