Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2008
416 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
William Friedrich, an ambitious professor of psychology at Yale in 1952, has stumbled upon a drug that promises happiness?and that can make him a famous man. When his experiment goes awry, and a research subject commits murder, the consequences will haunt him and his family forever.
Pharmakon is an epic novel, an invocation of the quest for bliss, for love, for family, and all of the betrayals that follow. We follow the Friedrichs from the well-ordered suburban life of postwar America through the chaos and freedom of the counterculture, into the drug-fueled, media-crazed eighties and beyond. In William Friedrich, Wittenborn has defined the archetypal American patriarch: a miracle worker and source of strength to everyone except those he loves the most. Pharmakon is also a layered, thoughtful search behind the veil of psychopharmacology as we know it today?a tale not only of the consequences of research, but also of the complex personalities, appetites, and struggles that created it.
Honest, insightful, and ruefully funny, Pharmakon captures formative moments of the twentieth century, the quirks of an American family, and will enthrall fans of the novels of John Irving.
"Unfortunately, the fates of the Friedrich children are of much less dramatic interest than that of their father, and as the novel shifts focus to their travails, this dysfunctional family narrative disappointingly peters out into irresolution." - Publishers Weekly.
"The author is an Emmy Award-nominated producer, and perhaps he would have better luck turning his premise into a screenplay. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries only." - Library Journal.
"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." - Kirkus Reviews.
"Starred Review. Pharmakon is a big book in every way except page count. It is filled with vivid, nuanced characters and with ideas, and Wittenborn’s engaging writing recalls Richard Russo." - Booklist.
"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 Mr. Wittenborn is able to channel a lifetime's worth of psychiatric symptoms into one improbably universal story." - New York Times, Janet Maslin.
"In Pharmakon Dirk Wittenborn has given us a fascinating portrait of a family living on the edge in the barely post-medieval age of 1950's psychopharmacology. Both victims and perpetrators, pioneers and innocents, the saga of the Freidrichs will stay with you long after the book has been read." - Richard Price, author of Lush Life.
"Eerie, authentic, and always with heart, Pharmakon is a slow-burning triumph." - Marisha Pessl, author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
This information about Pharmakon was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dirk Wittenborn is a novelist and screenwriter whose books have been published in more than a dozen countries. He is the Emmy-nominated producer of the HBO documentary Born Rich and the coauthor and coproducer of The Lucky Ones, a feature film about American soldiers returning from Iraq. His last novel, before The Stone Girl, was Pharmakon. He lives in New York City.
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