By Magdalena Hernandez

Flashback, by Gary Braver (Forge Books; New York; 2005; 400 pages; $25.95)

Sometimes, as countless stories have warned, getting what you ask for is a terrible curse. The Sibyl of Cumae wishes for a thousand years of life, then watches her body shrink through a seemingly endless old age. King Midas wants to change everything into gold, then starves as his meals turn twenty-four carat.

Greed, of course, lies at the core of these myths—greed for life, or for wealth. But they include another kind of hubris, too: the reckless temerity to challenge the natural order.

Updating this theme, English professor Gary Goshgarian (writing under his frequent nom de plume, Gary Braver) cautions us again about our desire to fiddle with human biology, a message shared by his previous novels Elixir and Gray Matter. His new novel, Flashback, explores what happens when pharmacology is used to jerry-rig someone's mind.

At the story's center is Jack Koryan, a former English teacher and would-be restaurateur. Orphaned as a child, Jack revisits Skull Rock, off the coast of Massachusetts, on the thirtieth anniversary of his mother's drowning. With a storm approaching, he attempts to swim to shore through waters infested with a rare kind of jellyfish. Their toxins put him into a six-month coma.

After he awakens, Jack finds his estranged wife has divorced him and their house has been sold. To further complicate the journey to recovery, he is suffering from peculiar visions caused by the coma.

Meanwhile, Rene Ballard, a consulting pharmacist, works at various New England nursing homes, where she monitors the medications of hundreds of senior citizens. Her former professor, Nick Mavros, heads up a team conducting trials of the drug Memorine, reportedly a groundbreaking cure for Alzheimer's disease. Derived from toxins produced by the solakandji jellyfish, the drug "stimulates new cell growth in the hippocampus and, with it, memory functions."

Nick recruits Rene to do clinical research on Memorine. A debt-ridden recent grad, she's attracted to the gig by filthy lucre. But a humanitarian aim motivates her, too. Rene's father succumbed to Alzheimer's years earlier, making the stakes for her both professional and personal.

At first, the drug's results look promising. The aging patients who take Memorine miraculously recover functionality. There's one side effect, though: Many patients experience flashbacks, which often cause them to relive traumatic experiences. Again and again.

Occasionally, the hallucinatory episodes yield tragic consequences. One woman attacks and kills a man in a store, after a Memorine-induced trance causes her to confuse him with a predatory neighbor from her troubled childhood. (In a wink from the author, the homicide victim is someone who, at least indirectly, peddles pharmaceuticals: a CVS drugstore manager.)

When Rene learns about Jack and his coma, she wants to know more about his flashbacks. From this intersection on, it's an exhilarating and fast-paced ride, as the two struggle to make sense of Jack's visions and understand why some Memorine patients meet untimely deaths.

Goshgarian has crafted an engaging tale. The bioethics theme is timely. The New England setting is fun, particularly for locals (there are even a few Northeastern references here and there). And the juxtaposition of characters and motivations is credible and nicely imagined, making for ample dramatic conflict.

In a refreshing twist, character development never takes a backseat to plot in this thriller. We even get a sense of the lives of several of the more minor characters. We see how much certain Alzheimer's patients improve when they take the drug—and witness, in some cases, the tragic aftereffects. One Memorine user is tormented by flashbacks of his POW days in Vietnam, which the author limns well, conveying the brutality of the man's history without stooping to cliche.

The novel's realism gives it immediacy. Marine animals' toxins are, in fact, currently being studied for their therapeutic qualities. It's easy to imagine a treatment similar to Goshgarian's fictional pill written up in the business pages of the Boston Globe.

And setting the story against the backdrop of the pharmaceuticals industry packs a narrative punch. Drug giants like Pfizer and Merck are household names and established powers—and interesting targets, especially given their new emphasis on marketing directly to consumers.

The pharmaceuticals executives in Flashback look forward to reaping profits and prestige after Memorine wins FDA approval. Even the U.S. government gets involved, hoping the miracle pill will help it save billions of dollars in health-care spending. The novel capitalizes on the built-in tension between wanting to do good and wanting to get rich.

Goshgarian's story has a few weaknesses. Several of its most dramatic plot points might test your suspension of disbelief—when the severed head of a black cat mysteriously appears in a character's mailbox, for example. And when the villain reveals his machinations in the novel's denouement, it's a little hard to buy how willing he is to do so, and at what length. No slip is a fatal flaw, however. Even when you catch a glimpse of the puppeteer moving the strings, you still enjoy the show.

Flashback is most interesting when it raises questions about the nature of reality. After consuming Memorine, some patients regress to their younger selves. Yet, as a character notes, "flashbacks needed just the right stimuli—like some of the old people on the Greendale ward hearing an old tune and suddenly they would be back in grade school."

One patient prizes the drug specifically because it "brought back her childhood." Her daughter makes the opposite case: Watching her mother playing with dolls and doing hopscotch all day long, she says, can make her "yearn for Alzheimer's."

Is it preferable for elderly patients to be completely disengaged from the present, as long as they're happy? Or is it better they face their depressing reality? And who decides? Some of these questions are as unfathomable as the sea—which, not coincidentally, serves as a motif throughout the novel, both as the source of Memorine and as a setting.

Goshgarian has written a cautionary thriller about what happens when human beings decide to rewire their brains with chemicals. If you've been wanting a gripping read, wish no more. It's here—and now.

Magdalena Hernandez, MBA'02, is a senior editor.

She Who Shops,
by Joanne Skerrett; Kensington Books; 2005