For your reading pleasure

3 delightful quick reads + all my complaints about Lessons in Chemistry

One of my favorite parts of spring is the energy that’s in the air—the possibility of what will bloom in the weeks and months to come. That energy is reflected in all the good writing I’ve been reading lately. Here are a few short pieces that have pleasantly smacked me in the face.

Jami Attenberg, A Burst of Color

Jami Attenberg has a very inspiring, readable Substack called Craft Talk and is all around a fantastic writer and grade A human. This installment is about rose bushes and sandwiches and thoughtful chefs and the absolute wonder that’s all around us and can be spotted if you simply pay attention.

Lyz Lenz, Chasing the Dark

I’m a huge fan of Lyz Lenz’s Substack, Men Who Yell At Me, with its smart, feminist, and funny takes on politics (with a weekly feature called Dingus of the Week). This piece is a more reflective one, where two eclipses intersect with Lenz’s dissolving marriage and search for autonomy and self.

Day 1 of 1,000 by Jeanne Malmgren

Sometimes the oof-iest stories come in the tiniest containers. This very short piece of nonfiction packs a big punch in the gut.

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And now it’s time to turn our attention to a slightly uncomfortable topic for me: Lessons in Chemistry.

I want to start by saying I write down every book people mention to me. I learn about books this way as well as the people who recommend them—over time, their reading preference and style becomes clear to me, allowing me to recommend books to them. It’s a lovely little ecosystem.

If the same book gets mentioned to me by a few different people I bump it up the TBR (to be read) list. Except when everybody recommends a book.

I have a special protocol for books that everybody loves: I usually don’t read them. Books that everybody likes are usually a bit too general for my tastes. What can I say? I like stories about real weird weirdos with amazing language. And those usually aren’t bestsellers.

So I was never going to read Lessons in Chemistry, because it was a good guess it wasn’t for me. But then I learned something about the story that forced my hand.

The protagonist of Lessons in Chemistry, Elizabeth Zott, is a headstrong scientist, who, to the best of her ability in 1960s America, does whatever the fuck she wants. It just so happens I am writing a novel about a headstrong scientist who, to the best of her ability, does whatever the fuck she wants. And in the world of publishing, if there’s a book out there that might be like yours, it’s kind of a rule that you have to read it. Or at least skim it.

Before we dive into Lessons in Chemistry, let’s talk about Michael Chabon’s early novel Wonder Boys. I read this book when I was in college and I remember loving and…that’s about it. I had no recollection of the characters or story when I picked it up again recently, spurred on by my Jupiter co-pilot Ralph, who raved about it.

From the beginning of Wonder Boys, Chabon wraps his arms around the reader with his lyrical language and deep detail. Here’s the narrator describing his friend Crabtree, who’s just flown in for a literary festival.

He wore the usual Crabtree expression of scorn, and his eyes were bright and hard, but he didn’t look as though he were angry with me. He’d been letting his hair grow long as he got older, not, as is the case with some fashionable men in their forties, in compensation for any incipient baldness, but out of a vanity more pure and unchallengeable: he had beautiful hair, thick and chestnut-colored and falling in a flawless curtain to his shoulders. He was wearing a well-cut, olive-drab belted raincoat over a handsome suit—an Italian number in a metallic silk that was green like the back of a dollar bill—a pair of woven leather loafers without socks, and round schoolboy spectacles I’d never seen before.

—Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon

Green like the back of a dollar bill. Not a dollar bill. Not money. The back of a dollar bill. I find physical descriptions really hard and struggle to eke out a few good sentences that make a character recognizable and unique. This book is simply crammed with evocative detail. Everything described feels fully formed and real and unique. I am always astounded by writers who can do that (see: Rebecca Makkai, Elizabeth Strout).

Now let’s turn to Lessons in Chemistry. Here’s the introduction of Walter Pine, who produces Zott’s TV show:

Walter Pine had been in television from almost the very beginning. He liked the idea of television—the way it promised people an escape from daily life…he kept on for the same reason many people keep on: because he was a parent—the lone parent of daughter Amanda, six years old, kindergartner at Woody Elementary, and light of his life. He would do anything for that child. That included taking his daily browbeating from his boss, who recently threatened he’d be out of a job soon if he didn’t do something about that empty afternoon programming slot.

—Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus

Light of his life ? He would do anything for that child ? I cannot think of more banal and overused phrases to describe the parent-child relationship.

Also…Amanda, six years old, Woody Elementary. I mean, come on. Tell me she loved horses or only ate pancakes in the shape of exclamation points or literally any specific detail that makes her sound like a human and not a cardboard cutout of a human.

Nor do we get any visuals or info on Walter beyond him liking television because it was an escape (again, all humankind). And not even a hint of detail about the daily browbeating from the boss, which one phrase of dialogue could liven up with very little effort.

Before I continue, let me be clear: Garmus and Chabon are doing Very Different Things. I am certain that neither of them wants to write like the other. It’s unfair of me to use one to criticize the other.

Garmus wrote a very serviceable book. It’s a neat, tight plot (predictable to some of us) and a few compelling aspects I’ll get into in a minute. But first let me tell you why the book really tanked for me: the characters were two-dimensional, bordering on unbelievable, and the point of view was a total and complete fail.

The POV is ostensibly roaming, but we don’t get much interiority or reflection from Zott. Her character is conveyed through her action and dialogue, but not her own thoughts, which feels like a real rook to me in a book that jumps into everybody’s head—including a dog’s!—but not hers. Not hearing her thoughts makes me feel like the author is withholding. It’s also hard for me to believe that a character who is so intelligent and observant would not have an ongoing internal monologue about everything happening around her.

Now, let’s talk about that dog, cutely named Six-Thirty (and a character name with a hyphen in it—bold choice). I don’t, on principle, object to a dog POV. (Animals have consciousnesses, but that’s a newsletter for another time.) However, I object to this dog POV because the author uses the dog to fill in information and emotion and detail that should be coming from the other characters. The dog tells us way more about the people and scenery and events in the book than the main character does. What is the point of a main character if we don’t have access to at least some of her thoughts?

Note that this question and insistence says a lot more about me the reader than about the author. This is what I read for—I want to know what’s going on inside a character’s head. But that’s a preference. Interiority is not everybody’s bag and books that fall more into genres (thriller, romance, fantasy, etc) tend to have a lot less interiority than the literary fiction I was raised on and read more than any other genre. So it’s also a little unfair of me to assail Garmus for a choice that follows its genre.

I don’t think, however, I’m overstepping on my character complaints. Zott endures some pretty serious traumas, but they are never mentioned or processed by her, nor do those traumas influence any choice or action she takes—it’s as if they never happened. Which is pretty unbelievable to me. If something big happens to you and you never talk about it and it never even subtly shows up in your behavior, I am not buying that it happened. And if I don’t trust the author or the character, I’m going to have a hard time enjoying the book.

Now I would like to tell you a few things I liked about LIC. The book makes more sense when considered as a thought experiment (rather than the waking dream John Gardner talks about) that has an important mission. Garmus gives us a protagonist who basically rejects sexism and ultimately prevails on her own merit.

Despite the fact that women (and many other people) are told exactly how small they should make themselves, Garmus gives us a kind of a fairy tale, in which all who are oppressed can reject the systems and beliefs that harm them and ultimately succeed.

The book soars only when we see Elizabeth recording her cooking show, which she uses to teach women chemistry and encourage them to follow their dreams. When an audience member confesses she wants to be an open heart surgeon, Elizabeth assures her is a possible and worthy goal. No matter how bad the prose, I was cheering for this woman and delighted when later in the book it’s revealed she has completed medical school and is moving on to residency.

The way Garmus shows Elizabeth connecting with her audience, empowering women who’ve been deprived of opportunity and feel less than, is definitely heartwarming. I want to live in a world where a TV show in the 60s helped women beat sexism and take control of their lives. I don’t believe it’s real, but I want it to be.

And yeah, I snickered when Walter mentions Elizabeth’s pants and she replies,
”Do you like them? You must. you wear them all the time and I can see why. They’re very comfortable.” Sometimes it’s really cathartic to mock sexism. And maybe by sometimes I mean in 2024?

Here’s the thing: I wasn’t impressed by Lessons in Chemistry, but that doesn’t make it a bad book. Nor does it make the people who liked it dopes. All of the people who recommended it to me were women. I doubt most of them believed this was the route to feminist liberation, were convinced the world of the story felt incredibly real and emotional. I am betting most of them simply felt relieved to be entertained and to escape for a bit to an imagined world where things were a little less shitty.

Books, after all, are a platform for dreaming. If we can imagine a person in the past who triumphed over systems that continue to harm us, maybe we can imagine a future where that’s possible too.

And sure, I’ll take Chabon six days out of seven, but goddamn it, a book that can make us a little more hopeful about the future, a little less bogged down in our hurt and rage, and also make us laugh? Well that book is doing something pretty valuable, I think.