PECK & PECK, by Bonnie Garmus
“Peck & Peck,” the antic sophomore novel by Bonnie Garmus, starts with an obvious provocation. Obvious, at least, to this lapsed fashion critic and ongoing retail enthusiast.
The title refers to a fictional poetry quarterly founded by twin brothers, Texas oil scions, that occupies a five-story building on the fictional Gladys Street in Manhattan. On the book’s cover this edifice looks like the Flatiron Building, except the wedge shape is a partially opened volume.
But … but … Peck & Peck was also the name of a famous department store with several locations on Fifth Avenue, founded by two brothers, and an oft-invoked literary symbol of lost propriety. In her classic essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion writes of “wearing a plaid silk dress from Peck & Peck, and the hem is coming down,” which about sums up the early 1960s.
This was the era of Garmus’s breakout best seller, “Lessons in Chemistry,” about a female scientist who overcomes extreme chauvinism with a subversive TV cooking show. The new book is set in the early 1980s, when (amid the tumult of punk and AIDS) the vapors of this staid clothing company were still a-swirl.
Whether the same-naming is coincidence or homage — the magazine and le magasin, French for store, do share certain struggles — is unstated and perplexing. Especially because the author is a former copywriter and “Peck & Peck” is explicitly about language and commerce, a frontispiece even listing some of the word’s many iterations: “peckish” and “pecking order” and most basically “to pierce; to kiss; to type; to carp.”
Enough carping. The hero of this tale is a young man, Batter Gray, from a small town 40 miles north of Sacramento (Sacramento! Didionland). He was named for a dead, astonishingly heroic family dog whose story is part of a big dramatic reveal about the past; it ain’t about baseball or baking. The human Batter was also a twin, but his own brother died as an infant, which has left him psychologically unmoored.
Batter’s mother, Rainey, is a typeface designer whose lengthy disquisitions on fonts make her seem like an escapee from the short fiction of Tom Hanks. His father is a historian named John Gray, like the English philosopher or the author of the 1992 best seller “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”
Peck & Peck, the poetry journal, seemed to me at first to be not just from another planet, but one outside our solar system. Then I was reminded that Poetry magazine, in Chicago, occupies its own building, thanks to a generous bequest from an Eli Lilly heiress. (“Poetry has always had the reputation as being the poor little match girl of the arts. Well, the poor little match girl just hit the lottery,” said Billy Collins, the United States poet laureate, at the time.)
Peck & Peck employs 39 editors, far more than The Atlantic Monthly, and gets thousands of submissions per month. You’ve heard of romantasy, the current hot-running lifeblood of the publishing industry; Garmus may have produced our first poemantasy.
Besotted with the journal growing up, Batter moves to New York after graduating from a pricey New England university. He works at the Gap and a restaurant called the Just Okay before Battering his way in the front door as a “copy editor” — meaning that he’s working the Xerox machine in the Peck & Peck office basement.
This building is one of the most developed characters in a very busy, fizzy novel. Espaliered pear trees uprooted from a monastery line the top-floor hallway, leading to a meeting room called the Aviary, decorated with eggs from birds as exotic as the tinamou and the rhea.
“The egg is synonymous with poetry,” our hero realizes. “The most delicate-looking package isn’t delicate at all — it can’t be, because it houses the most potent material.” And “Peck & Peck is the eggshell,” supplies a colleague. “Protect, then publish, that’s us.”
There’s a “Succession”-like battle for the soul of the publication between the brothers Peck, mercenary Salton and idealistic Declonius; a strange product-placement caper involving a movie starlet voted the Sexiest Woman Alive; a surprising number of police actions; and Batter’s inevitable ascent from the mimeograph pit to the top of a very tall soapbox.
“That computer that plays chess? It can write poetry, too,” he warns in a long speech about the mathematician Theo Lutz’s 1959 Stochastic Texts. “Like we’re all supposed to be impressed. Except the computer isn’t actually writing poetry; it uses an algorithm based on someone else’s work.”
Garmus has written a heavily expository allegory about the need to protect originality, humanity, beauty and natural intelligence against the machines; she has gone from “Lessons” to lectures. Poets from W.H. Auden to Xuân Quỳnh are name-checked (and a deceptively handsy Wallace Stevens actually makes a cameo).
Twins abound, including (with thundering symbolism) the marble lions, Patience and Fortitude, who guard the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. They’re probably wondering what in the Dewey Decimal happened to their old neighbor just across the street.
PECK & PECK | By Bonnie Garmus | Scribner | 432 pp. | $30
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