Guest review by Penny Dolan: LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus

                            

  

"A delight ... made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

Lessons in Chemistry did not look like a book I’d choose. For a start, the dust jacket image offers half a woman, in a dated high-heeled stance, carrying a colour television showing an American cookery programme. There are also quantities of – to me - annoying quotes. Nigella Lawson, Nina Stebbe, Rachel Joyce . . . However, as the novel was an important birthday gift, I sighed and opened up the pages.

What a pleasure! Almost immediately, I was swept away by the confident voice and dark wit of the writing. This highly enjoyable novel is – give or take some anguish - such an uplifting read that I forgot my crossness about those quotes.

Set in early 60’s America, Lessons in Chemistry is an almost-fairy-tale. The central character is Elizabeth Zott, misfit and heroine, who shines brightly and positively despite all the sharp injustices, pains, losses and her lack of small talk. As a reader, my heart hurt at her troubles and I rejoiced in her every forward step. (An aside: Garmus did not let me down.)

Not long after the start of the book, the admirable Zott becomes the host on Supper at Six, a daily afternoon TV show aimed at “ordinary housewives”. Dressed in her lab coat, with her notebook, pencil and kitchen knives, Zott explains the science behind the cooking process. Alongside, she tells her audience that they are far more than “ordinary”. She treats the women as intelligent people, reminding them of their own hopes and dreams and insisting, during their busy days, of the importance of making a moment just for themselves. Zott’s show, expected to fail, becomes a success.

However, Garmus, introducing the back story, makes it clear that this is not success to the highly-intelligent Zott, whose dreams have already been broken. She does not see herself as a cook. Zott is and always has been a scientist, ready to pursue a particular theory. Once, for a short pivotal time, such a passion was possible but tragedy struck. Now Zott’s scientific career has become what it always had been, one of picking herself up from one bitter disappointment to another.

Garmus makes clear that the academic establishment has, so far, considered Zott – both her brains and her gender - as challenges to the scientific and social norms of the time. She has been sexually abused, accused of being a slut and denied opportunities. Take this small example. Re-applying for a job at the hateful Hastings Research Institute, Elizabeth Zott finds she has been demoted to the role of lab technician. Worse, the smirking boss and “boys” present her with a new lab-coat, embroidered with her initials. E.Z. First time around, being English, I read those letters without American pronounciation. The next time, I understood why she was so upset. You try.

Yet Zott, despite everything, builds a lab in her own home, organises her life and responsibilities as best she can, takes cash in hand from the same staff that dismissed her, and persists. How one longs for her success! But without giving away any spoilers, the plot of Lessons in Chemistry is about much more than nasty bullying or the fame that comes from a tv show.

Yes, there is sadness in the book: the ploys of opportunistic bosses, greedy clerics and the harm of judgemental gossips. Yes, there are moments when my heart cried out for stoical, misunderstood Zott. But yes, there are also moments of delight, humour, affection and quietly happy coincidences. As the story progresses, the lonely Zott attracts a cast of misfit neighbours and self-effacing friends who find themselves standing by and helping her, while others, eventually and unexpectedly, do what is right.

There are three wonderful main characters who are most definitely on Zott’s side: Madeleine, a little girl with a passion for libraries and an imaginative approach to family trees; Six-Thirty, a loving, loyal dog with a vocabulary of over three hundred words and, of course, Calvin Evans, champion rower, scientific genius, grudge-holder and soul mate.

Moreover, between all the conflicts, Bonnie Garmus has laced Lessons in Chemistry with a satisfyingly, mysterious storyline involving mislaid documents, mistaken identities and enigmatic strangers. I read with a growing sense of solutions slowly arriving and wrongs steadily being gloriously righted. All in all, Lessons in Chemistry was a delight and one that made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine, which is surely a good thing in a story, especially these days.

When you find this book, do - if possible - glance at the hard cover beneath the dust jacket. No annoying images, no quotes, almost no words. Simply, unadorned, a pattern made from the Periodic Table. Possibly with poisons.

* * * * * * * * * *

Extract: To the horror of the TV producer, Zott has emptied her studio set of a quantity of homely decorations, clearing her "kitchen" surfaces so they are ready for work. Meanwhile, advertisers are insisting - again - that she shows their products to the audience.

“Hello viewers,” Elizabeth said, “See this?” She held the can of soup close to the camera. “It’s a real time saver."

From his producer’s chair, Walter gasped in gratitude. She was using the soup!

“That’s because it’s full of chemicals,” she said, tossing it with a clunk into a nearby garbage can. “Feed enough of it to your loved ones and eventually they’ll die off, saving you tons of time because you won’t have to feed them any more.”

Lessons in Chemistry is published by Penguin.

More reviews by Penny:

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

Guest post by Rhiannon Lassiter: THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES by Catherynne M. Valente

"As a high concept novel with an idea that sold me instantly, it completely delivers."

Rhiannon Lassiter is an author of science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, magical realism and psychodrama novels for juniors, middle grade and young adults. Her first novel, Hex, was accepted for publication when she was nineteen years old.

Rhiannon’s favourite authors include Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Mahy and Octavia Butler. Her own novels explore themes of identity, change and transition. Her ambition is to be the first writer-in-residence on the Moon.

I like high concept fiction. A lot of my time is spent searching for the Big Idea that has enough in it to sustain me for an entire novel. That’s true of me as a writer and as a reader. So I was immediately drawn to Catherynne M. Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues, a title that clearly references a concept crossover that is so brilliant it’s incredible it hasn’t been done before.

The Vagina Monologues was an episodic play written by Eve Ensler in 1996, twenty year ago. It was groundbreaking work focusing on women, sexuality and violence. 'Fridging' is a concept with an even longer history but the term was popularised in 1999 by Gail Simone though her website Women In Refrigerators, which compiled a list of female characters in comic books who were killed off as a plot device. 

Valente herself is an award-winning author, a recipient of the Tiptree award for The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden and the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She’s been on my list of authors to explore for some time but this was the first book of hers I’ve read.

It took me some time to get hold of a copy because it was published in the US first and there is no electronic edition, perhaps because the paperback format makes significant use of illustrations by comic book artist Annie Wu.

As a high concept novel with an idea that sold me instantly, it completely delivers. It launches the reader into an invented superhero universe, one with its own original superheroes, super villains and everyone in between. Page Embry, the narrator of the first section is dead “the deadest girl in Deadtown” who lives – or rather doesn’t – in a pocket dimension, a suburban hell, with all the conveniences of modern unlife. She is the President of the Hell Hath Club, a coffee-klatsch of women scorned. During the course of the book, these six women tell their stories, with intermissions for Page to introduce them and enjoy some soul music at the Lethe Café.

The writing is snappy and savage. These women had lives, hopes and dreams, before their stories came abruptly to an end when a villain put a full stop to them. The men they loved were superheroes, and these women’s deaths have served to motivate their next big plot action or their need for revenge. But the women themselves have been forgotten, or were never considered that important, bit part players in a bigger story.

It must have been a huge piece of work to - as Valente mentions in the acknowledgements - “(create) an entire superhero universe to make a point” and yet it’s done with considerable wit and elegance. The reader’s knowledge of this invented universe is largely assumed by the narrators, and it is at once original and recognisable. Characters like Grimdark, a Batmanesque figure, Proessor Yes who is Headmistress of St Ovidius’s School for Wayward Children, or The Arachnochancellor are completely believable creations. The world they inhabit is a superhero universe that hangs together or doesn’t with the right combination of techno babble and magical effects.

The individual chapters work well as monologues, neatly encapsulating the stories of these women: tragically comedic, well paced, mixing foreshadowing and self- reflection. I did wonder if the individual voices were sufficiently differentiated. If you pick up the book at a random page can you tell if it’s wayward child Julia Ash or conceptual artist Daisy Green speaking? And unfortunately, I mostly couldn’t. I think it’s a weakness in the book, although it may be that Valente was going for this precise effect: six women, speaking with one voice. But it’s not a very diverse cast; self-described as “mostly very beautiful and very well read and very angry” but also predominantly white and middle class. I think Valente could have gone further here to give us a richer palette of voices.

The chapter I think is most different is the one from the point of view of wise-cracking Pauline “Polly” Ketch, a villainous sidekick with more than one Bad Daddy. Her section stands out for her sparky villainy although she’s probably the most deluded of the characters, the one who believes her lover and murderer will return for her and bring her back to life. Spoiler, he doesn’t.

That brings me to my other criticism of the book, which again is feature of the authorial intention. There is no redemption arc for these women. They have been variously dead-ended or flatlined, destined to spend eternity in clothes picked out by relatives for them to wear in their coffins. Their monologues and their conversations all concern a world which they won’t be returning to. And although they have created a small semblance of a live for themselves with drinks and music and friendship, their stories have nowhere to go, their monologues end where they began, in Deadtown.

It has to be this way because that’s the big idea of the book. Women in superhero stories are typically foils to men, used and abused to further a male plot of action and violence. We are told from the beginning that Page can’t change. But it makes for a depressing read, despite the wit and sparkle. You want the women to rise up and start again, to see them re-enter the fascinating universe Valente has created. But they can’t and don’t and the book would be weaker if they could. It’s frustrating.

I’m glad to have read this book and I will look for more from Valente who I sense is an author coming into her own superpowers.  I recommend it highly. But I’m not sure how much it would stand the test of a re-read. It does what it says on the tin and it does it well and with flair. If I was left wanting a little bit more, perhaps that’s a sign that I need to read more of her work.