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Review 11: Chemistry by Weike Wang

Chemistry
I love to judge a book by its cover. It’s one of those times when you can really get your judging suit on. After all, apart from damage protection, the only purpose of the book cover is to allow you to judge its contents without making any actual effort to open it. And so you can revel in the fact that as soon as you enter a bookshop, judging season is open and it’s high noon.

Fortunately for Chemistry, the outside has been perfectly tailored to the inside. It’s bound like an old chemistry textbook – the kind that gets given out by the armload at the beginning of the lesson and returned just slightly tattier and more be-doodled at the end. It sets up your expectations wonderfully.

The unnamed narrator of the book is a scientist – by occupation, but also by mindset. And this is really a story about her trying to use the scientific models and knowledge she’s accumulated (thanks to a pushy father and a fascination with the workings of the natural world) to make sense of human behaviour. She recognises this is a fool’s errand partway through the book – the variables are too numerous – but continues, nonetheless.

There are a whole bunch of intriguing and interesting topics she covers. One is being 2nd generation American from a Chinese family. She sees other women in her same cultural situation, and they all share similar traits: an enormous sense of pressure to succeed; an overwhelming fear of shame. She herself feels this to the point of unrealism; since they had moved from China to a totally new and hostile country and made a success of it, she now feels that to be a success, she’d need to colonise the moon.

Another is the unforgiving nature of scientific academia, particularly towards women. More than once she ruminates on PhD advisors who work their students beyond all sanity, driving them to suicide, and the results-driven nature of this seems at great odds with genuine scientific enquiry. More than once, the narrator points out the frustration of creating output just for the sake of having been seen to deliver it. Somewhere I read that the average number of readers for a scientific paper is 0.6, she says.

I found the style of writing a struggle at first. She writes always in present tense, and uses no quote marks to differentiate speech. This makes it much more difficult to get into the flow of the writing, but once you’re in it, it sweeps you along quickly. It also lets her use past tense to make a point, only when the protagonist feels she’s literally put something behind her.

There’s also a river of wry humour that runs throughout the whole book. Wang has a deadpan delivery, with a knack for pinning a neat twist on the end of a thought. A couple of examples:

Pretty chemistry for a pretty girl [he said]. And I blushed. I didn’t think I was that pretty. I wasn’t as pretty as manganese.

That phrase about sticks and stones and bones. But my bones are very brittle. And I am lactose intolerant.

Overall, this is a great read – funny, sad, thoughtful. It can take a while to adjust to the style, but once you do, it’s really worth it.

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