AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL
Wittenborn psychiatric rating scales take their name from Dr J.R. Wittenborn, a research scientist whose fields of expertise included psychopharmacology and the evaluation of responses to psychotropic drugs. Now his son, Dirk Wittenborn, has written a guide to evaluating his father.
Pharmakon is the younger Wittenborn's novel about the family of a narcissistic, opinionated and dangerous patriarch whose work's influence extends to the lives of his relatives _ and beyond. ''If there's brain candy in your medicine cabinet,'' the narrator maintains, ''chances are my father's messed with your head, too.''
Pharmakon begins in the early 1950s, at the dawn of the age of mood-altering pharmaceuticals, with the research career of William Friedrich, a psychology professor at Yale. Though this is the heyday of the lobotomy as psychiatric treatment, Will's ambitions point him elsewhere. He falls under the sway of an autocratic, patrician scientist named Bunny Winton, who has studied the response of certain cannibals to certain fermented leaves from their native New Guinea.
She refers to this substance as ''the Way Home.'' When Will tries taking it, he hallucinates and sees ''shrieking, feathered apparitions'' that he finds wildly exciting. ''This is why he had become a psychologist and taken a job at Yale at a salary that forced him to put off going to the dentist,'' the book explains about the new discovery. As far as Will is concerned, the chemical cure for depression has been born.
When Will meets a pimpled Yale freshman named Casper Gedsic, Pharmakon is still immersed in a fondly satirical depiction of 1950s academia. It takes a while to realise that Will's doctorly interest in a hapless, brilliant oddball like Casper may lead to trouble. ''It's almost as if he lacks joy receptors,'' Will says of Casper, who begins looking like a good guinea pig for Will's chemical experiments.
During this part of Pharmakon, Wittenborn describes an abundance of innocent drug dosing that carries no hint of possible consequences. He illustrates how the characters' moods spike up and downward, depending on what substances they have been ingesting.
Beyond its interest in mood swings, his book also deals with snobbery and ambition, to the point where it briefly resembles one of David Lodge's wry comedies of academic manners. But then it takes a terrible turn: Casper turns out to have been too volatile to withstand the changes to which he has been subjected. He has been coaxed out of his isolation and thrust into circumstances he cannot handle. All in all, Casper has been tipped off balance.
Still, Casper seems so central that it comes as a surprise that the main part of Pharmakon will unfold later. Most of the book occurs post-Casper, after the calamities that changed the Friedrich family forever. Suddenly the novel has a narrator: Zach Friedrich, a young boy with an older brother, Willy, and two sisters, Fiona and Lucy. Zach would also have had another older brother named Jack had not their father, by now a stellar scientific figure for his role as a pioneer of psychopharmacology, enabled Casper to make a murderous mistake.
Pharmakon takes its title from a Greek word meaning both poison and cure. That befits its insightful depiction of this whole fraught family and the strange atmosphere in which Zach grows up. Experimental drugs seep into the story from every direction.
Zach's mother, Nora, who has been badly depressed for a while, suddenly begins cleaning house, dressing up and holding dinner parties after her husband uses his medical wiles to buoy her spirits. Not for nothing does Will use a paperweight that looks like a pill, a gift from a drug company whose fortunes have been greatly helped by Will's efforts. When Zach's parents' romance is rekindled, he notices that ''late at night, for fear of waking us, they'd whisper words like 'meprobamate,' 'diazepan,' 'chlorpromazine,' as if they were speaking a secret language of love.''
Zach sounds like a largely autobiographical version of Wittenborn. Both of them grew up amid great drug experimentation. Both aim to become writers. And both eventually pay dearly for the ideas of normalcy that they absorbed during childhood. Zach winds up a promising Hollywood writer whose drug habit all but destroys his career. Wittenborn is a film producer who recently saw one of his earlier novels, Fierce People, adapted to the screen, and who has talked about his own self-destructive chemical troubles.
What's best about Pharmakon, beyond the curiosity value of its unusual premise and atmosphere, is Wittenborn's colourful, affectionate evocation of a complex family story. While it goes without saying that the doctor can be envisioned as monstrous, Pharmakon prefers to see the humanity in his clumsy efforts at manipulation.
The book's portrait of Friedrich does justice to an overreaching former farm boy whose new celebrity never quite makes him happy and who cannot allow those around him to move through life unimpeded. Here is a man who, when his daughter paints a portrait of the family, insists on correcting her work. When pot-smoking Zach wins a high school essay contest by writing ''What Goes Up Must Come Down,'' about the perils of drug use, the doctor fails to detect any whiff of hypocrisy in his son's accomplishment.
Ultimately Pharmakon is a smart, eccentric coming-of-age story about an entire culture's maturation process, not just one about the workings of a single family. And Wittenborn is able to channel a lifetime's worth of psychiatric symptoms into one improbably universal story. NY
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