In Pharmakon Dirk Wittenborn has given us a fascinating portrait of a family living on the edge in the barely post-medieval age of 1950's psychopharmacology. Both victims and perpetrators, pioneers and innocents, the saga of the Freidrichs will stay with you long after the book has been read. (Richard Price, author of Lush Life)
Pharmakon is an old-fashioned novel about a modern subjectset in the past but completely relevant to where we are today. It might remind you of mid-period John Irving, but gentler. And just when you've settled into a groove the book takes surprisingsometimes shockingturns. Beneath all the pain there's hope coursing through these pages, and in the end don't be surprised if you find yourself moved to tears.
In Pharmakon, Dirk Wittenborn has given us a haunting illustration of the Tolstoyan maxim that every unhappy family is unique in its unhappiness, though in fact no one who has ever been part of a family can fail to feel pangs of recognition as they follow the saga of the Friedrich family across three tumultuous generations. Pharmakon is an ambitious and memorable novel. (Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and Brightness Falls)
Eerie, authentic, and always with heart, Pharmakon is a slow-burning triumph. (Marisha Pessl, author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics)
What's best about Pharmakon, beyond the curiosity value of its unusual premise and atmosphere, is Mr. Wittenborn's colorful, affectionate evocation of a complex family story. While it goes without saying that the doctor can be envisioned as monstrous, Pharmakon prefers to see the humanity in his clumsy efforts at manipulation…Ultimately Pharmakon is a smart, eccentric coming-of-age story about an entire culture's maturation process, not just one about the workings of a single family. And Mr. Wittenborn is able to channel a lifetime's worth of psychiatric symptoms into one improbably universal story.
The New York Times
Pharmakon is brightened by an atmosphere of personal authority; it really feels true. In the best novels, the personal and the general add up to a significance that goes beyond one's private experience. But if too much of Pharmakon goes by as life itself goes bybefore the cosmetic and wardrobe changes of art have given it a proper makeoverit still has a powerful sense of realism. I think that's the answer to the mystery of this book. It shouldn't work, but it does, somehow, despite everything; a vibe of personal experience saves this fast-moving, confused, likable and flawed novel.
The Washington Post
Author and screenwriter Wittenborn's latest novel, a multicharacter, multidecade exploration of pharmacology and murder, is large enough to require two readers for its audio version. Deakins and Hoppe trade off duties-one grainy and slightly ironic, the other orotund and inclined to throwing voices. Both are more than serviceable, underscoring the horror and the comedy of this tale of progress denied with cool detachment and a faintly mocking air. The dual narration splits between the perspectives of Zach Friedrich, son of a famed Yale psychologist, and that of a young man, a former student of Dr. Friedrich's, who is at the center of the book's tragedy. Having two narrators excellently underscores the stark contrast between the two worlds described, which only grow further and further apart as the book progresses. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 24).(Aug.)
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The jacket copy for Wittenborn's latest novel proclaims the contents within to be "an epic novel about family secrets and the consequences of ambition." Unfortunately, what lies between the covers is epic only in its absolute failure as a novel of both substance and entertainment. The basic plot conceit is interesting: a professor of psychology at Yale has to cope with a murderous research subject. The writing, however, is clumsy and derivative, riddled with cliches and plot holes so large one doesn't care whether the family's secrets are revealed at all. And when they are, it is a huge disappointment. The author is an Emmy Award-nominated producer, and perhaps he would have better luck turning his premise into a screenplay. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries only. [See Prepub Alert, LJ4/15/08.]
Christopher Bussmann
A novel of psychopharmacological experimentation, revenge and family tragedy. Wittenborn (Fierce People, 2002) re-creates Yale in the early 1950s as psychologist William Friedrich enters into a lab partnership with Dr. Bunny Winton, an exotic colleague who during the war had been developing some expertise with gai kau dong (aka GKD), a hallucinogen used by cannibal tribes in New Guinea. The scientists' suspicion is that this chemical substance might be able to be refined as an antidepressant, so Winton and Friedrich enter into a professional relationship in which rather surreptitiously they try out GKD on an experimental and a control group. While this is supposedly a double-blind experiment, Friedrich makes sure that the substance is given to Casper Gedsic, a brilliant, socially inept and perhaps sociopathic freshman at Yale. Shortly after Casper's personality changes, seemingly for the better (he loses his stammer, his shyness and his virginity), he brutally murders Dr. Winton and Dr. Friedrich's young son, Jack. Although he's caught and admitted to a hospital for the criminally insane, Friedrich abruptly changes the course of his life by moving his family to New Jersey (he gets a tenured professorship at Rutgers). While he teaches and works as a consultant to pharmaceutical firms there, he wills himself to forget the abortive experiment at Yale, and he and his wife even have another child, Zach, to "replace" the murdered Jack. Casper escapes from the hospital, however, and makes his presence known to the Friedrichs, who can never quite extricate themselves from the psychopathological shadow he casts, one that Friedrich may unwittingly have helped create. The novel then follows theshifting fortunes of the Friedrich family, especially the self-destructive Zach, who undermines his promise and creativity by becoming a drug addict. While the novel as a whole is a bit unfocused, the first part is a compulsive read and even after the narrative shifts to a dysfunctional family dynamic, Wittenborn holds the reader by examining Friedrich as a complex and sometimes monstrous paterfamilias.
"A smart, eccentric coming-of-age story about an entire culture's maturation process."
-Janet Maslin, The New York Times
" A rattling good tale . . . Wittenborn describes the mind of a cracked genius with great gusto and inventiveness . . . [Pharmakon's] pleasures are many."
-The New York Times Book Review
"Epically entertaining."
-Vogue
" John Irving is a benevolent influence on Wittenborn's work."
-The Times Literary Supplement
"No one who has ever been part of a family can fail to feel pangs of recognition."
-Jay McInerney
"A fascinating portrait of a family living on the edge."
-Richard Price
Yale in the 1950s is home to William Friedrich, an assistant professor of psychology who teams up with a colleague to test a plant with antidepressant qualities. One of their test subjects is Casper Gedsic, a brilliant freshman with suicidal tendencies. When Gedsic goes on a homicidal rampage, Yale scraps the test, and Friedrich’s career in academia is profoundly affected. With few characterizations and little variation in intonation, Mark Deakins and Lincoln Hoppe narrate this semiautobiographical novel, told from the point of view of Friedrich's youngest son, born after Gedsic's murder spree. The narrators capture the emotional ups and downs of all the characters as they deal with life's disappointments. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine