Consensus Satire

...Perhaps because the centerpiece of this novel is a research project that involves the distancing act of observation, or perhaps because its form is social satire with a moral underpinning, themes and characters turn to some extent into subjects and types and do not quite come fully to life...

...Their instructive function brings them breathtakingly close at times to stereotypes: the ruthless lab chief in cahoots with the giant drug companies...

...Pain, I mean...

...They are sharing a pipe of "some opiated hash...

...She is the novel's messenger and, as such, is something of a vessel: less vivid, less vital and less important than what she is carrying...

...The meeting itself, as a set piece, is a delicious send-up of overly competitive, overly educated, aging liberal professionals, "parents of both genders," who are aggressively proprietary about everything they have acquired, including the old Leftist "issues" they "have...

...Implicit is that just as decent men accept paternal responsibility, so truly cultured people insist on the common sense principle of an author's responsibility...

...Some pill or other to reconstitute the molecules of your fate...

...Even Bonnie, as central as she is to the story, remains a little distant, less of a person and more like anobject under examination, with predictable behavior and noteworthy responses...

...But there are also lesser characters, such as Bonnie's three-year-old with his sleep troubles, who, after a brief trial of medication, is cured with an age-old placebo—his mother's magic words uttered at bedtime to dispel the lurking night monsters and demons...

...She opens herself, in addition, to the possibilities of other relationships despite their risks, including the perilous leap of finishing her thesis...

...It is also Bonnie who imparts to us her understanding that "the history of pharmaceuticals was as rich and profuse as the history of pain...

...They articulate their insight with the kind of tentativeness and tolerance of alternative opinions that mark them as open-minded, liberal people who want your approval...

...Ian is testing what is projected to become an immensely lucrative drug...

...Most important, it is Bonnie who herself recognizes, and then brings to us in turn, the revelation that for life itself there can be no prescription...

...Prisoners to whom massive experimental doses have been administered become helplessly psychotic...

...Ian alone, while not quite full-bodied either, manages on some level to surprise, especially at the end...

...My theory," Ian says, "is it's all that keeps us going...

...Keeps us awake...

...Snug now and mellow, she confides to Larry that she might be pregnant by an academic she originally met a few years earlier at a Modern Language Association convention...

...Bonnie has staggered coatless out of the meeting and is sitting alongside Larry Albeit, the suecessful lawyer father of another preschooler, in his heated Saab...

...Both of these sympathetic characters—and, one suspects, the appealing, intelligent author as well—come down on the side of consciousness and against chemistry, on the side of anxiety and stress, tension and pain, the stuff of life itself...

...My theory is, if not for pain we'd just, you know, float around like jellyfish...

...And high-powered achievers like Larry Albeit, also a participant in the study, basically drop out...

...For better or worse, what all this adds up to is notmean, lashing satire, like Philip Roth's, but consensus satire like David Lodge's...

...In every culture and epoch, in every far-flung corner of the globe, people were ravenous for relief...

...Sleep, too, represents a major form of escape, and there are a good many variations here on that motif...

...It is a cold winter's night...

...It is Bonnie who brings us the news that "the world was made of chemicals...

...And there is, most originally, her babysitter, who writes a high school essay on Macbeth that idiosyncratically focuses on the shenanigans of the witches to give Shakespeare's great sleep play a feminist and, more relevantly, a drug spin...

...These range from the "sickly sweet odor of aftershave, deodorant, toothpaste, and Woolite—the many applied chemicals of the public self" on the priest she meets in the hospital elevator at the beginning of the book, to the substances on the doctor treating her at the end...

...Its stressed-out, terminally exhausted protagonist, Bonnie Saks, a divorced woman around 40, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the close of the 20th century...

...Already the drug has generated "inspired sleep" in Siamese fighting fish, who now float surreally around in their tanks in a seemingly endless dream state...

...Those themes involve the stress and corrosive fatigue of being alive and conscious in our age of anxiety, and the quest for some respite from that consciousness through chemicals and drugs...

...The father is a hot young Turk poststructuralist...

...His teeth had "been coated that morning with titanium dioxide, his underarms dusted with zirconium trichlorohydrex, his orangejuice spiked withtricalcfum citrate...

...Bonnie and Ian, whose interaction is limited almost exclusively to the lab, each separately come to essentially the same conclusion about life and adjust accordingly...

...In the same way that these characters are partially on call to demonstrate an aspect of sleep, other characters seem positioned to perform specific jobs...

...Spiders on the drug take extended naps, having to all intents and purposes retired from web-spinning...

...One of Cohen's best lines is delivered close to the beginning of inspired Sleep, after a parents' meeting at the cooperative preschool Bonnie's younger son attends...

...For life itself...

...When Larry asks if the father is "in the picture," Bonnie shoots back, "The father...

...Bonnie, "a woman who abhorred absolutists, who chafed at puritanical strictures of all kinds," who, moreover, had admittedly fully partaken in her time of the modern age's chemical banquet, eventually flushes her pills down the toilet...

...the disillusioned ex-science superstar, downgraded to prison psychiatrist, seeking a high and oblivion through sugar and dope...

...This is true not simply because she is a subject of the experiment at the center of the book, but because she appears basically as a patient almost throughout...

...Perhaps more to the point, it is also the end of what the government has unironically declared to be the "Decade of the Brain...

...The action, in fact, turns on Bonnie's efforts to get some relief from her debilitating insomnia by becoming a subject in a research study run by the novel's othermain character, Ian Ogelvie, an ambitious 30ish postdoc psychopharmacologist at a hot Boston sleep lab...

...Nothing on our minds...

...Ian, too, determines to plunge into real life by abandoning the corrupt world where scientists collude with drug companies and devoting himself to humanitarian goals, very possibly in an underdeveloped country...

...He deems her a most suitable subject not only for this research but for his independent explorations on the effects of placebos, known here as "Expectancy" theory, based on the idea that "Chemically speaking, the body's metabolic changes were often determined by the functions of the mind...

...The father won't even concede an author is responsible for his own book...

...It supposedly launches people very quickly, and for longer periods of time, into the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) dream stage from which they emerge far more deeply rested...

...Bonnie is struggling to raise her two boys on erratic child support supplemented by her pathetic salary as an adjunct college instructor of expository writing...

...Accordingly, Bonnie dedicates herself anew to the ferocity of her love for her children, which renders her so vulnerable after all...

...Most prominent, of course, are Bonnie and Ian—she with her major case of sleep deprivation, he with his big sleep study and, almost touchingly, his strategy for coping with disappointment...

...Three of her big scenes involve visits to a gynecologist, a fourth is a major medical event at home, and her sex interludes are a little clinical too...

...It doesn't shake you up, disturb you, possibly change you...

...There is also the student in one of her writing sessions who, though obnoxious and failing in every other respect, manages to fascinate even as he insults her with his "almost mystical ability" to fall asleep exactly 12 minutes into every class...

...The plot is occasionally pushed forward through such not wholly integrated devices as chat room transcripts, press clippings, records of funding committee meetings, research questionnaires, etc., while the peculiarities of sleep and the sleepers are sort of up there on display in all their interesting clinical varieties...

...Upon receiving a fishy rejection of his grant proposal by the National Institute of Mental Health, he flies "right into the soft, pliant arms of sleep...

...The story unfolds over the course of just a few winter months at the close of the last, exhausting century...

...Rather, with respect to certain themes that define our time, it gently reinforces the judgments it generously assumes you've always held...

...That's the line, and its effect relies on an understanding between the reader and the writer—on a shared familiarity with the academic scene in general and, specifically, a united raised eyebrow at contemporary literary criticism's disavowal of the importance of authorial intent...

...At the same time, she is trying to complete her long-overdue dissertation on Thoreau...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara," "Master of the Return,' and "The Jewish War" Robert Cohen's third novel, a skillfully written satire, has a lot of sharp lines...

...When had issues become possessions, Bonnie wondered, and why didn't she own more of them herself...

...A further inference is that unlike the cad who fathered Bonnie's baby, Robert Cohen is a decent fellow who owns up to creating not only the unborn child but Bonnie and every other character and situation in his book...

...In violation of research protocol, and despite her pregnancy, Ian on his own admits the desperate, sleepless Bonnie into the study...

...She has already expressed her convictions: "Was there to be a remedy for everything, then...

...the calculating, sexy Asian woman medical careerist...