Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Title: Lessons in Chemistry
Author: Bonnie Garmus
Publication: Doubleday, hardcover, 2022
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: 20th-century California

Description: Elizabeth Zott is a gifted but eccentric chemist and, unfortunately, a woman in a man’s world in the 1960s. She is belittled, exploited, and sexually assaulted when all she wants is to have the resources to do her job at Hastings Research Institute. Things get better when she finds a soulmate, an equally gifted loner, Calvin Evans, whose brilliance (and nomination for a Nobel Prize) unnerves his coworkers. Much later, however, Elizabeth is offered the opportunity to host a cooking show. The TV station envisions something feminine and fluffy but they get always-serious Elizabeth talking about the connection between food and chemistry. To everyone’s surprise, viewers are entranced – and empowered.

My Impression: Much of this book is a polemic against the misogyny, spite, and ignorance of the men of this era. I can’t say it is just the men in 60s STEM because the men in television are just as clueless (although only one is evil). There are also some very unpleasant women who are nearly as dreadful as the men. For example, the woman from the HR department at Hastings helps lead the charge against Elizabeth because her own experience has embittered her too much to realize what she and Elizabeth have in common. Elizabeth’s only friends are her neighbor across the street, Harriet Sloane, and Six-Thirty, the endearing dog she and Calvin rescued. Both the dog and Elizabeth’s child are ridiculously clever and the dog is also implausibly perceptive. He watches the show and sees that not everyone in the audience of Elizabeth’s show is clapping so he fears she is in danger:

Anxious, he waited until the creature and Harriet were busy in the lab, then slipped out the back door, jogging four blocks south, then two blocks west, until he was well positioned near the on-ramp. When a flatbread truck slowed to join a line of cars merging onto the freeway, he hopped on.

Obviously, he knew how to find KCTV. Anyone who’d read The Incredible Journey would understand how un-incredible it was that dogs could find just about anything. He used to marvel at the needle in the haystack story Elizabeth had once read to him – marvel because what was so hard about finding a needle in a haystack? The scent of high carbon steel wire was unmistakable.

The book is billed as humorous, in the style of Where'd You Go, Bernadette. I found it much more readable than that book and I was anxious to know what would happen to Elizabeth and her dog and child. While I did find the writing amusing while I was reading, the melancholy aspect of the book was more memorable than the humor. Elizabeth and Calvin are two lonely people who found each other only briefly, and that was the saddest part of the book (although the abuse both faced during their lives was very bleak also). Some of the people who deserved retribution didn’t get it, which disappointed me. Luckily, Elizabeth’s precocious child, Mad, is on a quest to find out more about her father, and she is dogged in her pursuit of the truth:

“Do you keep secrets?”

“No,” Harriet lied.

“Do you think my mom does?”

“No,” Harriet said, but now she meant it. How she wished Elizabeth would keep a few secrets – or at least opinions – to herself.

I kept seeing piles of this book both in bookstores in London (which surprised me; it seems so American) and in Boston but I wasn’t ready to read it until Barbara suggested it for our book group in October. It was a good choice although it will be interesting to see how our discussion goes and someone is bound to say it was not sufficiently literary. This is my twenty-second book in the 2022 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge led by Marg at The Intrepid Reader.

Source: Library