Why do I hate literary time travel?

THE LOG: In LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY and STAG DANCE, today’s morality curdles in the past.

Julia Child can still serve.

In her French Chef episode on French omelets, the camera’s mealy exposure zooms in on the eggs. They are a gelatinous mound of doubtful doneness. In thirty seconds, the butter in the pan froths, Julia whisks the eggs with a fork (resulting in a teeth clench on my side of the camera), and voilà—French omelet. Supper is served. Supper may also be undercooked.

Black-and-white 1960s cameras are the worst public relations that ever happened to eggs. Why watch this grainy video about eggs and butter when, with an involuntary finger graze over the Instagram app, I could dissolve into a technicolor world of eggs across the runny to hard-boiled spectrum?

The natural answer is I watch these clips to watch Julia.

I’m tempted to overgeneralize. Julia Child belongs to today’s oversaturated cooking minefield because she created it. Would daytime TV evolve to sets with built-in kitchens without her? Would we have Martha without Julia? Reductive, most likely. Julia belongs to a lineage of trained chefs and domestic traditions. Since Eve, we have had wives. Since we have had wives, we have had the feminine urge to evolve into Alpha Housewives (TM).

Yes, Julia appealed to homemakers in a time when most women did not work or could not consider that an option. Julia’s occupation as a chef didn’t threaten the boundaries of a burgeoning female workforce sent back home after World War II.

For Julia, her gateway to the world was the kitchen. She moves with an uncanny muscle memory, cracking an egg in each hand without a second to slow the split shells to a comfortable tutorial speed. She collects her pots in a clean tower and places them behind her. When she reaches out of the camera’s frame, her hands return full of pre-diced onions or herb bundles. She pauses to explain how to hold the handle—palm underneath, wrist exposed—to dump the omelet into the plate and “unmold” it. Halfway through the episode, she has made four omelets, one with herbs, one with ham. She’s juiced tomatoes in an unsettling process, squeezing the pulp through a mesh sieve. She drinks the filtered juice as a chef’s price and downs it like a shot. She’s diced an onion before the show, the angled shreds like shark teeth glinting in the pan.

I admire Julia’s flow, a tech-saturated word of the optimizing twenty-first century transposed onto the past. While we discuss flow as a means of optimizing toward a never-ending destination of final perfection, we leave out the blissful contagion of a flow state. Watching someone do what they love is transformative. Julia Child’s body always had a muscle for unmolding omelets. She doesn’t pontificate, doesn’t express her gratitude at being able to chase her dream, doesn’t pivot to a “and YOU can TOO” infomercial voice. She is Julia. The way she moves naturally is its own verb. She simply “Julia-es”. Anyone watching can feel comforted that their verb is out there, too.

This trance founds the Julia Child narrative complex, from HBO’s Julia to the lovely Nora Ephron film Julie and Julia. Yes, her voice has that distinctively imitable croak, but she represents an awareness acute enough to ignore anyone else’s opinion. My earliest exposure to Julia Child was the quoted philosophy my grandma and dad used during dinner prep. “No one knows what happens in your kitchen,” they said, echoing Julia’s voice as a carrot circle hits the ground and returns to the pot.

After weeks and weeks of Anna Karenina, I needed something fun and easy to rebuild my reading stamina. Reading Bonnie Gramus’s Lessons In Chemistry was a juice cleanse, though it left me with an irritable itch like a mild allergy.

Lessons In Chemistry orbits the Julia Child universe without any direct allusions to Julia. Set in the 1950s, Elizabeth Zott is a chemist who gains unlikely national popularity when she transforms her stoic chemistry into a public cooking show format.

Though the book opens with the origin of Elizabeth’s show, Supper at Six, most of the book traces Elizabeth’s painful past to this moment.

A zoom out on the nasty discrimination Elizabeth has personally faced feels like a 1950s bingo card. If you had rape in the workplace (twice), passive women-on-women social banishment, evangelical con men, a car accident, and an unemployed single mother recently fired from of a morality clause against wedlock, you win. You also might be a sadist.

Within the first tenth of the book, her academic supervisor rapes her in the lab, and she only escapes by stabbing his thigh with a pencil she keeps in her bun. It halts her chemistry PhD, and her unmatriculated credits earn her a spot as a research assistant at a lab where supervisors and peers plagiarize her work. She falls in love with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist named Calvin, which draws professional and romantic jealousy from her male and female peers.

Even Calvin, the only person who understands her as his unrecognized equal, pushes for marriage and children despite Elizabeth’s protests of constricting societal institutions. She doesn’t want to replicate the patterns of her immediate family: her father, incarcerated for feigned miracles cued by flaming pistachios that incinerated three of his followers; her mother, a gold digger who fled to Brazil and another marriage to evade taxes; and her brother, Elizabeth’s best friend who hung himself after his parents shamed him for coming out as gay. When Calvin dies in a freak car accident, Elizabeth discovers she’s a single mother-to-be.

Elizabeth Zott walks through this obstacle course of exaggerated issues with her glasses stuck on the bridge of her nose, her face dry as powder. Her trance, unlike Julia’s, is an objective reality. As a female scientist long before the woops and hiring cries for women in STEM, Elizabeth understands the workplace discrimination at face value. She sees it as an inevitable pattern and moves on to the next option. She freelances scientific reviews to her old coworkers and teaches her dog 600 words in English. When her daughter turns four, Elizabeth has already taught her to read Dickens and Darwin.

Let me take a second to discuss the dog a bit more. The dog is the most significant nod to the outside reader that this world is surreal. Though Lessons In Chemistry builds on the premise that a person ignorant and unafraid of other people’s opinions, like Elizabeth Zott, can change the world, it also spends so much time with this dog. We enter the dog’s point of view often. The dog has a backstory as a former bomb sniffer. The dog picks up Elizabeth’s daughter from school and walks her home like a doting grandmother.

This dog is a confident wink that we are in a hyperbolic, magical version of the 1950s. Yes, a drunk television executive might threaten to rape Elizabeth to “teach her a lesson” and have a heart attack when she pulls out her cooking knife--that’s part of the fun! And yes, this dog might attend an in-studio session and sniff out a bomb from the purse of an audience member before it detonates--and how silly is that! It places Elizabeth and her dog in this uncanny America where the brutality of its citizens’ ignorance causes most of the obstacles. And also? The worst experiences end with the wave of a carefully placed wand, because karma’s loyalty ensures things work out for Elizabeth.

She’s one of the good ones, and she’s suffered enough, Gramus seems to think. Look at the time she’s living in.

Gramus’s optimism transplants today’s morals to the past. If someone like Zott in the 1950s disrupted the rigid roles women believed they had to face, then women would have learned their worth. The butterfly effect would take us into a different present. If only our conclusions about inclusion could be transplanted to the past!

Elizabeth Zott accidentally becomes the evangelical she resented her father for being. In one of her first episode tapings, she accepts a question from an audience member, Mrs. Fillis. Mrs. Fillis admits she’s not the brightest bulb—“That’s what my husband always says,” she blushes—before she goes into a complicated osmosis theory about her leg edema. Elizabeth catches the medical jargon and asks what medicine Mrs. Fillis practices. “There isn’t a woman in the world who is just a housewife,” Elizabeth says. After Mrs. Fillis confesses to reading medical journals and stitching her five rough-housing boys’ wounds in her free time, Elizabeth hones her questioning.

“And when you were [your sons’] age you envisioned yourself becoming—”

“A loving wife and mother.”

“No, seriously—”

“An open-heart surgeon,” the woman said before she could stop herself (pg. 260).

The audience breaks into slow applause, encouraging this woman who doubts herself to apply to medical school.

These moments work great as a clean punctuation on a feeling, and they translate easily on the screen, as Apple TV gambled. It’s a scene you’ve seen before. The emotion is external. The secret darkness of the past sits on the surface, a thin icing to coat an otherwise smooth and sugary experience.

What am I being contrarian about? This book has sold over 8 million copies internationally. Why does it bother me that this feels so shallow?

It feels like Elizabeth Zott doesn’t belong to the 1950s. She acts as a time traveler of a 21st-century sensibility. She has no doubt history will favor her and look down on the judgmental busybodies, the conservative traditionalists, the evil men stuck in the past. The caricature of the villains feels removed from the past and stuck in archetypes about how we view the 20th century, a time where every woman wanted a divorce and was too scared to ask and when every man was a cheat or a liar or a rapist. All the good men, like Calvin, die young.

Unfortunately, this also assumes our 21st-century values hold the answers. We have figured out discrimination, obviously! It definitely hasn't evolved like the flu to best suit the era it infects! And we definitely don’t discriminate or hold any ugly biases today, and immigrants and trans people aren’t being targeted as contemporary scapegoats at the margins, right?

The truth is that every decade, year, and day holds the same core questions. This is the fundamental unity that makes reading classics so exciting. When I read Anna Karenina or Persuasion, it encapsulates the same questions we have today. We have never solved our questions about inclusion, respect, and compromise. All our issues have always been and always will be the same. Love, belonging, anger, and grief stand above time.

In this sense, Torrey Peters understands the assignment.

If Anna Karenina is a gout-inducing steak dinner, and Lessons in Chemistry is a quickly eaten cupcake of a novel, Stag Dance is the perfect broth to restore your nutritional baseline.

Stag Dance is Peters’ second novel after the runaway success of her debut, Detransition, Baby.

Before I read the book, I skimmed Peters’ interviews and then attended Open Book Club’s author reading (the full transcript of that event is here). In her press blitz, some of the same points come up. A dictionary of lumberjack slang written by children of loggers inspired Peters’ voice for the titular novella. She loves citing how it used “cackleberries” for eggs and “Scandahoovian dynamite” for tobacco.

Likewise, stepping into the past allowed Peters to remove the contemporary constraints of academic vocabulary around the trans experience, ideas like “body dysmorphia” or “appendage theory” that sit heavy on the page. (At Open Book Club, she mimed dropping a heavy block on the ground with a click of her tongue.)

It also freed her from the expectations of following her successful debut. What no one wants, she realized, is a lumberjack love story. From there, she could write anything.

It republishes Peters’ previously self-published short stories alongside a new novel set in a logger camp. With the previously self-published stories, written almost a decade ago, Peters wanted to place trans narratives within genre: Westerns, horror, apocalypse, and high school romance. Peters explains this best in conversation with Andrea Long Chu:

“Something I’m trying to do is see trans less as an identity and more of an invitation. And a lot of these stories are invitations to a reader to identify with these characters who are probably not like them. It’s about taking away the markers of what it means to be trans, and instead looking at the emotional building blocks of this experience, which are often pretty universal things, like the difference between how you’re seen and how you want to be seen.”

Inspired by a true tradition, Stag Dance features a novella about lumberjack Babe Bunyan. He earned this name from other loggers because his stature and prowess match the mythic giant Paul, and his face recalls Paul’s bovine sidekick, Babe.

To improve morale, the camp boss announces a “stag dance,” where loggers can volunteer to wear a triangle of brown felt, indicating themselves as a woman, or a “skooch,” for the other men to court. Babe volunteers to wear the triangle, despite his traditionally masculine stature. When he wears it, he finds a new world opens for him as a skooch, a world he likes and fears as temporary. Torn between a sisterly competition with another skooch, Lisen, for their fellow logger’s admiration, his confusion between being the logger and the skooch pushes him to desperation where he will adopt any role that reinforces his new idea of himself.

While Babe has no vocabulary for his draw toward wearing the triangle, he earns the reader’s sympathy with basic sensations every high schooler who has engaged in a feminine competition for male attention knows intimately: rejection, anxiety, humiliation, betrayal, and butterflies. Though adapting to the adopted vocabulary of another time takes a second to muscle through, Babe Bunyan’s concerns whistle through the unbulldozed wilderness of the past with a startling familiarity today.

One of my favorite passages: “Perhaps I cuold have clopped Stub Nelson, Jobs, Mikkels, and Johnny Duck Chief all in turn; yet if I did, then no one nowhere would see me for the shooch I’d named myself—which was my main aim…The only medicine menfolk respect is a good clopping.”

The logger camp isn’t an isolated utopia. It’s a microcosm of stiffled identities and societal constraints. As Babe gains confidence in the identity he wants to adopt, the other people hold onto their expectations. A single person’s defiance of the norms doesn’t dissolve them. It reinforces them.

Though my consecutive readings of Stag Dance and Lessons In Chemistry were coincidental, they accidentally foiled each other. To disappear into the texture of the past involves understanding how similar we are to it. While we can distill a time to the mythic icons of its era, the Julia Childs and Paul Bunyans, we also know as much about the past as we do today. Every hour, we are still living it.