Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus review – the zany follow-up to Lessons in Chemistry

If you have been into a bookshop since 2022, or perhaps even just breathed in and out, you could not have failed to clock the phenomenon that was Lessons in Chemistry. Bonnie Garmus’s debut remains a global sensation. The story of Elizabeth Zott, a gifted research chemist who, forced out of her lab by rampant 1950s misogyny, becomes the inspirational host of a TV cooking show, has so far sold a staggering 9m copies around the world. It spent the best part of two years on the Sunday Times bestseller list, was translated into more than 40 languages, and scooped numerous awards. In 2023 it became an Emmy-winning TV series; a year later New York Times readers voted it one of their top 100 books of the 21st century. Elizabeth Zott made such a splash that even her favoured brand of rowing machine saw a spike in sales.

What was the key to its prodigious success? Timing helped. In the aftermath of #MeToo, readers embraced a heroine who refuses to be cowed by injustice, who, thanks to resilience, pragmatism and straight-up hard work, ultimately comes out on top. The book is smart and very funny, a propulsive mashup of feminism and fairytale that balances darkness with whimsy, heartbreak with hope. It is also carries a shamelessly inspirational message. “Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies,” Zott exhorts her audience of housewives in the TV studio. “Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what you will change. And then get started.”

Garmus, then a copywriter, wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry in a fury after a meeting where a male colleague flagrantly took credit for her ideas: her anger “lit a fire under me about telling this story”. In Peck & Peck, her follow-up, there is less outrage crackling on the page but there are most definitely fires, and not metaphorical ones either. At the otherworldly New York offices of Peck & Peck, the most enigmatic, prestigious and dysfunctional poetry magazine in the world, the 39 editors have a single aim: to publish the world’s finest poems. Failed submissions – and every week there are thousands – are incinerated by the team of prison parolees who work in the mailroom.

Garmus’s sharp wit and gift for offbeat characters are both at full throttle in this quirky story of Batter Gray, a boy named for his mother’s improbably intrepid dog. Batter’s parents – his father teaches history, his mother designs typefaces – are eager for him to pursue a sensible, by which they mean lucrative, career; but Batter cares only for poetry. When by a marvellous fluke he lands a job at Peck & Peck, he is ecstatic, only to find himself in the basement churning out photocopies. Passionate about poems, pathologically unable to resist trouble, Batter is soon caught up in the bitter feud between the magazine’s two editors-in-chief, sworn enemies who just happen also to be twins.

Corporate machinations at a cultish poetry magazine in the 1980s might seem to offer slim pickings for any mainstream novel, let alone the follow-up to a monster blockbuster. The endangered future of poetry does not exactly sit alongside feminism as a rousing call to arms. Even Batter’s truth-telling typeface-fixated mother Rainey (a ringer for Elizabeth Zott) cannot duck the fact that poetry “is the bottom of the barrel arts-wise” and poets “never make a dime”. And yet from this apparently rarefied premise Garmus constructs a zany office comedy with shades of Hogwarts (Peck & Peck’s office building, with its vast glass dome, pneumatic tube delivery system and alphabetised balcony topiary, is as fantastical as anything in Rowling’s oeuvre) and the gleeful originality of early John Irving.

Though it sags a little in the middle, the result is a story that mostly zips along, and a resoundingly impassioned case for the importance of poetry in a profit-obsessed society that would gladly condemn it to extinction. Garmus’s riff on the poems that Peck & Peck sends straight to the incinerator is worth the price of admission alone: “anything on scented paper; anything written in only lowercase letters; anything that included a mention of self-publishing … poems that mentioned kittens, puppies, cooking, sandcastles, babies, sunrises, rainbows, running, beaches, cancer, or the word ‘namaste’ … Anything written on parchment … Anything using the word ‘methinks’”.

This aversion to mawkishness does not prevent it from creeping into Garmus’s own work. Readers irked by Six-Thirty, Lessons in Chemistry’s preternaturally intelligent dog, will find themselves no less vexed by Batter’s namesake, a rescue mutt whose credulity-stretching acts of heroism leave Lassie in the shade. And yet it is impossible not to be beguiled by Garmus’s irrepressible humour and the freewheeling exuberance of her imagination. It is hard to imagine a novel with more laugh-out-loud jokes about typography, harder still to dismiss her fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count. Will it repeat the mind-boggling success of Lessons in Chemistry? Probably not, but there are lessons in this book too that, in this terrifyingly accelerating age of AI, feel just as vital. “When you’re interested in poetry, you’re interested in everything,” one of Peck & Peck’s longstanding editors tells Batter. Garmus shows us that in spades.