She blinded us with science

Lessons in Chemistry Bonnie Garmus Doubleday

Like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Judith Krantz, Bonnie Garmus is a latecomer to the literary scene. This month she published her first book — the sparkling novel Lessons in Chemistry — days shy of her 65th birthday.

With Lessons in Chemistry, Garmus, a copywriter and creative director, delivers an assured voice, an indelible heroine and love stories — that of a mother for her daughter, a woman for science, a dog for a child, and between a woman and man.

At the centre of the novel is Elizabeth Zott, a research chemist, absurdly self-assured.

The novel is set in the early 1960s in the mythical Southern California town of Commons. Being a woman in science is a hard, lonely road. Elizabeth becomes a national somebody not in the lab but as a kitchen savant on a local afternoon television show called Supper at Six. Her nutritional dishes are doused in chemistry with a heaping side order of female empowerment.

“When women understand chemistry,” she explains to a reporter, “they understand how things work.” Science offers “the real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits that have been created for them.” It's better living through casseroles.

A decade earlier, Elizabeth met Nobel-nominated chemist and master grudge-holder Calvin Evans at the Hastings Research Institute, where he is a star and she is not because, well, sexism. They fit because they don't anywhere else.

Garmus has packed her novel with heartache, corporate malfeasance and a humiliating comeuppance.

Elizabeth is a feminist and modern thinker. She has little talent for ingratiating herself with other people. It is Elizabeth, not her equally eccentric and stubborn suitor, who refuses to wed “because I can't risk having my scientific contributions submerged beneath your name.”

Garmus manages to charm. She has created an indelible assemblage of stubborn, idiosyncratic characters. She's given us a comic novel at precisely the moment we crave one.