Feminist Chemistry
A debut novelist formulates an acidic page-turner
Idiots.
The world is full of them, which is bad enough. But so many of them are in positions of power, and too many are men. Or religious. Or, worst of all, both.
Welcome to the world of Bonnie Garmus—or, perhaps more accurately, the world of Bonnie Garmus as she understood it to be in the late 1950s and early 1960s (though one wonders how much she thinks it has changed). After enduring 98 rejections, the 64-year-old first-time novelist has made a splash with Lessons in Chemistry, which was published this spring to much acclaim and is poised to become a summer read for all seasons. The book has been published in 35 countries (my copy, purchased in June, was in its fourth printing). Dramatic rights were scooped up by Apple TV, which is planning a series starring Brie Larsen.
It’s not hard to see why. Lessons in Chemistry has a lot going for it. The novel has the intricate plotting of a murder mystery. The main characters are vivid. It’s gracefully written and marked by a lively sense of humor. And there’s a loveable dog named Six-Thirty. The book’s built-for-speed readability is balanced by a strong sense of engagement on issues of substance: sexual harassment, even violence, in the workplace; the daunting and often unspoken challenges of (single) motherhood; societal resistance to the work of science and the role of women in it—which can be as entwined as a string of DNA. Though the novel has a fizzy cover of hot pink and blue lettering which I regard as exceptionally effective in catching one’s eye (Zott has expressed hope that the cover for the paperback will change), I think Lessons is well poised for evergreen status as a feminist classic.
Despite — or is it because? — of its hard edges.
Lessons in Chemistry tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, a passionate young chemist struggling to make her way in the patriarchal world of the mid-20th century. The sexism is bad enough—it’s the dominant minor chord that runs through the novel—but Elizabeth is also deeply afflicted by people who are, to put it a bit indelicately, stupid. “Idiots make it into every company,” she muses in a chapter entitled “Idiots.” “They tend to interview well.” For the most part, she’s able to tolerate them, even do their work for them. It’s when they’re malicious (and usually, though not always, men) that she has a problem.
Fortunately, Elizabeth has a number of things going for her beyond a prodigious intellect and athletic ability to burn. They include a prodigious soulmate, a prodigious daughter, the prodigious aforementioned canine, and a powerful sisterhood that emerges to support her when tragedy strikes. And though she doesn’t particularly value it, Elizabeth also happens to be exceptionally telegenic, which is how, in a moment of need, she ends up as the host of a local cooking show, Supper at Six, in which her scientific knowledge and bracingly candid personality fuse to form a powerful compound that enters the nation’s bloodstream.
So why is it that I find this novel a little unsettling? (Not, of course, that this is necessarily a bad thing—indeed, that may very well be a goal for the likes of me.) Part of it is a proto-Nietzchean subtext which is a little surprising in an official culture obsessed with equality as the measure of modern morality. “They were the kind of people who make up the majority of every company—normal people who do normal work, and who occasionally get promoted into management with uninspiring results,” she laments of her colleagues at one point. Elizabeth has even less regard for their inner lives. “People will always yearn for a simple solution to their complicated problems,” she muses to her companion in a postcoital moment. “It’s a lot easier to have faith in something you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t explain, and can’t change rather than to have faith in something you can.” And what is that? “One’s self, I mean.” Such self-regard is endorsed by the narrator at the outset: “Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and would never be.” There are times when Garmus veers toward what might be termed the sin of Salinger, who by the end of his career developed an annoying habit of falling in love with his own characters, crowding out our own reactions to them, as he did with his beloved Glass family in books like Franny and Zoey.
But such considerations are secondary, because Garmus is playing for bigger game: to make a larger gender critique of society (here she’s on more conventional ground, because she embraces the regnant view that sexual difference, insofar as it is acknowledged, is irrelevant as a behavioral factor in the public sphere). This is my second source of unease: anachronism. Elizabeth Zott seems like a fully formed 21st-century feminist parachuted into the mid-twentieth century. Notwithstanding the societal norms that surround her, she is astounded—when she isn’t infuriated—that anyone would question the notion of equal pay for equal work, that a marrying woman would change her name (not that she has any interest in matrimony or bearing a child in wedlock), or that homosexuality would be anything other as an unremarkable facet of life in the human animal kingdom. (Though incidental, her racial bona fides are established in passing through Elizabeth’s approving mention of Rosa Parks and a toddler daughter who wants to be fighting for civil rights, apparently with Diane Nash in the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1961.)
This is not necessarily a problem. The suspension of disbelief is not something that can or even should be limited to science fiction—fantasies come in many forms—and even the most scrupulous historians are almost always reconstructing the past in the service of an imagined better future, if only one of restoration. One obvious point of comparison for Lessons in Chemistry is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, an Amazon series set in the same moment and featuring a similarly zesty protagonist who’s ahead of her time. But one of the things that makes Midge Maisel so marvelous is her comfort with, and affection for, people who clearly think and act differently than she does even as she charts her own path forward.
Which brings us to what I regard as the most problematic part of this nevertheless impressive book: its hostility, to the point of vindictiveness, toward religious faith. The once and perhaps future divorcee Mrs. Maisel is a Jew, admittedly a secular one, but one who understands and accepts the moral and communitarian fiber from which she fashions a complex American Dream (which, at the end of the day, is what most American Dreams are—hopefully imagined futures which are neither effortless truisms nor self-evident lies). But every sane character in Lessons in Chemistry seems to regard religious faith, especially Catholicism, as the locus of evil in the modern world. The ultimate villain of the piece—even worse than the malicious scientist who steals Elizabeth’s work—is a cartoonishly covetous bishop who heartlessly deprives a child and his family of the truth in pursuit of filthy lucre. This is Bonnie Garmus’s story to tell, and for all I know, she has first-hand experience with unquestionably real religious bigotry and the many sins of the Catholic Church. But at the very least, the sustained series of potshots that lace this book distract from its more compelling arguments.
Garmus is careful to provide some texture in the novel, which is populated with a few good guys, among them a Harvard-educated minister named Wakely, whose decency is inversely correlated with his orthodoxy. “Don’t you think it’s possible to believe in both God and science?” he writes Elizabeth’s partner, Calvin, at one point. “‘Sure, Calvin had written back. ‘It’s called intellectual dishonesty.’” No, it is not: an axiomatic principle of science is to neither confirm nor deny propositions for which there is insufficient evidence, and it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God. Science and religion are alike that way: both resist attempts to shoehorn them into preferred notions of the prevailing order or what we earnestly wish they would be. Garmus seems to believe that faith is nothing more than a crutch, as it surely is for some—and may not be a bad thing as such. But faith is no less a matter of rigor than feminism. (Or rowing crew, which figures prominently in the story.)
It is the pointedly named Wakely who provides what could be considered the grace note of the novel. “Chemistry is change and change is the core of your belief system,” he tells Elizabeth toward the end of the book. “Which is good because that’s what we need more of—people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable.” This is true: chemistry is indeed about change, and we really do need people to question authority. It is also true that chemical reactions tend toward equilibrium. You don’t have to be an idiot to believe we’re getting closer.