“A Package of Moods,” by Adam Bassett

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The Olympics and Major League Baseball have familiarized all of us with the world of performance-enhancing drugs. Athletes have lost their medals and been banned from competition when tests show they used prohibited substances to improve their performance.

But what if the rest of us — who are not Olympians or third basemen for the Yankees — wanted to improve not our performance but our mood? That is what Plattsburgh’s Adam Bassett’s first novel explores: the use of pharmaceutical patches to create and enhance our moods. What if we could put a patch on our neck that would make us happy, alert, or blissful? In “A Package of Moods,” that — as well as affection, lust, inspiration, and calmness — can happen because of Moodtech Corporation’s over the counter product.

Beginning in 2010 and endingin 2016, the novel tells the stories of families impacted by the “choose-your-mood” patches, corporate politics at Moodtech, as well as a whistle-blower and the local newspaper. Bassett organizes the narrative through inter-connected but almost stand-alone chapters, which sometimes have flashbacks, told from an omniscient point of view. The reader usually knows more than the characters, and so some dramatic irony is created.

While the concept and organization are interesting, there is just too much in “A Package of Moods” that is not adequately developed. A pharmaceutical corporation’s role in our society – its scientific exploration, its ethical responsibility, its marketing, its cultural and economic impact – is a book in itself, but it gets short shrift here. Add a whistle-blower and a newspaper and you have another story full of complications — leads, scoops, research, deadlines, etc. — that should be part of the novel but is not.

Bassett’s most effective effort is with the characters of the story, all of whom have some connection to Moodtech: the corporation, its products or both. There is the corporate public relations man, a security expert, a newspaperwoman, a nurse, a high school student.

And his best character is Colby, a high school student. Colby’s adolescent awkwardness, his inchoate sexuality, his observations about high school and its teachers all ring true – both familiar and original. For example, most of Colby’s school has been reacting to the tragic death of a student, with kids gossiping and teachers getting emotional. But Colby did not want to hear anymore; he was “ready for something normal. The math teacher always seemed to ignore drama.”

Ultimately, “A Package of Moods” would succeed if Mr. Bassett developed both the plot and the characters more fully. But this is a debut novel from a young author who shows promise, and who seems to have done some homework. If you remember Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World,” and its drug “soma,” you might consider Bassett’s work derivative. But Adam Bassett has a character named Huxley, and is probably winking, with us, at literary history.