Lessons in Chemistry

Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in early 1960s Southern California, and the problem, as everyone around her keeps explaining, is that she is a woman. Her colleagues at Hastings Research Institute take her equipment, her ideas and her credit. Calvin Evans, the institute's celebrated and socially hopeless star, is the first man to look at her work and simply see the work.

What follows is not the novel that setup promises. Elizabeth ends up fired, a single mother, and the host of a television cooking programme, where she declines to be charming and instead teaches the housewives of America chemistry, on the grounds that cooking is chemistry and that they are perfectly capable of understanding it. The show becomes a phenomenon and Elizabeth becomes a problem.

Garmus writes it as a comedy with a great deal of anger underneath. The jokes are genuinely funny, the dog has a point of view, and the tonal register shifts without warning into real cruelty and real grief, which some readers find jarring and others find the whole point.

Go in knowing it is broader and more sentimental than literary fiction usually permits itself to be, and that this is deliberate. The villains are villainous, the coincidences are large, and the ending ties knots that life does not usually tie. Readers who want ambiguity will be annoyed, and readers who want Elizabeth to win will be satisfied.

It is a first novel written by someone in her sixties, it is designed above all to be enjoyed, and it is considerably sharper about how institutions absorb and neutralise a talented woman than its bright cover suggests.