Book – Lessons in Chemistry

Author: Bonnie GarmusPublisher: Penguin Books[1]Reviewer: Stephen Keim

I had read the blurb of Lessons in Chemistry (“Lessons”). The opening pages start in 1961. Elizabeth Zott has already resigned from her research institute and her five year old daughter, Madeline, is attending school. Elizabeth appears to be a single mother. Elizabeth is already hosting Supper at Six, the television show that purports to be about cooking but which, at the same time, delivers to its viewers the eponymous “lessons in chemistry”.

I was a little disappointed. No matter how popular Supper at Six might have been and no matter how brilliant the concept of teaching chemistry and cooking at the same time might be, a novel based on following a TV show from episode to episode was going to be a little boring. I was hoping to hear much more about the lead up that brought Elizabeth Zott and the reader to this point in time.

I need not have worried.

Because, from that point, Lessons sweeps backwards and forward in time. Much of the action dates from around 1954. One version of the start of the narrative is Elizabeth barging into the laboratory of the Hastings Research Institute’s undoubted star chemist, the arrogant Calvin Evans, to requisition beakers unneeded by Evans but essential for Eizabeth’s important but massively under resourced work and laboratory. This incident and a subsequent inconvenient bout of vomiting has unforeseen consequences, including romance.

As a romantic comedy, however, Lessons fails miserably since most of the romance occurs in the early parts of the narrative. And the romance is not without a degree of related tragedy.

Garmus was born in 1957. Lessons is her debut novel. She is, however, a proficient and practised purveyor of words, having been a copy-writer for much of her working life.

Lessons weighs in at 382 pages (without the acknowledgements). Not an extraordinarily long novel. But Lessons is, undoubtedly, a big novel. It contains big characters who will make the unlikely occur. Elizabeth Zott is on the spectrum, fearless, unfiltered and unstoppable. Madeline is created and encouraged in her own unfiltered precocity by Elizabeth. Lessons features a dog mistakenly named 6.30 who, nonetheless, manages a human vocabulary of over 900 words and possesses dog knowledge that far surpasses that minor achievement; a reverend minister who confesses to not believing in God; a scientist nominated on multiple occasions for the Nobel Prize notwithstanding that he lost his parents and then his aunt through tragedy and was then raised in an oppressive Catholic Boys Home in Iowa; a well-meaning and talented but spineless television producer; and more than one sexual predator who, eventually, misjudge and choose the wrong victim. Lessons, also, manages to introduce the sport of rowing to a whole new and previously indifferent audience.

The theme of Lessons is society’s inability to judge and treat women on their merits such that women are never taken seriously and they do not receive the opportunities that men of the same and much less talent and ability do receive, on a daily basis. In Lessons, these events are taking place in the 1950s and 60s but both the novel and Garmus’s own experience indicate that these problems are timeless.

The lessons are, ultimately, neither of chemistry nor cooking. There is an internal lesson to reject the assumptions that society seeks to impose on you as a woman. The external lesson is, notwithstanding the acknowledged difficulties and loading of the dice against you, to resist and to assert your own worth.

Thirty years ago, I read every book by John Irving on which I could lay my hands starting, of course, with The World According to Garp and working my way through The Cider House Rules, Setting Free the Bears, The Hotel New Hampshire and A Prayer for Owen Meany.  

Lessons reminds me strongly of Irving’s work. It manages a similarly complexly interwoven plot weaving its way back and forth in time with apparently incidental incidents and references receiving their full significance in the denouement. Lessons introduces the reader to characters who are thought to be both rare and unlikely in real life. We grow to understand and love these unusual people in ways that we might have considered impossible in our own lives. And Lessons, also, as in an Irving novel, through its intriguing plot and its cast of unlikely characters, deals with moral issues of great importance.

For all of these reasons, Lessons is up there with the best of Irving’s works.

Lessons has been adapted to television, starring Brie Larsen, and is available on Apple TV.

I read Lessons in about a day. That is a tribute as much to the engaging nature of the characters as to the allurement of the cleverly unfolding plot.

Lessons comes highly recommended by this reviewer.

[1] Lessons in Chemistry was first published in April 2022 by Doubleday.