Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, perhaps unfortunately, is also beautiful.

Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.

The main character in Bonnie Garmus’ delightful 2022 novel, Lessons in Chemistry is as stubborn as she is brilliant. She refuses to be seen as simply an extension of her Nobel Prize nominated boyfriend whom she lives with but refuses to marry. Her hiring by a scientific think-tank is already viewed by the male workforce as due to the influence of her famous boyfriend. And she realizes that no matter how brilliant her work is, she will be seen as riding the coat-tails of Calvin Evans.

Elizabeth meets Calvin when he discovers her stealing beakers from his lab, which she explains is due to a lack of funding for her research. 

“The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that i can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be in a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.”

The action in this novel takes place in the 60s, but Garmus thinks not much has changed since then.

Garmus creates some really funny and delightful characters including a dog who understands a very large number of words and a precocious daughter “who could hum a Bach concerto but couldn’t tie her own shoes; who could explain the earth’s rotation but stumbled at tac-tac-toe.”

The plot of the novel is less important than the commentary on science and society that Garmus provides. Briefly put, Calvin dies, and Elizabeth is fired from the research institute soon after his death. Out of a job and nearly broke, she has little to do but work on her already very accomplished cooking skills. Cooking she insists is like chemistry, in fact it is chemistry at the practical level. Eventually in this whacky story, Elizabeth becomes the reluctant star of a cooking show, Supper at Six. Unexpectedly, the show is a huge hit, and she soon has a devoted following. Between recipes, Elizabeth provides running commentary on the absurd exclusion of women from science, making them stay at home and make babies in a form of legalized slavery.

The all-male workforce at the institute sees Elizabeth’s research project as unimportant and bound to go nowhere, and after she is fired, her work is simply stolen by one of her male colleagues. Only Calvin recognizes her brilliance, and he is no longer there to defend her. 

Darwin had long ago proposed that life sprang from a single-celled bacterium, which then went on to diversify into a complex planet of people, plants, and animals. Zott? She was like a bloodhound on the trail of where that first cell had come from. In other words , she was out to solve one of the greatest chemical mysteries of all time, and if her findings continued apace, there was no question she would do just that.

As her fame blossoms as cooking-show host, Elizabeth has only one real friend, Harriet, whom Elizabeth has hired as her assistant. They agree on most things, but not on one essential point. 

According to Harriet, men were a world apart from women. They required coddling, they had fragile egos, they couldn’t allow a woman intelligence or skill if it exceeded their own. “Harriet that’s ridiculous,” Elizabeth had argued. “Men and women are both human beings. And as humans, we’re by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational system, and choosers of our behaviors.  In short, the reduction of women to something LESS than men, and the elevation of men to something MORE than women, is not biological: it’s cultural.

I did not choose this book for its political significance, but simply because it sounded delightful and it is. Bonnie Garmus has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine and education, and she shows off her considerable talents in this wonderful comedic novel. Like her zany character Elizabeth, Bonnie decides, “Don’t work the system. Outsmart it.”

If you as a reader sometimes read a book just for the delight of reading it, this is a book for you, easily the funniest and most clever book I have read this year.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Teacher seeks pupil. Must hast have an earnest desire to save the world
Apply in person

This ad enrages the narrator of the book, Ishmael. Although he has in the past sought a teacher, he is now disillusioned, and angry at the naive audacity of the ad. He answers the ad simply to expose the person who wrote it as a fake. Imagine his response when he discovers just who that is.

Because it was backed by darkness, the glass in this window was black—opaque, reflective. I made no attempt to see beyond as I approached. I was the spectacle under observation. On arrival, I continued to gaze into my own eyes for a moment, then rolled the focus forward beyond the glass—and found myself looking into another pair of eyes.

I fell back, startled. Then recognizing what I’d seen. I fell back again, now a little frightened.

The creature on the other side of the glass was a full-grown gorilla.

And so begins one of the most captivating and insightful books I have read in years. Actually the book had gone through several iterations until Quinn published the current version in 1992.

I’m surprised it took me so long to discover this brilliant treatise on human’s destruction of the earth, quite a fitting topic for our earth-day show.

Yes, he is being interviewed by a gorilla and a very clever one at that. A poster on the wall reads

WITH MAN GONE

WILL THERE 

BE HOPE

FOR GORILLA? 

This koan recurs many times in the book. The gorilla announces, “I am the teacher,’ and so begins an incredibly complex discussion of how we got to where we are, and how we might save ourselves and the rest of sentient life forms on earth.

Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you ‘How can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’ and if you do this, people will look at you oddly and wonder what the devil you’re talking about. In other words, if you take this educational journey with me, you’re going to find yourself alienated from the people around you—friends, family, past associates, and so on. 

There is a whole philosophy of history spun out in the gorilla’s lessons, from creation myths to a tracing of the history of agriculture. The story of The Leavers and The Takers. The story is too complex to simply overview, nor am i anything like as clever as Quinn and the gorilla. 

“And so your account of creation ends, ’And finally man appeared.’

“Yes.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that there was no more to come. Meaning that creation had come to an end.”

“This is what it was all leading up to”

“Yes.’

“Of course. Everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.”

“Yes.”

“When man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached. There was nothing left to create.”

“That seems to be the unspoken assumption.”

Ishmael is a wise if impatient teacher and he does not simply lay out his theory of how we came to this precipice we are on, he proceeds in Socratic fashion, urging the narrator to dig out the story, and play his part in discovery, to bring out of concealment the story of our own destruction.

At first I thought that the author must have read The Sixth Extinction, and was playing off of it, but if anything, it is the other way around since this novel predates the publication of The Sixth Extinction and centers more on economic history than on scientific data.

In essence, the world was made for man, and man was made to rule it. But since the world would not meekly submit, man had to conquer it.

“I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.“

Martin Heidegger tells a similar story in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he claims that the present worlding, the world we are bringing  into existence, treats nature as standing reserve, that which stands in reserve for us to use and use up. Quinn’s version of the story sis far less pompous than Heidegger’s and far more entertaining.

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

Black Cake is a sprawling, brilliant debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It is hard to believe it is a debut novel, since the writing is so rich and complex, but she has been writing for a long time. 

Benedetta Bennet (known as Benny), and Coventina (Covey) have been best friends for life, and their voices are two of the most important narrative voices in this novel, although there are a host of narrators representing generations of families. The chapters are split between then (1965) and now (2018). Benny and Byron, once super-close siblings have drifted apart as they matured, but the death of Eleanor Bennett, their mother, brings them together, and the narrative she has left behind for them shows them that Eleanor was not the person they or others thought she was. Benny and Byron, or B & B as their mother likes to call them, have been summoned to Eleanor Bennett’s attorney’s office and are given a handwritten note and a USB drive. The note says simply “B and B, there’s a small black cake in the freezer for you. Don’t throw it out.”

As Wilkerson tells us in her Author’s Note:

It was my personal familiarity with a particular Caribbean food, black cake, that led obliquely to this book. It started me thinking about the emotional  weight carried by recipes and other familial markers that are handed down from one generation to the next. Then it had me writing about characters who must hold fast to their sense of self when they learn their lives have been built on a dubious narrative.

What we call holiday fruit cake is as close as most of us come to black cake. But the Caribbean black cake is made with fruit that has been soaked in alcohol over long periods of times, and is especially treasured as a wedding cake.

Not everyone sits down to write a book but everyone is a storyteller, in one form or other. As I wrote this novel, a lifetime of anecdotes and fleeting impressions shared by the Caribbean members of my multicultural family helped me to develop some of the fictional characters and scenarios from the 1950s and 1960s. The scenes from the unnamed island in the Caribbean reflect some of the geography and history of Jamaica...The fictional town where members of the book’s older generation grew up is inspired by the northeast coast of that island and uses a mix of actual and invented locations.

Without telling you much of the story that unfolds as B and B listen to the story their mother tells them, one of the two best friends is given by her father as a bride to a much older and powerful money-lender. Benny, who is a great long-distance swimmer helps Covey to escape the island and the marriage, but must then escape and change her own identity because of the long reach of the money lender and his family.

While B and B slowly learn the real history of their mother, scores of other characters are introduced. Covey eventually becomes a kind of food anthropologist telling family stories via food traditions. Benny becomes s world famous open-water distance swimmer, and eventually marries and moves to the United States.

In many ways Wilkerson displays the dangers for Blacks living in white communities., and in this way the novel seems very current. A black man pulled over for a busted tail light, and while trying to get his wallet, the officer pulls a gun on him.

What was the kid supposed to do if he was asked to show his driver’s license?

How is a person supposed to reach for their wallet? Are black people in America not allowed to have hands?

Byron would like to believe that this epidemic of mistreatment, this bullying of unarmed black men is just that, an outbreak, though prolonged, that can be brought under control. He wants to keep believing in law enforcement officers, to respect the risky work that they do, knowing that every day they step into unknown territory. He wants to know that he can still pick up the phone and call the cops if he ever needs to. There’s a lot of anger out there. A lot of hurt. Where  are they all gonna end up—black white, whoever—if things don’t get better?

Good question, and Wilkerson is a master at spotlighting this and so many contemporary issues. This is a wonderful novel, one of the best I have read in the past two years, and a fitting tribute to Women’s History month.