Book Review: Lessons in Chemistry

Can a book which is ostensibly feminist be its opposite?

*** 2/3 ***

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Have you ever liked a book that also made you angry?  Well, this is it.  I can’t say it was love/hate, but more of a like/annoy thing.  Don’t let that stop you from reading it.  But my insides got churned by this, and I guess they would be too by the TV series that it is linked to…but I don’t watch TV.

What’s going on?

I don’t like being manipulated, that’s what.  In the spirit of Hollywood, this book delivers that in spades.  It is cloaked in a very easy read, an enjoyable plot, mellifluous narration.  It just kind of pulls you in and pulls you along.

I found the book quite hard to put down.  That the story is good, in the sense that you want to just keep going, is a big part of what makes it hard to reconcile how I felt about it whilst reading it.

So why not just like it?

Good question.  Well, I don’t like being manipulated, and that is how I felt when reading this.  A great book achieves the same emotional response without the sledgehammer used here.

The novel is set in 1950’s USA.  The main character is pursuing her doctorate in Chemistry.  She is talented, but the casual sexism directed towards her is well catalogued but also facile.  We all know that casual sexism is just the vibratory backdrop for worse, and this is what comes about, when her PhD advisor comes onto her, she refuses his advances, so he rapes her.  So far so bad, but it is made worse in that by seeking to report the rape to the police, she is kicked out of the PhD program and blackballed.

She manages to find a position as a research scientist, but not at a doctoral level, at a pioneering institute.  Again, she faces casual, institutional and aggressive sexism, which she puts up with because it is so prevalent that it is all anyone knows.  As a modern reader, this is quite hard to stomach.

The truth of 1950’s USA was as bad or worse than everything described on these pages.  Reading diaries of professional women from that era are bone-chilling in their descriptions of dehumanizing sexism and belief systems.  This book presents a catalogue of them.  I found it a hard slog to get through so much outrage to want to read the story.  It was a gift of one of my caregivers, and I will not say which one until after I have reviewed the books given and described them all—and then I would like to see you match the book with the female archetype who gave it.  

Nothing like a fun little contest.

What befalls this woman is probably not alien to many women of that time, or even of today.  And I am the last person to jump to the defence of men, but almost universally in this book, a man either turns out to be a rapist, an out-and-out sexist, violent, or just plain dead, and that feels kind of cheap.

In the end, this woman does achieve remarkable things.  She does it in unexpected ways, but what is frustrating is that her “gift”, the final recognition, the moment of “f$%@ you” that comes to a lifetime of accumulated sexual innuendo, commentary and harassment ends up coming from someone else…not from her.  In other words, an actual gift.  

How disempowering!

So, what are we saying?  That even an incredibly capable and talented woman will just get constantly screwed, will be sexually assaulted more than once, and in the end will only succeed if a benefactor rescues her?  What a blowout.

And I love the exposé of just how insidious and rampant sexism has been in the past, but it is just as bad today, only better hidden.  Unconscious bias still hits all of us.  And that isn’t okay.

Powerful novels have an ability to teach as they tap into universal truths, hard messages, things we need to hear, no matter how difficult.  Today’s sexism is not as cartoonish as that which is described in this novel, but  it is every bit as insidious.  Sexual assault stats are no better.

So, in the end, I am not sure what the message of the book is, and that is a disappointment.  Still, it was an entertaining read.  If you can call such a difficult topic “entertainment”.

The answer to my question? I just wish the book didn’t feel so manipulative, so oriented towards a happy ending, to offer a case of revenge porn, but for it to have come not from the protagonists own careful and diligent work, but as a gift from an outsider.