INSPIRED SLEEP

An insomniac single mother seeks relief—and (temporarily) finds chemically induced bliss.

It’s no wonder Bonnie Saks can’t sleep. She’s a poorly paid college instructor, working doggedly on her dissertation while teaching Western Lit. to drowsy undergrads. She’s beset by a vague longing for a better life, overwhelmed by feelings of failure, and worried about her unintended pregnancy. Her married lover means well but does little, and her do-gooder husband decamped some time ago to the Third World in pursuit of a less materialistic way of life. Their teenaged son Alex is a nervous wreck, subsisting on Prozac and Dr. Pepper, and her younger son, longing for his feckless father, keeps her awake with nightmares of his own. So Bonnie answers an ad for sleep-study volunteers placed by Dr. Ian Ogelvie, a hotshot young psychiatrist who’s testing the fabulous new sleeping pill Dodabulax. He spends long hours each night at the lab obsessing over trifles, fantasizing about the fat grant he hopes to earn, lusting after his nubile, tough-talking lab assistant Marisa Chu, and swilling vodka straight from the bottle. Hooking up Bonnie to an electroencephalograph and sending her into dreamland with a few blue pills, he watches her sink into untroubled slumber at last. Her dreams are restful and deeply pleasurable—and often erotic. But when she wakes up, everything is just like before. Bonnie gets on wearily with her life, learns that the fetus has died (and that those blue pills were placebos); and Dr. Ogelvie learns that he won’t get that coveted grant after all.

Cohen (The Here and Now, 1996) takes a few feeble pokes at the collusion between universities and international drug companies bent on getting their latest products past the FDA, but that’s about it for excitement. Any intermittent flights of fancy are shot down by the cerebral, fussy prose.