Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, November 22, 2024

 

Lessons in Chemistry book covers in different countries – Covers, clockwise from top left, in the United States, in Britain, in Estonia, and in German

Briefly, in the words of the author, Bonnie Garmus:
“I set the book in the late 50s, early 60s and there's a woman, Elizabeth Zott, a chemist who's not allowed to be a chemist because she's unwed and pregnant, and she gets fired from her job for that crime, and she ends up taking a job as a very reluctant TV cooking show host.

But instead of teaching the housewives at home how to cook, she teaches them chemistry because she wants to remind them of their innate capability and in doing so, she changes the status quo.”

The novel is set in the fifties in balmy California where the great research universities and labs are; and no end of places that invite people to have a good time. In this setting arrives Elizabeth Zott, keen to make her career as a research chemist but having to battle all the way against the failures in her childhood upbringing – which she could do nothing about besides surviving – and the later disabilities heaped on her by the science establishment refusing to recognise her as a gifted and determined scientist.

Though she has already published papers and secured her M.Sc. in Chemistry from a prestigious university (University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA for short), and should have been working towards a Ph.D. at the same university, that attempt is botched by her guide and professor attempting to molest her sexually. She flees after poking a sharp number-two pencil six inches into his belly.

The only position she could get was as a lab technician in the fictional Hastings Institute, where Nobel-prize winning work is accomplished by brilliant scientists like Calvin Evans. Her encounter with him is the amusing story of the great man dismissing Elizabeth as a secretary when she appears to borrow some glass beakers for her work. It’s a put-down at first sight. The stand-off is tense until an encounter when he throws up on her dress after having one too many. She does not melt, but merely handles him as a patient.

Soon he takes her seriously and finds in her not only someone who understands his work and can critique it, but more, understands his own complex personality stemming from an even more cruel upbringing where he was molested by a pedophile priest in an orphanage after his parents (adoptive as it turns out) died. But he makes out all right and even goes to Cambridge University in UK and returns to the fictional town of Commons in California and a low paying job, selecting it purely because a pen-pal (who later became a Presbyterian clergyman) told him that Commons has the best weather for rowing. Rowing you see, is not only the author Bonnie Garmus’ passion, but one she devolves on Calvin Evans, and through him to Elizabeth Zott. There is an enormous amount of rowing lore and terminology in the novel, and descriptions of the brutal regimens of training required to succeed. 

Lewis Pullman as Calvin Evans and Brie Larson as Elisabeth Zott working in the lab from the Apple TV series

The pair make chemical headway in the lab and with each other. If chemistry is change as Elizabeth asserts then the two of them change and now attain a deep relationship with each other while intently pursuing their chemical research in Hastings. 

Elizabeth Zott and Calvin Evans collaborate in Hastings Institute

A stray dog they acquire and a leash that the town mandates combine to cause a freak accident while Calvin is jogging, and that causes the major turning point in the novel.

Calvin dies, but will Elizabeth be allowed to continue her work, funded by a secretive donor to for research in Abiogenesis – the theory that life originated from non-living matter, such as inorganic substances and simple organic compounds? No. The head of the chemistry department appropriates her research and publishes it as his own. She is thrown out of a job.

She has been left pregnant by Calvin Evans with the child named Mad, short for Madeline. How to support herself and a child? A chance encounter with the producer of afternoon TV programmes for housewives and children opens up a new horizon, a TV programme called Supper at Six, in which she opens up the vistas of Chemistry that underlie cooking, and goes on the air every weekday on a special set. 

Brie Larson as Elizabeth Scott hosts the TV Show ‘Supper at Six’

She transforms the show into a platform for science lessons for housewives while challenging gender biases. The show contains oodles of chemical knowledge about the proteins, amino acids and enzymes that make up food and how they transform under heat and various conditions into the tasty dinners every woman can make from fresh ingredients. The various segments of the show are very entertaining but they are all done in an air of seriousness, acknowledging how full of value is the time mothers pend on their family in preparing nourishing meals.

As in her previous career as a chemist, in TV production also there are bullying bosses who are constantly disparaging employees and asserting their male superiority. This culminates in the station chief of the TV, one Lebensmal (meaning ‘bad life’ in German), attempts to rape her. She is nobody, and he will have her. Fortunately, the brandishing of the 14-inch kitchen knife that every professional chef carries, is sufficient to repel his penile attack and render him inoperative.

Her extremely successful show is now syndicated nationally and Elizabeth Zott steps out of gentle penury into the limelight of a royalty earning TV star. But her ambition to return to chemistry  and take her research forward in the field of Abiogenesis, cannot long remain in abeyance. The erstwhile generous donor, Avery Parker of the Parker Foundation, who was keen to fund her work, turns out to be the (unwed) mother of Calvin Evans. She buys Hastings Institute and cleans it up, getting rid of the hostile, male chauvinist head of chemistry, Dr. Donatti, and putting Elizabeth in charge.

Madeline Zott and Six-Thirty, the dog, have a close protective relationship

The dog and the genius child of Elizabeth Zott and Calvin Evans have major roles. The novel was written to highlight how torturous the struggle was to recognise that women have minds and aspirations of their own, without reference to men in their lives. Women are as keen in intellect and as determined in their work habits as any male professional. 

It might be the basic tenet of feminism to take women seriously, as Elizabeth wished to be. There has been some progress in America and the West, and in other parts of the world in the last seventy years. But look at the way the Republican candidate for President in the Nov 5 elections in USA treats women. How many cases have been brought against him by women he molested? And his VP candidate has a such a low opinion of women that it almost amounts to the Nazi theme that officially encouraged and pressured women to fill the roles of mother and wife only. Women were excluded from all other positions of responsibility, including political and academic spheres. Nazi Germany promoted the cult that women were for Küssen, Kochen, und Kinder – kissing, cooking, and kids.

These ante-diluvian attitudes that persist in advanced countries, are demonstrated not only by the examples of leaders at the top, but in the statistics of the gender pay gap: according to current data, women in the United States are typically paid around 20% less than men for the same work. The gender pay gap in the EU is 16%. In India it is 18%. And so on. 

There are worse manifestations: in Afghanistan it is a crime for women to seek secondary education. In many countries women are forced to wear clothes to suppress their femininity – not because they want to, but because a male-dominated society decides what they shall wear.