Skip to main content

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.

--

This is my eleventh book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa...

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...