Summary: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today we are pleased to have with us Weike Wang author of Chemistry, her first novel, published in May by Knopf. Weike is a graduate of Harvard where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University and her fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train and Redivider. Chemistry is an academic novel of sorts. It’s a love story too and a life journey as well, but it is the academic side of it that I really like because it is really really funny. I learned that a Chinese proverb dictates that a mastery of math, physics and chemistry leads to fearlessness anywhere in the world. I also learned that our unnamed narrator who tutors science students feels that they want the mastery of this knowledge delivered through a tube, uploaded by the tutor at their weekly sessions. I learned that the triangle is the strongest of shapes. As Weike says, when you think geometry think triangles. What is so strange about this book and so enchanting is that that sentence is followed with a desire to design apartments that do not echo. A revocation of sound’s ability to echo in the first place. Strange. But cool. Whether I am learning that there is a mineral 58 percent harder than diamonds. Lonsdaleite which can only be made by smashing meteorites together (kinda) or that there is something called an argon box that chemistry students use to do their experiments or when the experiments go wrong want to put their heads inside of, I was always learning. The key to this book, is that each little factoid, aphorism or hint from Steven Hawking is also a hint at our narrator’s life situation. And it is a pretty gnarly one. She has a great boyfriend, a pretty horrible academic career going on and a seeming inability to decide pretty much anything. She is also a bit of a drunk. So the question is, as we learn and read, where is she going to end up. Which I can’t tell you and I don’t even know for sure where she does end up. But the trip is lots of fun, and even though we feel for I’ll call her Samantha, we also are able to laugh out loud through the whole of this short but jam packed first novel.
