Bonnie Garmus's Peck & Peck novel follows poet in 1980s New York

Bonnie Garmus's new novel, 'Peck & Peck,' follows the life of Batter Gray, a twenty-five-year-old aspiring poet from Yuba City, California, who moves to 1980s New York City. There, he immerses himself in the poetry scene and eventually finds work at the prestigious Peck & Peck journal after seeing a flier at a reading. Batter Gray, born in 1957, arrives in the city with a deep love of poetry cultivated through voracious reading in high school.

He had consumed poetry anthologies, chapbooks, selections from The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Kenyon Review, alongside works from Shakespeare, Keats, and the Beat poets. His transition east began earlier, with college on the East Coast bringing culture shock for the middle-class Californian. He ping-ponged between majors without finding his drive and had a sophisticated, wealthy roommate who took a liking to him. In New York, he rented a terrible apartment, worked three crummy jobs, and found a girlfriend who was a punk rocker, though her legendary scene is mostly off-stage. The novel portrays a nicer, shinier version of early 1980s New York. Batter is hired as the copy guy at Peck & Peck after overhearing they were hiring while standing in the snow outside its building. He was told there was no way to work his way up, and his pay was so terrible he tried to get hired back as a waiter.

The legacy and inner workings of Peck & Peck

Peck & Peck is an iconic poetry quarterly founded by the Peck family and carried forth by generations of twins. The current twins running the journal are the feuding opposites Declonius and Salton. The journal is housed in a uniquely imagined five-story building with an aviary, located at the crux of a three-way intersection in Manhattan. Bonnie Garmus imagined this Flatiron-like structure herself, with its slender triangular shape, odd plantings, overly tall French doors, and twin glass domes. She has no real-world model for it. Garmus sketched the aviary room in winter using a stick, pebbles, and dried corn kernels when her boots got stuck in the mud. In the novel's portrayal, Peck & Peck is a rarified, pricey poetry journal with a gigantic staff.

Bonnie Garmus’s research and creative process

Bonnie Garmus, the author of the bestselling debut 'Lessons in Chemistry' and the new 'Peck & Peck,' drew from a diverse background for her second novel. She graduated from the Colorado Institute of Art two years after enrolling, where she learned over a hundred typefaces by sight. Her career as a copywriter informed the novel's world. Garmus used imperatives like 'Find originality.', 'Reward creativity.', and 'Burn the rest.' as mottos for the fictional journal. To craft the central twin dynamic, she interviewed several sets of fraternal and identical twins and consulted a twin therapist and behavioral twin studies. Her fiction is described as having a golden glow. The novel, spanning 432 pages, features a mother who dispenses memorably quirky advice and a legendarily smart dog. The main character, Batter Gray, is named after that dog.

Family influences and real-life inspirations

Family dynamics in 'Peck & Peck' mirror aspects of Garmus's creative inspirations. Batter Gray's parents are John Gray, an idealistic historian teaching at a local community college, and Rainey Gray, a nervous professional type designer. Garmus's own teenage experience with poetry was foundational. "When I was fourteen, I had an English teacher who used to read a poem to us every day," she said. She made a promise to that teacher to read a poem every day for life. "It wasn’t until decades later, when I heard his favorite Nikki Giovanni piece being read on the radio, that I remembered that promise." This recollection helped inspire the novel's exploration of poetry and artistic commitment.

The novel’s physical details and publication

'Peck & Peck' by Bonnie Garmus is published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book is priced at $30. It follows Batter Gray’s journey as he handles love, work, and artistic aspiration in a stylized version of 1980s New York, working within the rarified, conflicted world of the Peck & Peck quarterly.