Bonnie Garmus (2022) Lessons in Chemistry.

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry, has as its protagonist Elizabeth Zott, who shoots from the hip, and never fails to tell the reader why. The past is never past and all that. And in physics, as in life, nothing is ever lost. But Elizabeth Zott is a chemist. A first-class chemist. Physics may have created the atomic and hydrogen bombs. But it was chemistry and chemists that created our modern world.

Elizabeth Zott is a genius, in the same way her first love and partner, Calvin Evans, at the Hastings Research Institute in California in 1952, is a genius. His work lauded, his research published in notable journals like Chemistry Today. And he’s a shoo-in for The Noble Prize (perhaps I should use past-tense here).

But Elizabeth Zott is not the wrong kind of genius, but the wrong kind of person. Sure, she’s white enough. And beautiful too. Her problem isn’t a murdering crook for a father and a narcissistic psychopath for a mother. That’s commonplace in American government (and most prisons all the way from cell blocks to the governor). Her problem is she’s female. It’s a problem no chemistry book can solve.

She’s forced to take a job, not a chemist, but as cook on local and then national television. Supper at Six. Lyndon B. Johnson, the then grossly overweight Vice President of America, watched it. Supposedly, an avid fan. He too had a way with the ladies. For example, the way his hand wandered inside his secretary’s dress, in the backseat of a car on his Texas estate, while his wife rode in the front. Boys will be boys.

Stott had her own idiosyncratic take on this kind of behaviour and American patriarchy. That’s why her cookery programme is such a nationwide hit. American housewives love her because she tells it like it is.

‘They either want to control her, touch her, dominate her, silence her, correct her, or tell her what to do.’

Listen to the modern tone here in a note put into her daughter’s lunchbox. Mad is aged five and also a genius, smart enough to have read most of Dickens and big enough to pass for six so she can attend school.   

‘Fuel for learning. Play sports at recess but do not automatically let the boys win. It is not your imagination. Most people are awful.’

Lessons in Chemistry is not Mill on the Floss. George Eliot does allow for women to be read as vastly superior to men, even although they may never be regarded in that way. But she wouldn’t allow for a dog being a narrator, and telling the story from his point of view. No matter. Elizabeth Zott is a great character. Everything else flows from that. I’m as sure as a dumb male can be that a television series will follow. I might even watch it. Read on.