by Robert Cohen
(Simon & Schuster Inc, 2001)
(U.S. $ 25.00 - Can. $37.00)
Bonnie Saks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, needs help. Her unfinished dissertation is flung across her desk. Her ex-husband has decamped to South America, leaving her with their two sons. and most pressingly of all, she has a debilitating case insomnia. So when she sees a sign that asks, ARE YOU SLEEPING TOO LITTLE?, Bonnie immediately signs up for a state-of-the -art study. Under the care of Ian Ogelvie, a hotshot researcher with visionary ideas, ad with the aid of an experimental drug, she enters a vague and happy dream state thay may or may not be good for her.
With a keen, panoramic eye, Inspired Sleepencompasses everything from the slippery evasions of love to the intricate network of commerce that binds together Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and managed care. It gives us a richly satiric and exuberant portrait of millennial America-its believers, hustlers, prospering careeristsm, and shadow population of lost, sleepless souls-dramatizing one of the most salient questions of our times: Are antidepressant drugs an escape from ora channel to our genuine selves? It is at once both profoundly illuminating and terrifically funny.
Comments
"Robert Cohen's fine writing and honesty of vision provide us with the clarity and companionship of the best novels. Cohen's characters engage the age-old questions about what it means to be a human(e) being-not at philosophical high altitudes, but at school board meetings, in doctors' offices, at home with our children, and at sea with our lovers."
- Julia Alvarez
"Inspired Sleep"is that rare phenomenon, a truly contemporary, truly adult novel. With dazzling wit, Robert Cohen details the manners and mores of romance, medicine, and child rearing in the late twentieth century. His characters could be our next-door neighbors, or ourselves. Inspired Sleepis an irresistable pleasure."
- Margot Livesey