Sweetness #9[Little, Brown and Company; 2014]

Sweetness #9 by Stephen Eirik Clark tells a story of organized craving. The main object of craving in this book is the institution of food. Not so much the taste, although that is a useful alibi, but its presence: the shell of plastic wrap and air designed to preserve it for months, the dyes issuing signaling colors far brighter than the original, the clear familiar smells created out of a cocktail of chemicals, the freezers holding weeks of frozen dinners for a captive family, and, in the end, looming over every indulgence of an era in which nobody in our part of the world starves, the guilty aftermath of eating — exercise, scales, fat, and the raw misfortune of being one of the statistics of the FDA. Without knowing why, the people in this book love the institution of food as much as they do its taste.

We begin in the early seventies. David Leveraux is our narrator. He’s trying to set the record — which he thinks we, the readers, might know — straight. In his own words, he starts off a believer in America. He doesn’t understand hippies. He selects scotch over pot. He thinks Nixon is innocent. What does he do? He works as a flavorist, a scientist responsible for artificial flavorings. Just consider, he says, breathlessly, the Golden Age, where following the invention of the TV dinner came the microwave: “a Sputnik-like event that caused young men such as myself to heed the call of nation’s top food science program.” Ho-Hos and Twinkies are the tastes of freedom, while the actual work of fighting the Red Menace goes on elsewhere, far from David’s consciousness.

We know exactly what is coming: victory over the Soviet Union and the puritanical rejection of the microwave, the prepackaged snack cake, and the additive. But David can’t know this, and so, from a person who is decidedly average, we get a ground-zero view of the rise and fall of his Golden Age.

He works at a prestigious lab where a brand-new artificial sweetener, Sweetness #9, is being tested. It is in this lab where he notices that the monkeys (fed on Sweetness #9) are growing fat and fond of Jerry Lewis movies, and the rat he has unadvisedly developed a connection with has become depressed. The monkeys disappear, to be replaced by thinner monkeys. The rat has social problems, and dies. More problems follow for David.

He tries to blow the whistle on his employers. The attempt fails, and he ends on a food-science community black list. He is saved by a German émigré, Ernst Eberhart, who takes him to a new life at another company called FlavAmerica. It is there that we rejoin David, in the late 90s, in Battle Station, New Jersey, after he has become a respected member of the food science community.

It is the return of the repressed: the obese monkeys and depressed rats become his wife and two children, living in a house on a hill in New Jersey. They are wired into a familiar network: suburban ennui instead of Jerry Lewis. Into this laboratory, Clark cleverly allows talk-radio and pre-internet Albanian manifestos regarding additives to enter. Soon David is paranoid about the product whose effects he had seen, and then denied: Sweetness #9. Packets of the substance follow him everywhere, his son stops using verbs, and his daughter is mordant and obsessed with toxins.

Clark’s skillful narrative maneuvers scenes of home and work, hinting at and drawing out the plausible and implausible reasons for what is or what might be wrong with David’s life. Sweetness #9 could lie beneath, a poison turning people into apathetic machines. But this is not a science thriller or a political novel, and the possibility of menace has nothing to do with questions of chemical or corporate malevolence. Instead, it’s David and his daughter Priscilla, discussing her exposé for her school newspaper on artificial foods, and his flashes of guilt as he stumbles over his own past. It’s the way his wife asks him if he’s gay. It’s the fact that as terrorists attack supermarkets, the hammer falls on his family, on his life. There is a toll, and a supposed meaning behind the attacks, but these are forgotten in the rush of his family to the edge.

Backstory is provided by a senile Ernst. It purposely explodes the entire premise of the Sweetness #9-based narrative. Yet David survives the explosion, unaware of what he has really ingested in his survival, and it is here that the problem in the book arises. Ernst, as Hitler’s flavorist, was witness to the end of the Third Reich. He was also witness to the rise of Geschmack Drei, a flavoring that rendered its most-famous user, Adolf Hitler, depressed and suicidal. Or so years after the fact and demented he believes: “But by March of ’45, after more than a half year of use, he was speaking of suicide and admitting defeat . . . I didn’t know how to explain it.” Geschamck Drei is of course Sweetness #9. Whether or not it led to Hitler being possessed by the spirit of defeat, or whether that was more due to the fact of his being alive in a bunker under Berlin, awaiting the Soviet Army, is not a question for this novel. Thinks David: “His story didn’t have an end any more than time did; it continued in me.”

It is a convincing moment of comical obtuseness. Hitler the leader subverted by chemicals rather than war, David’s family and his laboratory animals having had their wills eaten away by a chemical rather than life or their situation. We believe David would accept this. Or at least, a David desperate to finalize the events of his life with a story that permits coherence.

In another convincing scene, a younger colleague, the thrift-store attired Beekley, plays prophet, and explains that the age of ideas of artificial strawberries are over, that now it’s the taste of actual strawberries that will serve like, he says, heroin. The older scientists are silent, letting this wash over them. They have just come from the new farmer’s market, and they are standing in a museum of forged art, surrounded by Rembrandts, Picassos, and Warhol that had all once hung in museums before being exposed as counterfeits. It is the perfect environment for a prophet. Art and reality are everywhere, and the men whose careers attack it are about to be exposed. David listens as Beekley happily explains their obsolescence, and the message sticks with him.

Like all people who want to be authentic, he has several convenient skins to shed in order to throw off the past. His family’s real name is not Leveraux, but Mockus, we find. He tells his family this in the spirit of confession. Then he adopts a bland diet that Winston Churchill recommended to the unwilling English of the war. And at the finish, he begins taking communion at an Orthodox church.

To David, it is enough to end the book with some form of hope. But to the reader, his ending is unreal. It’s not quite a parody of a sentimental ending. It’s just convincing enough to raise doubts. This is a book, after all, about artificial tastes. And the most artificial part of the book is the human narrator. The author, it seems, flinched, before the act of tracing his creation back to its laboratory.

 
Thomas Schrope is a writer living in New York.


 
 
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