Addictive Medicine, Despite the Side Effects

PHARMAKON

By Dirk Wittenborn

Viking. 406 pp. $25.95

Reading Dirk Wittenborn's "Pharmakon," I thought of bees. Flying insects play no role in Wittenborn's novel, but the thing about bees is that, according to physics, their trifling wings shouldn't fly. There's no way those implausible little flaps can lift a buzzing mass into the air. Yet they do.

"Pharmakon" sputters and ticks along with real problems of pacing, of consistency, of language. It's a mess. All the same, the book manages, somehow, to fly. Even as I shook my head at yet another of Wittenborn's missteps, I'd realize he'd caused me to get off at the wrong subway stop. I'd been too engrossed in the story.

So, what is the story? That's a hard one. "Pharmakon" is not a first novel, but it mingles imagination and solipsism in the way that many first novels do. In Wittenborn's petri dish is the Friedrich family: the father, William, is a professor at Yale, and his youngest son, Zach, ends up a drug-addicted friend of John Belushi. As it happens, Wittenborn himself was the youngest child of a Yale professor, and he also ended up a near-casualty of the "Saturday Night Live" crowd in the late-1970s. Mrs. Friedrich is her husband's research assistant; Wittenborn's real-life mother was his father's research assistant. And on it goes.

"Pharmakon" opens in the early 1950s, when Dr. Friedrich is working on an early depression drug. For a time, the action revolves around Casper Gedsic, who is Friedrich's guinea pig. Gedsic, for reasons we're only given sketchily, decides he wants to kill Friedrich. That almost-attempted murder gives the book its narrative drive.

Was there a counterpart to the fictional Gedsic in real life? (Apparently, yes.) You start asking those kind of extra-literary questions when a novel runs awkwardly close to the author's experience because, as Martin Amis has observed, autobiographical fiction puts the reader in a state of salacious curiosity about the novelist's private life. I was minding my own business before this book came along.

But the problem with "Pharmakon" isn't that the plot follows every turn of Wittenborn's life like a little brother. The problem is that Wittenborn hasn't put his material through the changes required by fiction -- the recasting of life's scraps into something with the scope and meaning of graceful narrative.

Because Gedsic appears and then is jailed before the reader gets to know him, because all details about Friedrich's exciting research drop away, because the budding sexual intrigue Wittenborn sets up between Friedrich and his research partner Bunny Winton is never explored -- because of all this and more -- we're left with the stuff of juicy diaries, but not of the best novels. It lacks any sort of grand meaning, or grand artistry. Casper Gedsic is a huge part of the story, but what does he mean to the family, to the story, to himself?

The most glaring example of this artlessness is the novel's structure -- or its structures. "Pharmakon" reads like two distinct novels smushed into one. The book's first section, written in the third person, deals with Friedrich and Winton and their discovery of the first antidepressant. The prose in this part is on an impatient sprint and doesn't slow to catch its breath. Wittenborn rushes even an important scene in which Friedrich and Winton have to save their imperiled research from a crusty boss. The author gives the sense that he's ditching authorial pieties for the simple honesty of reportage.

But then the novel throttles down for Book II. Here, we see the Friedrich family after William's research, and we also get a whole new cast: son Zach and his siblings. And this part, told by a first-person Zach who somehow knows things only a third-person narrator could know, is a coming-of-age story, without any of the campus politics or scientific adventuring of the first part.

And yet "Pharmakon" is brightened by an atmosphere of personal authority; it really feels true. In the best novels, the personal and the general add up to a significance that goes beyond one's private experience. But if too much of "Pharmakon" goes by as life itself goes by -- before the cosmetic and wardrobe changes of art have given it a proper makeover -- it still has a powerful sense of realism. I think that's the answer to the mystery of this book. It shouldn't work, but it does, somehow, despite everything; a vibe of personal experience saves this fast-moving, confused, likable and flawed novel.