Lessons in Chemistry — Bonnie Garmus
Bonnie Garmus's debut
novel follows Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist sidelined by the sexism of
1960s academic science, who ends up, almost by accident, hosting a wildly
popular cooking show that she insists on treating as a chemistry lecture. The
premise gives Garmus a vehicle for both comedy and genuine anger, Zott's show
becomes an unlikely platform for talking to an audience of housewives about
capability and self-respect in terms the culture around them refused to offer.
The novel's tone is its
most distinctive feature: brisk, wry, and confident enough to include a
genuinely sentient dog as a recurring point of view without the book tipping
into whimsy for its own sake. Garmus is clear-eyed about the institutional
sexism Zott faces, and the specificity of that anger gives the comedy a
foundation that keeps it from feeling weightless.
Some of the plotting
relies on convenient coincidence, and a handful of side characters exist mostly
to serve the theme rather than as fully developed people. Those are relatively
minor complaints against a debut with this much confidence in its own voice and
premise, and they haven't stopped the book from becoming one of the more purely
enjoyable recent entries in popular fiction.
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