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Pharmakon

By Vince Darcangelo, Special to the Rocky

Published August 14, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Fiction. By Dirk Wittenborn. Viking, $25.95. Grade: B-

Book in a nutshell: Wittenborn has mostly found success in moving pictures. Two of his screenplays, Fierce People and The Lucky Ones, have made it to the big screen. (The latter, about three Iraq war veterans returning home, starring Tim Robbins, hits theaters in September.) He also earned an Emmy nomination for producing the 2003 HBO documentary Born Rich.

In Wittenborn's new novel, Pharmakon, success is found not in movies but in the pharmacy. Pharmakon is an epic journey through the world of psychopharmacology from the 1950s to the modern day where psychotropic drugs are as prevalent as cell phones. The novel scales the family tree of psychologist Will Friedrich, a professor at Yale whose ambition to discover the ultimate happy pill puts him in close contact with Casper Gedsic, a suicidal freshman too smart for his own good whose insecurities and mental instability lead him to murder.

Casper becomes a figure that haunts the Friedrichs through the decades via a few close encounters but mostly as a Boo Radley-like specter while he's serving time in a mental institution. The impact of his actions ripples throughout this ambitious, though bloated, novel.

Sample of prose: "The boy who had drawn up plans for an atom bomb at seventeen grew into a man who turned himself into a different kind of secret weapon. Working slowly, patiently, outside of time, while Casper constructed one persona to distract and disarm Dr. Shanley, he reconfigured himself from within, rewired his heart to wreak havoc on Dr. Friedrich."

Pros: Wittenborn has created a compelling family history on a very timely and interesting topic. At times this book is brilliant, in particular in the opening and closing sections, which are filled with compelling action sequences and discoveries.

Cons: The middle gets weighed down with too many characters and too little action. The bloated prose makes the book much longer than it needs to be.

Final word: Kudos to Wittenborn for crafting an ambitious fable for the psychotropic age. I just wish the book's chemistry were a little more focused.