Tom Ryan
Bonnie Garmus’ sprightly second novel has much in common with her first, the irresistible 2022 bestseller Lessons in Chemistry (which she published at the age of 65). Both deal with the pressures of the workplace, the rejections, resentments and ridicule, and both are flavoured by the same delicious screwball spirit that gave so much zest to so many zany Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. Films such as Bringing Up Baby, Palm Beach Story, Ball of Fire and The Major and the Minor.
Like them, the two books feature eccentric, expansive supporting casts whose wackiness embodies the mad, mad, mad, mad world we all have to deal with. And just as dogs frequently play key roles in those films, they’re also pivotal in Garmus’s novels: Elizabeth’s Six-Thirty in the first, and Batter, who doesn’t actually appear in Peck & Peck but whose history has a significant role to play and whose name has been bestowed on the central character and narrator.
Even more substantially, both books are touched by the tenor of the times in which they’re set. For Lessons in Chemistry, it’s the 1960s as the set-upon Elizabeth takes a stand against a patriarchal order that would have her trapped on the sidelines. In Peck & Peck, it’s the 1980s, as the timeworn struggle between business and the arts rears its ornery head once more inside the eponymous publishing company and against a background of technological change.
A key difference between the books is that, whereas the first is written in the third person, surveying its female protagonist’s situation and circumstances from the outside, the new one places us inside its male protagonist’s tortured efforts to understand the forces that have shaped his life and, in his words, “to generate the one thing (he) craved more than anything: respect”.
We gradually come to recognise that, while Batter is well-armed for his encounters with the world – he has a lot of data on tap, much of it gleaned from his type-designer mother and historian father – there’s much about it that he doesn’t understand. Alongside this, it becomes clear from his dealings with others that his instincts are more trustworthy than his actions.
As the book begins, he’s in prison. All that follows provides an explanation, his explanation, for how he ended up there. It’s an ingeniously complicated route that begins with his family history and becomes especially convoluted when he bluffs his way into a job at Peck & Peck. An esteemed poetry quarterly boasting an editorial staff of 39 and based in an awe-inspiring building in New York, it’s currently under the sole management of Salton Peck. He’s taken charge after a falling-out with his twin brother, Declonius.
As its title suggests, the book’s founding principle is the idea that nothing can be viewed in isolation, that everything has its double, a shadow side. The Peck & Peck building seems like a sanctuary when nobody’s around and a madhouse when they are. The Peck brothers, the third generation of twins to head the company, are mirror opposites. The idealistic Declonius, a champion of the arts, oozes contempt for the dunderheads of the world who don’t appreciate their importance. Of his brother, an abrasive, pontificating businessman, he says, “If he can’t quantitatively measure something’s value, then it’s worthless.”
Twins are part of Batter’s family history too. He’s haunted throughout by the one with whom he shared their mother’s womb and who didn’t survive, and his divided inner life comes to mirror the conflict between the Peck brothers. In the light cast by the book’s refutation of black and white certainties about anything, it’s clearly not by chance that his surname is Gray. Or that there’s much more to his mother’s preposterous stories about the dog he’s been named after than he (and we) initially realise.
Garmus established herself as an astute and witty social satirist with Lessons in Chemistry and those qualities are again in evidence here. Peck & Peck is admirably sharp in its depiction of how companies operate as a matter of course, riven by divisions, uncertainties and secrets at the same time as they provide opportunities for growth and adventure. It’s also hugely appealing in the empathy it shows for those hapless souls immersed in a maelstrom that seems to be denying them the respect they believe they deserve.
Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus (Manilla Press $35) is available now.
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