Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus: a ‘rollicking good story’

Somewhat “miraculously”, Bonnie Garmus managed to make science and feminism “fun” in her bestselling debut novel “Lessons in Chemistry”, said The Boston Globe. In her second book, she is “poised to do the same thing for even more esoteric loves: poetry, fonts and literary publishing”.

The novel follows the life of Batter Gray, a middle-class Californian boy who possesses a “deep love” of poetry, much to his parents’ dismay. After graduating from college, he moves to New York to pursue his passion. “Like so many people coming of age in the city, he rents a terrible apartment, works three crummy jobs, and finally finds a girlfriend.”

Gray seems “destined” to end up at Peck & Peck, a “rarefied, pricey poetry journal”, though he’s the “copy guy”, working in the basement. Down there, “as is not uncommon in literary circles, he finds both mentors and nemeses” as he negotiates his way upwards.

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In telling her story, Garmus creates a “Ferris wheel of characters”, like his font designer mother and “chaotic tyrant” of a boss. They and the many plot twists all “snap together delightfully” and make for a “rollicking good story”. If her debut novel “made you love chemistry, this one might just make you fall for poetry. Such is the force of happiness.”

There is a certain “mawkishness” that creeps into “Peck & Peck”, said The Guardian. As in Garmus’ first book, there is a “preternaturally intelligent dog”, added to a fragile love story and a hasty courtroom scene. But it is impossible not to be beguiled by the “freewheeling exuberance of her imagination”, and the “fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count”.

You might not have thought a novel set in the world of poetry could be funny, but “you’d be wrong”, said the Los Angeles Times. “The repartee sparkles” and the “farcical touches lighten the tone”. But it’s inspiring too. Batter, for all his quirks, is “perhaps the best poetry ambassador to have ever graced the pages of a novel”. Readers will be “hard-pressed to resist becoming a poetry stan”.

Above all, this is a “workplace comedy, a New York City coming-of-age story, and a giddy satire wrapped in a sometimes-ungainly bundle”, said Laura Miller on Slate. The Peck & Peck office, home to a whopping 39 editors and crowned with a “spectacular glass dome”, is “pure fantasia”, but Garmus does at times “ladle gooey dollops of sentimentality” into her work.

There is an “almost Wodehousian giddiness” to the book, but Garmus’ satire never comes across as “mean or bitter”. Characters sceptical of poetry and its place in the world are treated as generously as those who love it, because the form “is in truth both boring and transcendent”.

“Peck & Peck” may not reach the heights of “Lessons in Chemistry” but it is a “rare work of popular fiction that has prompted me to look up a William Carlos Williams poem, and I suspect I won’t be the only one on whom it has that particular, and very welcome, effect”.