1961. 30 year-old Elizabeth Zott, once a research chemist who put up with sexist behaviour (from men and women), is off to the TV studio. She presents a cooking program. She's a star. Her daughter Madeline read most of Dickens before she was 5, and pretends at school that she's normal.
1952 - Calvin Evans is a work colleague - a genius, a rower; orphaned at 5. He spent 6 sexless years at Cambridge UK. Her father's a jailed evangelist. Her gay brother killed himself. Her favourite subject is abiogenesis - how life emerges from inert matter. Calvin and beautiful Elizabeth live together. Calvin wants to marry. He takes her to the rowing club - a new world of jargon. She learns how to row by using physics first principles. He gets her into a men's eights team. She's fiercely independent, not wanting to play the system. Their boss, Donatti, tries to sabotage their relationship and her confidence. They get a dog whose PoV appears.
He dies, run over by a police car. She's pregnant. She's sacked. She makes her kitchen into a lab hoping to continue her work. Colleagues drop in for help. She's invited back to the all male eights. Neighbour Harriet helps out.
About halfway through the book, Mad reappears as a PoV. She's 4. Elizabeth asks for her job back. She's given a technician's job and discovers that Donatti has stolen her work. She begins to think that Calvin's father isn't dead - he helps fund the lab. She resigns and starts presenting a cooking show with a chemistry theme. Reactions become analogies for society and relationships. She doesn't talk down to the housewives. They become assertive at home. Walter Pine, her producer (and a single parent to one of Madeline's classmates), panics.
The station boss tries to sexually assault her. She reveals a kitchen knife. He has a heart attack. Walter takes over. She's syndicated, popular - even after she reveals that she's an atheist. Wakely appears - a religious pen-friend of Calvin. She gets on the cover of Life - though the article isn't all true, it reveals some awkward truths.
After 2 years she resigns from the programme claiming she should spend more time with Madeline. We learn that her brother died saving her from drowning, though he couldn't swim himself. Harriet and Walter become a couple. The mysterious sponsor reappears and sacks Donatti. She's Calvin's mother. Is she back to get Calvin's papers that Elizabeth stole? She gives control of the lab to Elizabeth so she can research abiogenesis and looks forward to getting to know her grand-daughter better.
The book bounces along entertainingly with (at times farce-like) satire to a rather tame ending.
Other reviews
- Stephanie Merritt (Garmus’s great skill here is to create a richly comic novel around a character who is entirely deadpan, and to whom some pretty dreadful things happen ... There are, inevitably, a few first-novel flaws: the narrative perspective hops around too often, dallying with minor characters when its strength is in Elizabeth’s inner life. There’s a semi-magic-realist strand from the viewpoint of Elizabeth’s unnaturally perceptive dog, which some readers may find charming and quirky and others somewhat grating. But Garmus understands the importance of a satisfying resolution)
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