Pharma Culture and the Poetic Mind: Michael Workman Reviews Anne Yoder's The Enhancers

Among the great books about pharma culture, and there are a number of them, Anne Yoder’s The Enhancers should be thought of as a new contemporary standout. And that’s a tall order in a field that includes the late Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, and Stephen Elliott’s excellent The Adderall Diaries, not to mention immediate drug culture precursors such as Basketball Diaries, everything by Burroughs, on and on. But The Enhancers probably has more in common overall with the pill poppers of Fahrenheit 451, whose residents are (mostly) willing participants in their own forced somnolent pacification through the constant abuse of sleeping pills. In that dystopian storyline, Montag’s wife Mildred takes them so frequently she spends a significant amount of time in a paralytic stupor, eventually overdoses, and has to have her blood replaced by an “Electric-Eyed Snake machine,” a procedure so horrific, so metaphorically self-obliterating in its dehumanization, watching her abject subservience to the procedure ignites Montag’s eventual revolution against the book-burners.

Released this year on the now somewhat venerable (in dog-years) Chicago-based indie Meekling Press, the novel starts off with a quote from Rimbaud, “O science! Everything has been taken care of […],“ and drops the reader directly into a dystopian fantasy world in which that is exactly the case. Every aspect of human existence has become a node on the Lumena Corp.’s totalizing, granular chemical treatment plan. Another in a long line of evil corporations in film and literature, Lumena Corp. is a chemical company so monolithic it seems to stand in for the government. On the surface, one could be forgiven for mistaking the problem that the novel illustrates as formulaic, when instead it serves as metaphor for the problem of our culture’s pharma-titrated, self-help fanaticism, fanning out in the coming-of-age narrative of three teenage girlfriends: Hannah, Celia, and Azzie.

Hannah, the main character, has grown up with her friends in a factory town that produces VALEDICTORIAN (or V. for short) for Lumena Corp. V. is one of many enhancers specialized in by their local Lumena factory, boosting those with higher than average intelligence to even greater heights. Since birth, Hannah has seemingly subsisted on a strict regimen of pills developed and manufactured by Lumena and seems to revel in the control it grants her to fine-tune her own psyche. “And I had an arsenal of relaxants. Sublingual strips of Mental Floss to help organize thoughts, Liquid EnerG for boosts and ampules of FortiFYI and Meniscus, which helped forge connections and mental agility. My dosing schedule changes weekly, sometimes daily, with my new lability” (46).

There are more drugs than there are ailments to treat. Yoder plays some language games with the endless variety of names: AnxietyEZ, Delixir, Sunkiss – you get the picture. They rearrange brain chemistry into targeted outcomes for performance in their contributions to society, with parameters apparently drawn inside a chemical engineer’s checkbox. These “enhancement” prescriptions, in all their infinite variety, are the constant subject of the three friends’ conversations.

But Yoder takes a painterly approach to the material of language, a reality defined one amplitude off from ours, as the three friends experiment with the pharmacopia at their disposal. Minds fracture as their society is organized and reorganized around the drugs, and that dictates pretty much everything about them: social roles, status, intelligence, imaginative capacities. “Everything seemed fragmented,” Hannah muses, “but oddly this drew us together, like our previous table regrouped for midday dosing.” When Celia is taken to psych, it derails the friendship storyline into an extended phase of self-reflection. Eventually, the strain of their distance from reality fragments when the hometown factory erupts in a fire, and there’s the sudden dilemma of a supply chain cutoff.

The constant mood adjustments they’re forced to endure works to animate the teenage drama of the novel, stitched together with the pink rusty staples of internet cultural references where needed, a frisson buried always just beneath the surface of the dialogue between them. Minds are described as varieties of fruit and there’s in-depth discussion of emojis. Unable to consume the culture as a whole, the novel seems determined to at least consume its own influences with some modicum of resonant joy, some delight at delivering an exploration of language that matches the afterglow of Hannah’s day of “treatment” sex at the spa. It’s an aspiration that seems to culminate in a moment when she muses to herself about the nature of the drug and its effects on her consciousness, on her creativity: “Does V. advance the poetic mind? It made me wonder, what was a self? I mean really. It made me think of Descartes for some reason. We’d memorized his sound bite, ‘I think therefore I am,’ as justification for living mostly within the mind/screen dynamics. But we never discussed what this meant. Or context” (p. 138).

Inventive and well-written, The Enhancers is a new kind of critique of the narcissistic, utopian ideal of American exceptionalism. It takes on new forms of tenderness in its depiction of its protagonist’s relationships, and casts them in the light of an expanded palette of language closer at times to Naked Lunch, with all the added fun of angst, identity formation, and humanity on the verge of apocalyptic collapse.