The Book: Pharmakon…or the Story of a Happy Family, by Dirk Wittenborn
The Story: In 1952, William Friedrich is teaching psychology at Yale. In a bar one night, he overhears another professor talking about a trip she took to South America and a leaf that the tribes would take to calm people down or help after surgery. His gears started turning and eventually he approached her about trying this out as a drug to cure depression. Nothing like this had been tried before and the early results kind of blow them away… it’s working!
After the study, one of the subjects, Casper, totally loses it and commits murder. That same night, William Fredrich’s youngest son dies in a mysterious accident. It remains unclear whether or not Casper was involved, but the idea that he may have been haunts the family for the long run.
The rest of the story kind of follows the family as the parents age and the kids grow up. It is narrated by Zach, the Fredrich’s son that was born shortly after the events of the first part of the story. At this point, it kind of turns into a fairly standard dysfunctional family story, with all the good stuff: divorce, children, depression, drug addiction, psychotherapy, fame and fortune, rehab, upward mobility, homosexuality… the whole nine yards.
What I Thought: I have to brag about Shaun a little bit here: we were at a library book sale and I had already gotten past this book on the shelves, and he picked it up and said, “This sounds like something you’d like,” and handed it to me. Sure enough. Dysfunctional family, murder, scientists… all things that I love in a book.
And the first half of this book delivered all of that beautifully. It was suspenseful- both when they were messing with the anti-depressant originally and after Casper went crazy. It had intrigue- was William going to give into temptation with his co-worker? The writing was lively and I was totally into it. The information about anti-depressants backed with the setting of academia in the 1950’s was perfect for me.
The second half fell flat for me. It was alright, don’t get me wrong. I was glad that we got to see how the family ended up, but I would have been happy with an epilogue or something. A couple hundred pages was just too much for me. I think that somewhere towards the middle, the author lost track of what he was trying to say and where he was trying to take this story. It kind of turned into a hodgepodge. I think that he’s a talented writer, but I think maybe he took too much on and then tried to just end it and be done with it.
Conclusion: If you like dysfunctional families and a little bit of mystery/intrigue, I guess give this one a go. I’m kind of reluctant to recommend it because I was pretty underwhelmed with the ending, but maybe I was just expecting something different and I let that distract me. To be fair, I did speed through this one so there must have been something here that kept me going. I’m going to say, “recommended with reservation.” There ya go.