Her Debut Novel Was a Bestseller and a Hit TV Show. Her Follow-Up Is Just as Charming.

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Legions of people dream of retiring from their corporate jobs, finally writing that novel they’ve been dreaming about, and seeing it hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Bonnie Garmus is one of the very rare writers who achieved just that with her 2022 debut, Lessons in Chemistry, later adapted as a limited series by Apple TV. Lessons—a sort of fairy tale about a stubbornly scientific woman in the early 1960s who, despite the opposition of numerous sexist men, becomes the host of a popular TV cooking show—turned out to be the glass slipper in Garmus’ own Cinderella story.

But Cinderella only needed to find and marry one prince. The author of a bestselling novel is expected to follow up with another hit. Garmus’ second novel, Peck & Peck, has many of the qualities that made Lessons in Chemistry charming—quirky characters, an aphoristic way with words (Garmus worked as an ad copywriter), and a buoyant absurdity that (usually) carries the reader past the sketchier bits of its plot. What it eschews, however, is a premise as commercial as Lesson’s, for which Garmus deserves some respect. As tempting as it may be to repeat herself, Garmus strikes out for fresh territory.

Lessons in Chemistry is the story of a woman who is unfairly mistrusted and dismissed by biased male authority figures but ultimately proven right in the end. This formula, perfected by Paula Hawkins in 2015’s The Girl on the Train, has powered countless novels to bestsellerdom over the past decade. With Peck & Peck, set in the early 1980s, Garmus opts for a male narrator instead: Batter Gray, a young man whose primary eccentricity is his deep love for poetry. No one, including Batter’s parents, smiles upon this passion, and the dire consequences of organizing one’s life around such an unlucrative art form becomes one of the running jokes in the book. How people respond to Batter’s ambitions reflects their character. A gentle, encouraging teacher tells him, “Being a poet means you have the interesting opportunity of working two jobs at once.” His handsome college roommate, a Big Man on Campus type, advises him to get a guitar, remarking, “Maybe you’ve heard of this new thing that makes poetry tolerable. It’s called music.”

When Batter moves to the Bronx and lands a lowly job in the copy room of a legendary poetry journal, Peck & Peck, the novel gathers steam. It’s a workplace comedy, a New York City coming-of-age story, and a giddy satire wrapped in a sometimes-ungainly bundle. The offices of Peck & Peck are a wonderland erected on a wedge-shaped slice of Manhattan real estate, with each floor painted a vivid color—violet, indigo, lime—and embellished with dangling letterform mobiles, framed scraps of matchbooks and napkins on which legendary verse was once scribbled, and shadow boxes containing the blown eggs of countless species of wild birds. All of this is crowned by a spectacular glass dome, called “The Aviary,” where the journal’s 39 editors meet to hash out the contents of every issue.

Anyone who’s ever worked at a literary publication will recognize this as pure fantasia; only the most affluent have any office at all, let alone an entire building or more than a handful of editors. On his first tour of the building, led by the inexplicably hostile PA of the editor in chief, Batter is taken to the fourth floor and then guided downstairs, like Alice falling through the rabbit hole, to the concrete bunker where he’s tasked with running off the countless photocopies the journal produces.

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Peck & Peck is presided over by Salton Peck, “short, odd, unstable, sweaty, and prone to tantrums,” as alarmingly choleric as Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen. Salton hates plants and adores Gordon Lightfoot, a fondness that at first earns Batter his ire (“I will not sit here and listen to you tell me Gordon Lightfoot is a liar,” he rages at one editorial meeting. “How dare you!”). But Batter ultimately wins Salton over by displaying extensive knowledge of the rogue wave that many suspect of being the cause of the 1975 wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. Salton, he will learn, has issued decrees that Peck & Peck summarily reject any submissions that refer to cancer, beaches, the word namaste, and Barstow. The rest of the journal’s staff is only slightly less zany. All that’s missing is a grinning cat who announces, “We’re all mad here.”

The journal, with its storied history of discovering major talents, has been edited by several generations of wealthy twin brothers. Salton’s twin, Declonius, once served as editor in chief but has been forbidden by restraining order from entering the building, after having served a prison sentence for embezzling from the company. Declonius nevertheless somehow sneaks his way into Batter’s copy room, where he commiserates with the young man by whipping out a thermos of gin and tonics at 8:30 a.m.: “ ‘I only drink in the morning,’ he explained, as if everyone knew evening drinking was where the real trouble lay.” When Batter threatens to call the security guard hired to keep people with unsolicited manuscripts out of the building, Declonius retorts, “And what if he did come down here? He’d have to leave the lobby unprotected. That place would fill up with poets in five minutes.”

Peck & Peck’s editors all mourn Declonius’ reign over the journal as a golden age of literary integrity. Salton, who hates poetry, wants to run ads and the terrible verse of a starlet declared “the sexiest woman alive” by a tabloid magazine. He browbeats the editors into brainstorming other ways to make the publication profitable, and when one suggests distributing copies of Peck & Peck at funeral homes, he’s delighted: “What better time,” he says, “to read something that makes absolutely no sense than at a funeral?”

The parts of Peck & Peck set in the journal’s offices are the highlight of the book, and at times I couldn’t help wishing that Garmus focused on this more exclusively. Her plots tend to bulge at the end, with an accumulated mass of action, revelation, and exposition that feels rushed. There’s a flimsy love story, a courtroom drama, and, alas, more of the drippy caninolatry that made Lessons in Chemistry a bit saccharine. That earlier novel had a preternaturally wise dog who assisted its heroine in her lab experiments. In this one, Batter is named after a dog his mother once owned who brought her roses on Valentine’s Day and distributed $100 bills to poor children. Garmus seems to think that she needs to ladle gooey dollops of sentimentality into her fiction every now and then to please the cheap seats, and to be fair, perhaps she’s not wrong about that.

Nevertheless, Peck & Peck is a genuinely funny book that at its best moments achieves an almost Wodehousian giddiness, even if Garmus lacks the master’s superb discipline and economy. One hallway at the journal’s offices is “lined with black-and-white photographs of famous poets, all of whom looked suicidal, plus one close-up of a cracked lightbulb,” a fleeting but acute evocation of a certain breed of artsy decor. Yet Garmus’ satire never comes across as mean or bitter. The characters who find poetry tedious and incomprehensible are treated as generously as those who love it and live by it, because poetry is in truth both boring and transcendent. Peck & Peck may not climb the charts as vigorously as Lessons in Chemistry did, but it’s the 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.