Bonnie Garmus “miraculously” 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”.
“Peck & Peck” follows Batter Gray, a middle-class Californian boy with 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, the fictional “pricey poetry journal” at the centre of Garmus’ novel, 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. Along the way, we meet a “Ferris wheel of characters”, including his font designer mother and “chaotic tyrant” of a boss. They and the many plot twists all “snap together delightfully”, adding up to a “rollicking good story”.
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 book has an “almost Wodehousian giddiness,” but Garmus’ satire never comes across as “mean or bitter”. It 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”.
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