Fiction: So that's where the chemical weapons are hidden - in the nervous systems of the American people. With 120 million US citizens, almost half of the population, on anti-depressants (according to the New York Times last year), it's hardly surprising that the medication novel is proliferating.
Near the start of this latest, by Matthew Sharpe, lone parent Bernie Schwartz goes to his pharmacist in Bellwether, Connecticut, to have his Prozac dosage adjusted after one side of his face goes numb.
What Bernie doesn't know, though, is that the pharmacist is self-prescribing in order to find the courage to face his customers. Between the two of them the result is that Bernie takes away the wrong tablets, a toxic mix-up which leads to coma and brain damage.
Until this point, Bernie, by combining Prozac with irony, kindness and home working, has just about managed to keep the remaining pieces of his broken family together. Though sometimes worried about "where the drug ended and he began", he has survived desertion by his more ambitious wife, Lila, and the conflicting demands of his two teenage children, Chris and Cathy, with his identity more or less intact. Now, however, it is time for him to be recreated.
The disappearance of the old Bernie is traumatic for his family, but it is also a kind of opportunity.
While his father is still in a coma, Chris passes the time by drawing a moustache and sideburns on his inert features in an effort to make him look "effective in the world. A little self-esteem, a little authority, a little charisma".
For the achingly earnest Cathy, meanwhile, her father's condition both enforces her independence and provides a focus for her Christian feeling ("In faith, she felt she had finally found an endeavour which made maximum use of her stupidity and ignorance").
And for Lila, his ex-wife, the verbal absence of the pessimistic, guilt-inducing Bernie offers the prospect of getting to know her children again.
"To bring other people in contact with their own misery may have been the special genius of the Schwartz family," the author tells us, and sure enough, the nuclear unit is soon augmented by a group of well-drawn characters with problems of their own.
There is Chris's closest friend, Frank Dial, one of only five black students at his school, who is hankering secretly and treacherously after Cathy; there is Bernie's neurologist, Lisa Danmeyer, who, along with the other female medics at the hospital, is instantly and somewhat implausibly attracted to Chris's blend of misogyny, verbal aggression and teenage vulnerability; and Catholic battered wife Connie Hyde, who is unsure whether she wants to convert Cathy or do violence to her because of her privilege and naivety.
While the events that befall these characters are dramatic enough - the film rights have already been sold - what really seems to interest the author is the way they describe those events, the struggle they have with language.
Chris, who has inherited his father's now-destroyed talent for wit and invective, is constantly trying to find phrases powerful and offensive enough to make experience meaningful, to wake up the somnambulant world around him. This verbosity is a response in part to Bernie's near-muteness and his tendency, after rehabilitation, to understand the emotional intention of words rather than their intellectual subtleties.
In one of several poignant scenes between father and son, Bernie gives human names to the trees, buildings and sounds that surround them, thereby helping Chris to see his suburban environment in a more benign light.
What Sharpe (also author of the ambiguously named Nothing Is Terrible) has done in The Sleeping Father is to create a world that seems drugged, half-asleep, unresponsive, but which is nonetheless violent, unsafe and exposed to forces it cannot understand or control.
Chris imagines his future with his father as one of constantly alternating episodes of coma and rehab, with full consciousness always elusive for both of them.
This is a smaller, more enclosed novel than comparable works such as The Corrections, but what it lacks in authority and scope it makes up for in intimacy and strangeness.
The Sleeping Father By Matthew Sharpe Sceptre, 345pp. £12.99
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist