Review: Can poetry be hilarious? Bonnie Garmus 'Lessons in Chemistry' follow-up proves it

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Set us as preferred Book ReviewPeck and Peck By Bonnie Garmus Scribner: 432 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.From a young age, “Peck & Peck” protagonist and narrator Batter Gray is obsessed with poetry, an infatuation that doesn’t disturb his parents until he reveals that he plans to pursue a career in the field.“There isn’t a parent alive who wants their kid to grow up and be a poet,” Batter reflects.

But by the time he enters high school, he’s already gone from “reading A.A.Milne to Bukowski,” and by 17, he’s pondering Sonnet #2 by Ted Berrigan, in awe of how Berrigan “subverted the form.” Now his parents are “worried in earnest.” His teachers remind him that nearly all the great poets had second jobs: “Robert Frost worked as a cobbler,” advises Mrs.

Barksdale.“Walt Whitman was a clerk.” Batter remains undeterred.“Peck & Peck” is Bonnie Garmus’ whimsical and winning ode to the written word, and send-up of the pretensions of its gatekeepers.

Her 2022 critically acclaimed, hit debut novel, “Lessons in Chemistry” — later adapted into an Apple TV series starring Brie Larson — introduced Elizabeth Zott, an eccentric and brilliant scientist determined to get her due despite the patriarchy’s many efforts to keep her down.“Peck & Peck” has little in common with that feminist anthem, but both share a classic underdog story of battling a culture that favors money, status and squeaky wheels.Garmus’ sophomore novel is more of a bildungsroman, the chronicle of a quietly observant boy who is certain of only one thing: that when it comes to poetry, he has perfect pitch.

Not that he wants to be a poet: “I don’t want to write,” he confesses to his friend Jun...