On its face, “Lessons in Chemistry” might look like an overnight success story: A career copywriter experiences some “garden variety misogyny” one day at work, takes her anger out on the page and catches the eye of an agent, who buys the manuscript on the strength of three chapters. The book goes to auction; bidding wars ensue; the novel comes out and surpasses expectations.
“I sent it out on a Tuesday,” Garmus’s agent in Britain, Felicity Blunt, said of the manuscript, “and by Wednesday morning I was getting emails that were coming in faster, faster, faster.” Blunt had to forbid Garmus from stress-exercising on her rowing machine — a habit the author shares with her main character — so that she could be reached.
In fact, it all took a great deal of work. “Part of the reality behind the myth of an overnight success,” said Garmus’s American agent, Jennifer Joel, “is that most people have actually been toiling, laboriously and diligently, in an unseen way, for years.”
Wilson’s new novel is called “Now Is Not the Time to Panic,” yet another disingenuous phrase uttered only when things have gone to hell. This time around, Wilson explores the tension between adolescent creativity and cultural paranoia, that urge to affect the world and the cost of doing so. Among other things, the story is an eerie reminder that the internet didn’t invent viral memes or the mental web on which iconic images propagate.
It’s a moment at once personal and existential, but right now it also feels strikingly pointed. In our loneliness, especially during the pandemic, we reached out to become less unknowable via social media, only to watch helplessly as one platform, a source of Black culture, joy and livelihood in particular, falls at the hands of a white male billionaire. We are seeing how tenuous such connections can be — and conversely how much humanity consists of and relies on their cumulative impact.
This recognition is Obama’s bass note, the ballast in her book of lessons. After all she has witnessed and experienced, both as a first lady and as a Black woman in America, she knows in her bones just how timely these themes of unity, compassion, gratitude, courage and the desire to see one another are: “Any time we grip hands with another soul and recognize some piece of their story they’re trying to tell, we are acknowledging and affirming two truths: We’re lonely and yet we’re not alone.”
Although reaffirming, the advice isn’t groundbreaking. What makes the book special is that it builds on parts of “Becoming,” and Obama serves as mentor and guide, using pivotal moments in her life to demonstrate when she had to rely on boldness, pluck and grit as she made her way from a second-floor apartment on Chicago’s South Euclid Avenue to the Ivy League to what she describes as a “132-room palace, surrounded by guards.”
Among the many virtues of John Lancaster’s delightful “The Great Air Race” is how vividly it conveys the entirely different world of aviation at the dawn of the industry, a century ago. Many airplanes in those days were literal death traps. A biplane known as the DH-4, used as a bomber by Allied forces in World War I, had its gas tank immediately behind the pilot in the cockpit. As Lancaster explains, “Even in relatively low-speed crashes, the tank sometimes wrenched free of its wooden cage, crushing the pilot against the engine.” To get a DH-4 properly balanced for landing, a co-pilot or passenger might have to leap out of the open cockpit and climb back to hang onto the tail. And this was one of the era’s most popular and successful models.