Book Review: Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn

Normally, when we read a novel that ends without explaining the plot point, ambiguities, and portents, we usually think the writer has done something. Plot holes are the sign of a lazy, unskilled writer who likes to raise attention to certain themes, but doesn’t know how to follow through on it. With Pharmakon, however, Fierce People author Dirk Wittenborn has turned the plot hole into an aesthetic. In an interview posted online, Wittenborn makes the case that the ambiguities, insecurities, and missing information in our lives are what ultimately define us.

In Pharmakon, a chilling if maddeningly inconsistent novel, we get to the source of Yale psychologist William Friedrich’s research, the mental breakdown and consistent mad killing spree of his patient Casper Gedsic, and circumstances of Gedsic’s subsequent recapture years later after he escapes from a mental asylum. The true facts are never made clear in any of those cases. Yet, rather than leaving gaping holes in Pharmakon that leave us unsatisfied, those ambiguities are what draw us in to the novel, and turn what could have been a turgid academic psychobabble novel into a thrilling, psychologically compelling page-turner. Wittenborn’s innovation here is no small accomplishment.

What is more problematic, however, is Wittenborn’s more superficial methods of disorienting his reader in Pharmakon. The novel switches from first to third person multiple times, and the four books that make up Pharmakon may have been better served as independent or serialized novellas. The problem is not so much the disorienting effect of the change of narrator, but that some of the sections stand out far above the others.

Pharmakon is at its most infatuating in the first book, when we learn of Friedrich’s discovery of a wonder herb used by cannibals in the South Pacific that he hopes to make a fortune off of by turning it into a drug. He works with Dr. Bunny Winton, the lone woman in Yale’s psychology department, who discovered the herb while working as a nurse during World War II. Wittenborn’s grasp of the toils of academic life at Yale in the early '50s is remarkably adept, and the first section is as exciting for the details of the social lives of academics as it is for Friedrich and Winton’s secret project that has them as giddy as schoolchildren.

Article Author: Ethan Stanislawski

Ethan Stanislawski is a freelance journalist/critic and new media specialist. He is a regular reviewer and staff writer at Prefix Magazine, and also contributes regularly to Blogcritics Magazine. His interests include theater, film, and pop music …

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