Bonnie Garmus had a problem after Lessons in Chemistry. Following up a bestseller with sixteen international literary awards, two years on the New York Times list, and an Apple TV adaptation is the kind of pressure that turns ordinary people into recluses, or worse, into writers who keep trying to repeat themselves. Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus is the rare second novel that refuses both options. It is its own animal. Whether that animal is more lovable than her debut depends, I think, on what you walk in expecting.
The Setup, Without Spoiling Anything
Meet Batter Gray. He is named after his mother’s “heroic” dog, an identical twin who lost his brother at birth, and somewhere in his early twenties he commits the unforgivable sin of wanting a career in poetry. His mother is a type-obsessed eccentric who believes the right font can save democracy. His father is a community college historian who suffers from anxiety and a strong opinion about Tennyson. Batter ends up in early-1980s New York City, working three minimum-wage jobs, until a phone call lands him at the most prestigious, secretive, and dysfunctional poetry quarterly in the world: Peck & Peck.
What he expects: an editorial gig.
What he gets: a basement room with three copy machines, an old baloney sandwich smashed under one lid, and a betting pool on how quickly he will quit.
That is roughly the first hundred pages, and Garmus never lets the engine cool.
What Garmus Still Does Better Than Almost Anyone
There is a voice in Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus that grabs you by the sleeve on page one and refuses to let go, which is the same trick Lessons in Chemistry pulled. The narration runs hot with asides, period gags, and the kind of bone-dry comebacks you write down for later use. A few things Garmus is consistently great at:
The mother, Rainey Gray. She steals every scene she enters. Her tall tales about the original Batter (the dog) are folded into the book like recurring jokes that quietly turn into its emotional spine.
Period rendering. Vietnam, Watergate, Reagan, the early days of the AIDS crisis, an NYC clocking over 637,000 felonies a year. Garmus does not bury her research in lectures. She slips it into one-liners.
The supporting cast. A polyglot editor from Kerala who writes copy instructions in Sanskrit. A security guard who used to be a cop and will not shut up about typefaces. An actress named Xing Xing Yao who turns out to be more self-aware than her publicist would prefer.
The small heartbreaks. A college roommate’s storyline lands harder than you expect, and a single sentence near the end about an unowned guitar is going to flatten a lot of readers.
The Poetry of It All
Here is where the book earns its slightly odd shape. Garmus is writing about poetry without writing in poetry, and she has to walk a tightrope. She quotes William Carlos Williams, Auden, George MacDonald, Dickinson, and Pablo Neruda, and she trusts her reader to feel the difference between a real line and a parody. She is also visibly enraptured by typography, which functions as a quiet running motif about how meaning depends on the form you give it. If you have ever lost an afternoon arguing about a font, you will feel seen.
The satire of the poetry quarterly world is sharp, occasionally cruel, and almost always affectionate. The Peck brothers’ eccentricities (the egg motif on every cover, the topiary alphabet outside the building, the thirty-nine editors arguing under a glass dome) tilt into magical realism by the end, but the book earns the tilt.
Where the Book Stumbles a Little
This is a long novel, and not all of the length is the good kind. A few honest observations that explain why the average rating sits where it does:
The middle slows. Workplace satire is fresh in chapter four. By the time the seventh “Salton has a tantrum” set piece rolls around, the comedy is spinning in place.
The cast is enormous. A reader who picks the book up after a few days away will sometimes squint at a name and try to remember which floor that one worked on.
The mystery resolution leans tidy. When the long-running embezzlement plot finally untangles itself, the answer is satisfying in a movie-of-the-week way but slightly too convenient for a book that otherwise resists easy outs.
Wren is thinner than she should be. As a love interest she reads more like an idea than a person, which stands out next to how thoroughly Garmus draws Rainey and Xing Xing.
The shadow of Lessons in Chemistry. Some readers wanted Elizabeth Zott again. Garmus, to her credit, has not handed them that. Some will read this as bravery, others as a missed obvious win.
None of these complaints kill the book. They keep it from being airtight.
A Style You Cannot Easily Imitate
What I admire most about Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus is how confidently it lives inside its own time and its own moral universe. The book is genuinely interested in what it costs to be true to a craft the world considers pointless. There is a thesis here, gently insisted upon, about originality and substance and the dignity of work that does not pay well. Which is also, not coincidentally, what Lessons in Chemistry was secretly about all along.
If You Loved This, You Will Probably Also Love
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, of course, for the same warm-sardonic voice and a protagonist who refuses to bend.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, for the eccentric-institution-as-a-world setup and the comic dignity of a confined life.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer, for the literary world satire and the oddly tender male protagonist.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, for the books-as-religion sensibility.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, for the voice and the way an entire community becomes the main character.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, for the secretive institution with rules nobody can quite explain.
The Editor by Steven Rowley, for the publishing-world charm and the warmth.
So, Is It Worth Your Time
Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus is uneven in the way interesting books tend to be, and entirely worth reading anyway. It is funny on the surface and quietly devastating underneath. It is too long by maybe forty pages. It is also one of the kinder books I have read this year about why people keep doing work that does not pay, and about how a person figures out who they want to be once they finally admit who they already are.
If you walked in hoping for Lessons in Chemistry: Now With Poetry, you will be a little disappointed. If you go in willing to meet a different book on its own terms, you will probably finish Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus the way I did, which is by sitting still for a moment, then quietly going to find the closest copy of William Carlos Williams.