Clark, Stephan Eirik.
New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2014.
Added to CLICnet on 09/09/2015

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Notes:

• It’s 1973, and David Leveraux is a young and ambitious flavor chemist working at a world-renowned flavor-production house. While testing a new artificial sweetener–Sweetness #9–he notices some unsettling side effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a general dissatisfaction with life. 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 is generally dissatsified with her life. Is Sweetness #9 to blame, along with David’s failure to stop it? Or are these just symptoms of the human condition? David’s search for an answer unfolds in this expansive novel that is at once a comic satire, a family story, and an exploration of our deepest cultural anxieties. Wickedly funny and wildly imaginative, Sweetness #9 questions whether what we eat makes us truly who we are — Provided by publisher.

Subjects:

• Weight gain — Fiction.
• Eating disorders — Fiction.
• Sweeteners — Fiction.
• Families — Fiction.

Requested by Kurpiers, R.