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Summary
Summary
It's 1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your can of soda to the butter on your popcorn.
While testing a new artificial sweetener-Sweetness #9-he notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life. David tries to blow the whistle, but he swallows it instead.
Years later, Sweetness #9 is America's most popular sweetener-and David's family is changing. His wife is gaining weight, his son has stopped using verbs, and his daughter suffers from a generalized dissatisfaction with life. Is Sweetness #9 to blame, along with David's failure to stop it? Or are these just symptoms of the American condition?
David's search for an answer unfolds in this expansive novel that is at once a comic satire, a family story, and a profound exploration of our deepest cultural anxieties. Wickedly funny and wildly imaginative, Sweetness #9 questions whether what we eat truly makes us who we are.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Artificial sugar substitutes, chemically crafted flavor enhancers, and unnatural food colorings are trapping Americans in a self-destructive cycle of addiction, suggests Clark in his first novel, a hyperironic, hyperworrisome account of one man's journey through the processed food industry. The horror begins in New Jersey in 1973, when recent Rutgers food science program graduate David Leveraux goes to work for corporate giant Goldstein, Olivetti and Dark. His first assignment is testing Sweetness #9, a product in development, on rats. The product is eventually approved and put on the market, but as "the Nine" catches on (it's 180 times as sweet as sugar at a fraction of the cost), lab rats, monkeys, the Leveraux family, political leaders in Washington, and the general American public all show signs of depression, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and self-destruction. David eventually finds another job, but hides his past dealings with Sweetness #9 from his vegan daughter, as well as his fast-food-enthusiast son, until the truth must be told. Clark's storytelling skill lends credibility to elements like David's wife running off to Ukraine in search of serenity and a trimmer waistline with a 300-pound life coach/nutritionist, and Sweetness #9 tracing its origins to Hitler's bunker. The energetic mixture of laughter and revulsion, routine and invention, outrage and dismay, fact and fiction, skewer a food industry that provides neither food nor sustenance and damages us in ways we are just beginning to fathom. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A social satire raises spooky questions about food additives."The brain is like the Amazon, Leveraux. Ten steps in and we're lost." So flavorist-in-training David Leveraux is told by his boss when he reveals his worries about the obesity and depression of the animals on whom he's testing a new artificial sweetener, Sweetness #9. The boss explains that as these things go, cancer is easy. Other side effects are "like a scuttling sound on the jungle floor, something that shakes a bush or runs up a tree just moments before you can identify it." That observation is the heart of the first novel by Clark (he's also written a story collection, Vladimir's Moustache, 2012), which will make you nervous about what you eat. Shortly after this conversation, Leveraux is fired and committed to an institution. Then the novel leapfrogs from 1973 to 1998. Leveraux is out of the bin, back in the business and patriarch of a family raised on fake food. Things are not going well: His wife has weight problems, his son has stopped using verbs, and his angry, rebellious daughter is researching an article on food additives. In fact, every character may or may not be showing the depredations of a chemically based diet, and the problem may have originated with experiments in Hitler's bunker. While the plot goes off the deep end, Clark's wit never flags. Of his son Ernest, Leveraux observes, "Churchill once spoke of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma;...I might describe [Ernest] as a corn dog wrapped inside a slice of pizza stuffed in a Hot Pocket." Of a rival company, Tanko-Shinju: "I've heard [it] translated both as 'pink pearl' and 'two men commit suicide in a coal mine.' "Clever writing balances out the conspiracy theories, but thefictional treatment of this issueleaves readers wondering about thefacts. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
David Leveraux is an ambitious young flavor scientist (or flavorist) in 1973 when he is hired to conduct safety testing on Sweetness #9, a new artificial sweetener. To his dismay, his lab rats are exhibiting lethargy, compulsion to overeat, and general dissatisfaction with life. Leveraux's company argues (before firing him) that he is simply observing universal afflictions, traits that comprise the American Condition. By 1998, Sweetness #9 is ubiquitous in consumer products from diet soda to toothpaste. Everywhere Leveraux looks he sees possible symptoms of Sweetness #9 poisoning, including in his aerobics-obsessed wife, his sullen teenage daughter, and his video-gamer son (who has stopped using verbs). When terrorists start bombing the packaged-food aisles of grocery stores and Leveraux's colleagues begin arming themselves for Y2K, could Sweetness #9 be to blame? He sets out to learn the truth and heal his family in the process. Part suburban family drama, part corporate thriller, Clark's first novel offers a hyperreal American fable that is tuned to our cultural anxieties about food, chemicals, and authenticity.--Bosch, Lindsay Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A CALL TO ACTION: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, by Jimmy Carter. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) President Carter's 28th book surveys global discrimination against women, much of which he attributes to distorted interpretations of major religions and sacred texts. Carter argues that these flawed approaches, exacerbated by the world's "growing tolerance of violence and warfare," need immediate corrective action. SWEETNESS #9, by Stephan Eirik Clark. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.) At the outset of this novel, an eager young flavor chemist, David Leveraux, is testing a promising new sugar substitute when he notes troubling side effects. Years later, the chemical has saturated the American diet, and its insidious effects are everywhere, including David's own family: His heavyset wife flits between fad diets, his son drops verbs from his speech and his unhappy daughter goes vegan in protest. HOW WE LEARN: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens, by Benedict Carey. (Random House, $16.) Like many other students, Carey, a New York Times science reporter, "grew up believing that learning was all self-discipline." After following research that investigates how learning actually occurs, he reconsiders that belief, presenting strategies to help us study smarter. THE WHEREWITHAL, by Philip Schultz. (Norton, $16.95.) This novel in verse centers on Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski, a man dodging the Vietnam War and translating the journal his mother kept during a massacre in their hometown in 1940s Poland. Steeped in tragedy, the story captures the "strain of finding the wherewithal to face suffering on every human scale," Adam Plunkett wrote here. THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN, by Jill Lepore. (Vintage, $16.95.) Wonder Woman's back story may begin among the mythic Amazons, but her origins are distinctly American, As it turns out, her "secret history" is due in large part to her eccentric creator, William Moulton Marston, whose fraught feminism and kinky proclivities were evident on the page. (In Lepore's telling, it was no coincidence that the superhero was tied up in virtually every comic.) THE INVENTION OF EXILE, by Vanessa Manko. (Penguin, $16.) A Russian émigré arrives in America in 1913, but after being sent back to Russia and, later, traveling to Mexico, spends a lifetime trying to return. This debut novel tells the story of an "epic love frustrated but never destroyed by political antagonism between nations," our reviewer, Jonathan Dee, wrote.
Library Journal Review
In this good-natured satire of America's love of the artificial, nice guy David -Leveraux is the straight man who got top honors in flavor science with his thesis on the "Biophysics of Brie." He gets fired from his first job at an animal-testing lab after he notices disturbing behavior in the animals that are fed a sugar substitute, Sweetness #9. Unable to find work, David checks himself into a state mental institution. Not until he is rescued from the asylum by Ernst Eberhardt, Hitler's flavorist during the waning days of World War II, does he find success. David moves back in with wife Betty, and they have two lovely children. All is well until the family starts exhibiting some familiar, unsettling behavior. Is the world's most popular artificial sweetener making his wife fat? Is his son addicted to Red Dye No. 40? Will his daughter get her hands on a poorly translated Albanian research report that blows the lid off Sweetness #9? VERDICT This debut novel is a hilarious take down of an industry more interested in getting us to buy its products than in selling us good food. Essential for fans of Christopher -Buckley's Thank You for Smoking.-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.