The Author of Lessons in Chemistry Returns — and She's Writing About Poetry
Lessons in Chemistry was one of those novels that accumulated readers over time rather than arriving already famous. It became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, then an Apple TV+ series with Brie Larson, and Bonnie Garmus turned into one of the more closely watched debut authors of recent years. The pressure on her second novel is considerable.
The follow-up is centered on a young man hired by Peck & Peck, described as the most prestigious, secretive, and dysfunctional poetry journal in New York. It is being promoted as irresistible and tender and delightful, which is the promotional language attached to a book whose publisher is betting that readers who loved the warmth of Lessons in Chemistry will find the same warmth in a very different setting.
The shift from a female protagonist navigating 1960s sexism in scientific culture to a male protagonist navigating the world of literary poetry publishing is significant — not so much the gender shift as the change in stakes. Lessons in Chemistry worked because the injustice it was describing was real and the humor was a form of coping with it. The poetry world as satirical target is richer in self-importance than in actual consequence, and whether Garmus can find the same emotional core in material that is inherently more comedic and less serious is the central question about the new book.
The fact that she took this particular direction — smaller, more comic, more insular — after such an expansive debut is itself interesting. It suggests either that she is working against expectation deliberately or that this is where her instincts took her naturally. Both possibilities make the novel worth reading.