PHARMAKON

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 the shifting 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.