Book Review: Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn - Page 2

It is there we meet Casper, whose name is a not-to-subtle allusion to the way he will haunt Friedrich and his family for the rest of their lives. Casper is a mentally unstable loner, the son of a Lithuanian cranberry picker in New Jersey who got into Yale by winning a science competition with a design for an atom bomb. Through taking Friedrich and Winton’s wonder drug, Casper becomes the big shot at the Yacht club, a wizard gold investor and fiancée of the granddaughter of the Governor of Connecticut. As soon as he goes off the drug — or was he still on it? — Casper breaks down, and shows up at Friedrich’s house with a gun in his hand and a list of people to murder.

The tragedies of Book 1 naturally lead to the events of Book 2, where the Friedrichs, now living in New Jersey while William works for pharmaceuticals. The Friedrich child have to grow up with a traumatized mother and a father who shoots down their every action with brazenly honest but emotionally destructive psychoanalysis. We hear it all through the perspective of youngest son Zach, who is too young to remember New Haven, and whose life is inextricably tied to Casper. While the change from third to first person could be jarring, we can overlook it because Zach is so adept at analyzing his family, and has such a fascinating story to tell of family social dynamics, the insecurities and life-altering events of youth and maturation, and the irrevocable damage his father caused for all his children. The two sections seem tied together in ways a lesser writer could never accomplish.

In the final two books, however, Pharmakon truly goes off the deep end. In the third person, we meet up with the adult Zach, now called “Z,” who is a recovering cocaine addict (and not recovering very well) in the '80s. Z still can’t get over the problems of his childhood and his relation to the history of Casper Gedsic. It’s already a problem that Wittenborn’s grasp of tone and milieu of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s is not as strong as that of previous decades. What’s more problematic is his inclination to have Z become partially enlightened about the events of the Friedrichs’ Yale days and the experiments with Casper. It seems that Wittenborn did not have the faith in himself to leave those ambiguities completely unresolved, or to leave the dramatic irony to the reader alone. That inability to go the extra mile dilutes the true ingenuity of Pharmakon’s structure and narrative, and makes the book something much more typical.

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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