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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.
BookBrowse Review
Stephan Eirik Clark specializes in the half-laugh in which you laugh at the absurdity of something and yet are caught in the middle mulling over the serious point made. There is much to consider here, much to debate. But even in a novel that presents so much, including rich insight into the flavoring industry, shadowy enough in its own right, you still have to want to follow the main characters.
David, our lead, engages in so much hand-wringing about his part in the creation of Sweetness #9 that it becomes tiresome. His family, his wife and two children could very well be us in our suspicion of the food industry or in our artificial sweetener habit. But it's hard to be engaged when it feels like the characters are there solely to communicate the author's message, rather than being full-fledged people in their own right. Clark knows style and knows how to make characters alive enough for us to visualize them, but their emotional core remains out of reach. Once the novelty of seeing inside the food industry has passed, sadly there isn't much else to engage this reader." - Rory L. Aronsky
Other Reviews
"The energetic mixture of laughter and revulsion, 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." - Publishers Weekly
"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." - Library Journal
"Clever writing balances out the conspiracy theories, but the fictional treatment of this issue leaves readers wondering about the facts. " - Kirkus
"Funny and moving. After this, nothing will ever taste the same again." - T.C. Boyle
"Sweetness #9 does for flavor science and its sweetly dangerous concoctions what White Noise did for chemical transportation and airborne toxic events - that is, makes them real enough to produce legitimate anxiety and funny enough to make you fall off the couch." - Keith Lee Morris, author of The Dart League King
"Sweetness #9 is funny but still human, entertaining but also illuminating, smart but not smug, thought-provoking without lecturing: it's a rare book that does all this at once, and does it so well." - Caitlin Horrocks, author of This Is Not Your City
"A truly gifted writer, Stephan Eirik Clark writes with an inventiveness and artistry that few can match." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
"Haunting and hilarious, Sweetness #9 is so compelling that it made me throw the maraschino cherries in the trash and run out to buy organic greens." - Stacey Richter, author of Twin Study
This information about Sweetness #9 was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stephan Eirik Clark was born in West Germany and raised between England and the United States. He is the author of the short story collection Vladimir's Mustache. A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, he teaches English at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. This is his first novel.
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