February 2002
|
INSPIRED SLEEP: A NOVEL Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg |
|
Bonnie Saks is 39, divorced, and struggling to
raise two sons on her paltry salary as an adjunct professor of English.
She teaches remedial writing to barely literate college students who
snooze through her class. Bonnie, however, stares at the clock most
nights, sleeping three, four hours at most, as she frets over her
still-unfinished doctoral dissertation. It's on Thoreau, that icon
of self-sufficiency, whose writings force Bonnie to reflect on what's
lacking in her own life. An unplanned pregnancy, the result of a brief
fling with someone she'd never marry, sends Bonnie to visit the obstetrician
who delivered her sons. Trying to weigh whether or not to continue
her pregnancy, Bonnie sees a sign in the hospital asking, "Are
you sleeping too much? Too little?" The lure of possible relief
for her insomnia, plus $250 a week for participating in a three-month
sleep study, proves seductive. Bonnie is an eager consumer of substances galore.
She downs herbal sleep aids and tranquilizers pressed on her by helpful
friends, and blue pills swiped from her drug-using babysitter's purse.
She accepts "opiated hash" from the father of another child
at her son's daycare center, the start of an unsatisfying affair.
She drinks and smokes, even as she contemplates possible risks to
her unborn child. When sleep researcher Ian Ogelvie prepares to inject
her with an experimental drug, he assures her it's safe because he's
done "a thorough search of the literature." Bonnie, despite
her academic training, doesn't ask what possibly could have been written
about an untested drug. Ian is desperate to try his compound on a human
subject. He needs successful results to get his research paper accepted
by a prestigious journal. In Ian's lab at Boston Psychopathic, spiders
taking the new compound spins perfect webs without stopping to rest,
Siamese fighting fish settle into tranquillity, and mice--normally
adverse to water--swim cheerfully in plastic buckets. Bonnie perks
up at first, too. She wears bright scarves to class and manages to
keep her students awake a little longer. She sleeps blissfully at
night. But soon she starts taking more and longer naps in the daytime.
When the spiders abandon work on their webs, Ian
recognizes something has gone wrong. Ian is not so much a mad scientist
as a sad and bad one, caught up in the miasma of his own failed aspirations
to secure grants and recognition. He can't even manage to get a date
with a sultry fellow researcher. Freud once said his goal was to help people live
with ordinary unhappiness. For plenty of people in contemporary society,
author Robert Cohen suggests, that's not good enough. Cohen, who teaches
at Middlebury College in Vermont and has earned several writing awards,
uses Bonnie to deride the pursuit of a pill for every ill. "Even
if it didn't work. As if the taking itself was the cure." In Ian's and his colleagues' willingness to break
rules and put patients at risk, Cohen rips the marketing of health
care services, inadequate safeguards for human research subjects,
backbiting in academia, and pharmaceutical manufacturers' overzealous
promotion of their products. Many of Cohen's riffs on topics such
as big-pharma's underwriting of research and perks for doctors resonate
with recent news stories. Readers may feel they are being lectured
to at times, though. The sleep component of this satire, the skeleton that should hold it up, alas, is flimsy. Ian's description of how his compound allegedly works is gobbledygook. In responding to a screening questionnaire for potential insomnia subjects, Bonnie reports she "often" experiences symptoms of narcolepsy, restless legs, and virtually every other possible sleep disorder. Ian accepts her anyway. Described variously as a psychologist and as a psychiatrist, Ian neither conducts nor orders a physical exam. While Bonnie sleeps in the laboratory, Ian discovers a bottle of vodka the sleep tech has left under the desk, drinks himself into a stupor, and leaves the lab in the middle of the night. The sleep tech who normally works at night--but was told not to come in that night--fortuitously shows up the next morning to release Bonnie from her electrodes. The author's failure to create a credible universe diminishes the story's overall authenticity. |
Copyright (c) 2002
Websciences |