Books |
Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel
Bonnie Garmus
By
Published: Feb 06, 2023
Category:
Fiction
“Lessons in Chemistry” has been on the Times fiction bestseller list for 38 weeks, at #1 for many of them. It was Barnes & Noble’s 2022 book of the year and one of Amazon’s top 20 books of 2022. There is a series in production on Apple TV, starring and executive-produced by Brie Larson. Book groups vote for it, or wish they had. And I was encouraged to read this novel about Elizabeth Zott, scientist and cooking show host, by friends who have never before pressed me to read a 386-page novel.
It begins like this:
Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbelt-less cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over.
Despite that certainty, she made her way to the lab to pack her daughter’s lunch.
The reason this book is cherished — almost as an inspirational text — is that Elizabeth Zott is a heroine. She doesn’t stew in her bitterness. She fights back. The end of the first chapter tells us what she achieves: She’s the “improbable star” of a TV cooking show, “Supper at Six.” And then she’s more. Much more. I’ll write around the twists and turns of the plot because I hope you’ll read this book as a friend did — looking up in surprise when she finished at 2:30 AM — and as I did, pumping my fist and cheering, something I haven’t done since I read The Queen’s Gambit in 1984.
I can share the obvious. Elizabeth Zott is brilliant and attractive — what used to be called a “brainy beauty” — but her career as a highly trained scientist is stalled because she’s a woman. No need to guess the reasons: unfair biases, judgments, misogyny, degradation, and abuse as a result of cultural, political, and religious beliefs. In other words, because of men.
Elizabeth is a heroine for right now precisely because she’s not a woke feminist, no matter how much she sometimes sounds like it. She’s a one-off, trapped in her towering intellect, a supreme rationalist — whatever she does to fight her way out of the prison that America’s patriarchal culture created for women is because she’s thought deeply and knows what is sensible, smart, productive, and right.
You may think — and I often did — that she’d catch more flies with honey, and you may think she might put less strident notes in her daughter’s lunchbox (“Play sports at recess but do not automatically let the boys win” and “Most people are awful”) and you may not be charmed by a dog that learns 900 English words, and if you don’t care about getting up at 4 AM to be the only female rower on a racing crew, you will definitely skim some pages.
But good luck resisting the second half of the book, which has velocity and humor. Elizabeth Zott’s approach to a cooking show is only superficially about recipes. It’s much more about chemistry: what’s in the food we eat, and why it’s good or not for us. Her refusal to conform to the template for these shows is nutrition for the soul, and the women in the studio audience take notes. So do women at home. How can you not love a TV star who ends her show with this: “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.”
[To read an excerpt, click here. For a brief video interview with Bonnie Garmus, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Someone has said this is “a book for smart girls who refuse to dumb themselves down.” Garmus makes no apologies for aiming at an audience of women who remember their mothers being regularly told in the 1950s and ’60s that their place was in the home while the economy was exploding with opportunity and prosperity for men. She’s also writing for 2020s women, who are still thwarted by a smooth talking, slow to change patriarchy. As she’s said, read the book if you’re “tired of all the ways people make life miserable for others through misogyny and racism, and all the societal burdens that surely should have been eradicated by now.” And then she adds, “But as I’m fond of saying, the book isn’t anti-men, it’s anti-sexism.”
Wishful thought: This might be a great gift book for a smart man who refuses to dumb himself down.
