A feminist scientist in love

Since this is a bestseller with such a promising title, I was keen to read it in the hope of some ‘pseudosciency’ content. Alas, it turns out not to have much to do with science despite its protagonist being a chemist; it turns out to be a romance + feminist novel. 

The story is set in the 1960s USA, when women were apparently routinely treated as useless, brainless, and second class. Our protagonist, Elizabeth Zott, is a super intelligent, super capable, super determined woman, a superwoman in fact. (So much so one believes less and less in the protagonist being a life and blood human being.) She is a chemist, although the patriarchal system she lives in discredits her work, discredits her in fact; she has plenty to complain of – from discriminatory job practises to plagiarism to assault and rape.  

Elizabeth falls in love with a very gifted fellow chemist, but one who receives recognition and acclaim, since he is a man. Their romance is pretty routine, but what she values most about Calvin Evans is not just their compatibility, but “because he was the first man to take me seriously” (p331). Zott goes on to tell anyone who will listen, and in fact, delivers diatribes on this theme:

Imagine if all men took women seriously. Education would change. The workforce would revolutionize. Marriage counsellors would go out of business” (p331).

There is a lot of such hectoring by Zott throughout the novel, which I read patiently because this is all perfectly true of course, but which is still rather tedious to read even if one is part of the choir.  

Zott is a likeable character for all that. She has tremendous self confidence in her abilities, very sure she can do and achieve anything, which is remarkable given she grew up in a framework and society which has told her the opposite all her life. She is very serious, takes herself too seriously, but she is sincere, which is her redeeming feature. That said, she is still too much a caricature, and the novel actually conforms to patriarchal stereotypes in depicting a feminist who manages to hold onto her feminist ideals by compromising on being fun, pleasant, agreeable, etc, as if these qualities cannot coexist with being a committed feminist. The novel depicts Elizabeth Zott as extremely good looking and striking and tall, but severe in manner and obtuse or determinedly obtuse to other people’s responses to her and opinions of her. Perhaps those were just had to be the coping mechanisms of a serious feminist in the 1960s. 

A lot of the book is a little over the top, such as Elizabeth Zott using chemical symbols even for items like salt, pepper, vinegar in recipies, which it is unlikely even top level chemists would necessarily use in daily domestic routine. Again, I hesitate to say she protests too much, because it is likely given her situation and times, she had no choice but to be in perpetual protest, so to speak, in all spheres of daily living, where apparently women were incessantly discredited and disdained and dismissed. The book does outline sexual harassment, work discrimination, the domestic and marriage trap, and many other struggles women faced in that era in the USA, many of which are accurate but a little over rehearsed in the novel, perhaps. The struggles portrayed are genuine, but the portrayal lacked freshness.

One element I really did like in the novel is the dog, Six-Thirty. Not that this dog was particularly believable, because Six-Thirty was apparently more intelligent than the average human (which I have no doubt many dog owners do believe!) I enjoyed Garmus’ passages where she writes what Six-Thirty is thinking, but again, I seriously doubt dogs can construct such sentences in English or hold such complex (and extremely human) concepts. I can believe an intelligent dog can learn very many words, as Zott works on teaching her dog, but I do not know if dogs can reason in the way Garmus writes, and if they do reason, whether they do it in such a distinctively anthropomorphic way, for example,

From under the table, Six-Thirty lifted his head. He hated that Mad thought there might be something wrong with their family. As for Nefertiti and the others, it wasn’t just Mad’s wishful thinking – it was accurate in one critical sense: all humans shared a common ancestor. How could Mudford not know this? He was a dog and even he knew it” (p263). 

Still, Six-Thirty is such a darling that I am willing to suspend disbelief and allow that he is the most remarkable of dogs. The difficulty with this novel is, if one reads it lightheartedly, there is plenty to enjoy – the rom com bubbling on, the comic bits like how Elizabeth Zott’s daughter is named, etc. But then, is one to also lightheartedly read all the serious gender issues raised here? Then again, the book clearly creates heroes and villains and all the characters are quite stock characters or caricatures or props, so perhaps it is not intending to take itself seriously. But Elizabeth Zott suffers all her life precisely because she has not been taken seriously, so shouldn’t the reader show her the respect of taking her story seriously? This novel sends out mixed signals, and compromises the reception to it.