Lessons in Chemistry

I went into this expecting something charming and slightly light and came out having had a much more complicated experience than that, which i think is exactly what Garmus was going for. This is a funny book. It is also, underneath the funny, a genuinely angry one, and the anger is what gives the comedy its weight.

Elizabeth Zott is a chemist working at a research institute in California in the early 1960s and she is better at her job than almost everyone around her and almost nobody will admit that out loud. She gets passed over and talked down to and harassed and eventually pushed out, not because her work is lacking but because the people around her have decided in advance what a woman in a lab is allowed to be. Garmus writes these dynamics with real precision. It is never one big dramatic act of sexism. It is a hundred small ones stacked on top of each other until the weight of them becomes impossible to keep carrying.

The relationship at the center of the book, between Elizabeth and a fellow scientist named Calvin Evans, is one of the more unusual romances i have read because it is built almost entirely on mutual respect for each other's minds rather than on the conventional beats romance novels usually rely on. Calvin sees Elizabeth clearly in a way nobody else in her life does and that clarity is more romantic than almost anything more conventionally swoony could have been. What happens to their relationship sets the rest of the plot in motion and i will not say more than that because the way Garmus reveals it matters.

Elizabeth ends up, through a chain of circumstances that involve a television producer and a desperate studio and her own refusal to dumb herself down even slightly, hosting an afternoon cooking show. What she actually does on that show is teach chemistry disguised as cooking, explaining the actual molecular reasons behind why a sauce thickens or why bread rises, while housewives across America tune in expecting something much simpler and end up getting an education they did not know they wanted. This is the part of the book that made me grin the most while reading. Garmus clearly enjoyed writing these scenes and that enjoyment is contagious.

Six Thirty, Elizabeth's dog, deserves real mention. Garmus gives him sections from his own perspective and somehow makes this work without it ever feeling gimmicky. He understands more words than a dog reasonably should and his loyalty to Elizabeth and to her daughter is one of the warmest threads in the whole book. I am not someone who is usually won over by animal narrators in fiction and Six Thirty won me over completely.
Where the book occasionally stumbles is in its plotting. There are a number of revelations and coincidences in the second half, particularly concerning Elizabeth's family background, that felt engineered for maximum emotional effect rather than emerging naturally from the story Garmus had been telling.

I do not think these moments ruin the book but i noticed the seams a little more than i wanted to. Some of the men in the story, especially the ones at the research institute, are drawn with broad strokes that serve the satire well but do not always feel like full people, which is a minor cost of how effectively Garmus is making her point about the era.

The ending resolves things a bit more neatly and warmly than the rest of the book had prepared me for, given how unflinching Garmus had been about the unfairness Elizabeth faces throughout. I understand the impulse to give readers some comfort after putting Elizabeth through so much and i did not resent it exactly, but it felt slightly softer than the sharper, angrier book that came before it.

Four and a half stars. This is a genuinely entertaining novel with real teeth underneath the charm and Elizabeth Zott is the kind of character you carry with you after you close the book. If you have not seen the television adaptation yet, read the novel first. The book is sharper and funnier and Six Thirty alone is worth the time.