Nearly ALL the depressed patients in Drs. Will Friedrich and Bunny Winton's 1952 drug trial at Yale University display significant progress after consuming a drug derived from a hallucinogen traditionally used by a cannibal tribe in New Guinea.
An acrophobic young man gains enough self-confidence to acquire a pilot's license; a nurse returns to college; and, most significant, the brilliant but suicidal, unkempt and painfully awkward 17-year-old Casper Gedsic, in a transformation worthy of "Flowers for Algernon," loses his stutter and becomes an extremely adept, if manipulative, social climber. But shortly after the study ends, Gedsic goes on a homicidal rampage that leaves two dead, and the fatally ambitious Will and his young family never fully recover from the tragedy. Something similar may be said of "Pharmakon," Dirk Wittenborn's ambitious novel of family and pharmacology, which struggles to regain its balance and clarity once it shifts attention from the story of the drug trial to its aftermath.
It's fairly easy to think of "Pharmakon" as two novels, a sort of "Crimes and Misdemeanors" about mental illness -- on one hand, a fitfully gripping, psychological thriller about the short-term human costs of Will Friedrich's ambitions; on the other, a thoughtful, if meandering, family saga, much of it narrated by the youngest Friedrich, Zach, about the long-term effect of Will Friedrich's actions and inaction.
The more viscerally effective portion is the drug-trial story. As Zach chronicles his father's quest for wealth and renown in New Haven, Conn., Wittenborn does rely too often on cliches (brains fermenting in jars are described as being either "dark as coal" or "pink and delectable as a baby's bottom"); Wittenborn's metaphors can be both hackneyed and repetitive -- one character keeps his "nose . . . to the grindstone"; another keeps his "brain to the grindstone." And Wittenborn occasionally manifests symptoms of metaphor overdose: "Numbers bubbled up within him with the carbonated fizz of a shaken-up bottle of pop, igniting inside his head with a silent flash, like fireworks exploding underwater."
