“That's why I wanted to use Supper at Six to teach chemistry. Because when women understand chemistry, they begin to understand how things work."
Roth looked confused.
"I'm referring to atoms and molecules, Roth," she explained. "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."
"You mean by men."
"I mean by artificial cultural and religious policies that put men in the highly unnatural role of single-sex leadership. Even a basic understanding of chemistry reveals the danger of such a lopsided approach."
An older woman at the bookstore was buying Lessons in Chemistry and she told me that she had read the first few pages and found them hilarious, and she wanted me to know that “the boomers love this book because we lived it.” And that made me think of my boomer Mom and her awful stories of how she was treated as an attractive young woman — by teachers and doctors and priests and bosses; pretty much any man who had power over her, and they were everywhere — and while I can see how this book might provide a certain schadenfreude for a reader who has experienced that kind of repression, I really didn’t like it. I didn’t find it funny (every awful thing happens to the main character) and I didn’t find it relatable (this main character is effortlessly sexy and a self-taught chemist who knows more than the PhDs around her) and I didn’t find it credible (I especially didn’t like the genius dog with the big vocabulary and, apparently, the ability to read). I wonder if the older woman from the bookstore still found this “hilarious” after the first time the main character was sexually assaulted and called a certain c word; personally, I found the treatment vulgar. I do want to stress: I can see what kind of satisfaction a reader could get from watching this character overcome so many obstacles — and especially if that reader had been held back by similar obstacles — but it just didn’t work for me. Slight spoilers (not much more than is on the jacket) from here.
Neither of them had wanted children, and Elizabeth still fervently believed that no woman should be forced to have a baby. Yet here she was, a single mother, the lead scientist on what had to be the most unscientific experiment of all time: the raising of another human being. Every day she found parenthood like taking a test for which she had not studied. The questions were daunting and there weren’t nearly enough multiple choice.
It’s the late 50s and Elizabeth Zott — probably the world’s leading expert on abiogenesis, even if she doesn’t have a PhD, can’t publish her research, and has no real standing in the lab she’s lucky to work at — meets and falls in love, despite her best efforts to remain a serious-minded ice queen for the rest of her life, the lab’s celebrity chemist, Calvin Evans. This is a meeting of equal minds, and their too brief love story is rather sweet, but he ends up dying, leaving Elizabeth alone, unmarried (by her insistence), and pregnant. She’s fired from the lab, builds a new lab in the house Calvin left her (to continue her research, with her dog as capable lab assistant), and after a few years, when their daughter (who reads Mailer and Faulker at four years old) is enrolled underage in kindergarten, Elizabeth is scouted to host an afternoon cooking show. And while the producers would like for the “luscious” Elizabeth to wear skin-tight dresses and sip cocktails while reading her mindless cue cards, as soon as they go live, Elizabeth decides to speak to the housewives at home as though they were serious people doing serious jobs, and the audience laps it up. She becomes a cultural phenomenon over the next couple of years, but still, the suits upstairs would like to find a way to remind Elizabeth who’s in charge.
All of this would be fine if the story wasn’t burdened with the melodrama of Elizabeth and Calvin’s messed up childhoods (and characters from Calvin’s past popping up by chance), or if Elizabeth wasn’t so book smart but socially dense — like seeing no reason why declaring herself an atheist on TV in the early 60s should cause a fuss, especially when she uses her faith in science to make a belief in God seem backward — or if everything wasn’t so black and white about who is good (the women, and two weak men) and who is bad (all the rest of the cartoonish oafs who try to keep Elizabeth down). I didn’t like that, despite growing up in a crazy household and having to teach herself from library books, Elizabeth constantly refers to salt as sodium chloride and vinegar as CH₃COOH: I have no doubt that her (terrible) parents used the words “salt” and “vinegar” and can see no reason for her to speak that way as an adult. There’s a lot of extraneous drama going on in this book — like: I understand that the author Bonnie Garmus is a rower, but the rowing scenes were so unnecessary, even from a feminist perspective — and it just didn’t all hang together for me.
“Stability and structure,” she repeated, looking out at the studio audience. “Chemistry is inseparable from life — by its very definition, chemistry is life. But like your pie, life requires a strong base. In your home, you are that base. It is an enormous responsibility, the most undervalued job in the world that, nonetheless, holds everything together.”
There is a good message at the core of Lessons in Chemistry (even if society has moved on to the point where equal rights between the sexes is not an earth-shattering concept anymore), but I found its delivery to be pedantic: Both overtly, through Elizabeth’s constant lecturing, and contextually through the endless obstacles she is shown to face as a woman in her time. And I know from my Mom that it could really be like that, but this, for me, was an unsatisfying literary treatment of the times.
I was just thinking a couple weeks ago (after I read Naomi Alderman's The Future) about how moved I had been by Alderman's previous novel The Power: That book (about women gaining a strange electrical power that suddenly gave them physical supremacy over men) was like a gut punch that left me wet-eyed and breathless. But, even though I gave it four stars, it's probably not a great novel; just one that I completely identified with in the moment. In the same way, I really do see how there could be some uplifting wish-fulfillment for boomers who read Lessons in Chemistry. I took a screenshot of this post that my Mom shared on facebook last night:
I can see how she'd find that hilarious even if it didn't land with me; at least she got a thumbs-up from another boomer.
