Since the publication in 1993 of Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac, innumerable books have attempted to take the measure of a national psyche increasingly awash in mood-elevating pharmaceuticals. America seems to have embraced with unbridled enthusiasm the family of drugs that interrupt the journey of a neurological chemical called serotonin through the brain — so much so that cultural critics worry the nation is rapidly morphing into the dystopia of Aldous Huxley’s frenzied imagining.
The citizens of Huxley’s Brave New World, you recall, would swallow a gram of the fictional drug “soma” at the first stirrings of anxiety. “Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles,” Huxley writes of a populace so doped-up it is incapable of independent thought.
Huxley may have thought that a drug offering instant and indiscriminate contentment was a horror beyond imagining. But when such a drug is no longer merely a literary trope but a practical possibility, it’s not quite so easy to dismiss. The reality of the SSRI drugs is that they lift psychic boulders from the crippled backs of the clinically depressed, and it’s impossible to argue that such pain should be endured simply because human beings had no choice but to endure it in the millennia before these substances were discovered.
But to those not afflicted with crippling depression — to those suffering minor aches and sadnesses — Prozac and its progeny offer the fantasy that ordinary depression might be treated with an analgesic. We no longer tolerate headaches, throat aches, stomach aches. Why should we tolerate soul aches?
That question is at the heart of Robert Cohen’s novel Inspired Sleep. This witty, wise, intellectually engaging, and altogether extraordinary book is set in the not-so-brave real world of serotonin inhibitors, Internet chat rooms devoted to anxiety, and doctors and patients who test the new drugs that promise relief from spiritual agony even as they raise fundamental questions about human nature.
“Who says what’s okay and what’s pathology? Because there are an awful lot of us in the middle, you know, who don’t know what to call what we’ve got. What are you going to do, go around treating everybody for everything?” The woman who speaks those words to her psychopharmacologist is Bonnie Saks, a thirty-nine-year-old pregnant divorcee with a quick wit, sharp tongue, maxed-out credit cards, two young sons — and a really lousy case of insomnia. The exhausted Bonnie drags herself through the day, rousing and feeding and fighting with her kids, teaching English literature to sullen and uncomprehending undergraduates, avoiding work on a Ph.D. thesis about Thoreau (whom she has come to despise), and trying to make do in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on $ 19,000 a year.
Every night, at 3:29 A.M., she wakes up and cannot get back to sleep: “Her neighbors’ windows were dark. The vacant streets were silent. She could feel the city bobbing along on slow, invisible tides, sailing wistfully through the millennium. What purpose was served, she wondered, in keeping her apart?”
All around her, people are finding refuge in psychopharmaceuticals. Her older son, enraged by his father’s disappearing act, washes down 25 milligrams of Prozac a day with Dr. Pepper. Bonnie joins an Internet “community” whose participants trade gossip and fears about brain drugs. “I got turned on to this great new psychopharmacologist downtown who wants to put me on Effexor,” writes one participant. “Which is supposed to be great stuff. Though I hear it causes lower bowel problems.”
Another: “I have a history of depression and had tremendous results from Nortriptyline and Prozac for 4 yrs. I felt so good I didn’t mind giving up my sex drive.”
Still another: “Hi! I’ve been on Wellbutrin and Cytomel for about 2 months! How long does it take before it really starts to work??? I don’t feel so good sometimes but other times I really am starting to think it’s working!”
Elsewhere in Cambridge, pharmaceutical researchers are developing a medication called Dodabulax, which seems the answer to Bonnie’s prayers. The chief researcher tells his students, “In ten years — five — we’ll be living in a world . . . where the biology of sleep and wakefulness is regularly manipulated through chemical means, with effects as revolutionary in the spheres of work and leisure as was the introduction of electrical light.”
But Bonnie resists medicating herself: “The whole millennial banquet of mood lighteners, breast swellers, hair growers, fat removers . . . — all the fast chemical solutions you could buy in a jar and swallow your way toward perfectibility — made her feel reticent and grudging, like a fat girl on a diet. Was there to be a remedy for everything, then? For life itself?”
She tells the father of her younger son’s preschool classmate, “I don’t approve of shortcuts. Not anymore. Every time I take one I wind up getting lost.” The father has become a participant in the clinical trial of Dodabulax. “Gives you fantastic dreams. Fantastic dreams that never end,” he says. “Do you know what it’s like to have nothing but deep sleep and fantastic dreams?”
Bonnie cannot resist the lure. “Forget the planet,” she thinks. “It’s you that needs saving.” She joins the clinical trial for Dodabulax as well. The drug is administered to her by a brilliant young psychopharmacologist named Ian Ogelvie, who is gifted with a capacity for stillness that Bonnie lacks utterly. He can sit for hours and observe as a spider, doped with Dodabulax, weaves perfect, symmetrical webs, and two Siamese fighting fish dosed with the drug no longer feel the compulsion to fight. But while Ian’s life is as Spartan as Bonnie’s is chaotic, it is equally unsatisfying: “There were times he did not so much inhabit his life as observe it under glass, finding his every movement obvious and reactive, significant not of itself but of some larger, unknowable force that lay beyond the frame of his will.”
Dodabulax works its magic on Bonnie immediately. She is finally rested, full of new energy, more patient with her kids. But for someone so burdened, sleep itself quickly becomes an addiction. Her four-year-old sees it happening: “Lately she didn’t care so much about what they ate, or how often they took baths, or what the teachers had said about what they’d done in school that day, or any of the usual things she worried about. All she seemed to think about was lying down. She did that a lot. Even when she was standing up she sort of looked like she was lying down.”
The high-powered lawyer who introduced her to Dodabulax loses his ambition and his sex drive. Ian’s spider stops spinning webs altogether. The dreams of a convict who receives triple doses begin slopping over into his waking life, leaving him “yellow, his bones scooped from his face as if by claws.” And what effect will the drug have on Bonnie’s pregnancy?
Inspired Sleep may sound depressing, but it is vivid and alive in a way few contemporary novels are. Cohen has a rare sensibility that is equal parts comic and compassionate. He has a ruthless satiric understanding of the woes of the overly educated, but also an imaginative sympathy for the anxieties arising from those woes. Cohen renders the political dynamics of Ian’s research team, and Ian’s blindness to them, with uncanny precision and detail. And Bonnie is one of the great characters in recent fiction: smart, obnoxious, self-pitying, and yet resilient.
Like so many who indulge in the fantasy of a chemical release from our ordinary troubles, Bonnie wishes to be delivered from the clutter of her life. Cohen’s point is that clutter is life. Better to be Bonnie than Ian Ogelvie, who longs for human connection but cannot quite manage it. He can only watch, mystified, as the world swirls around him. Bonnie lives in the whirlwind. It’s often overwhelming, but it’s also far more interesting.
Contributing editor John Podhoretz last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about Mel Brooks’s The Producers.
