Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
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Book Reviews of Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Book Review: by its cover
Summary: 4 Stars
Having stayed up until 2:30 am to finish this book, I'm naturally going to write a good review, but it will have a but, a yet, a turn. The book is very clever, very crafted in the way that Renaissance sonnets were, working hard to seem effortless, figuring forth sprezzatura - that oh-I-just-tossed-this-off-while-flicking-the-lace-on-my-cuff self-satisfied sort of smirk. And for the first hundred pages or so, this works brilliantly.
But no one can be breathless - neither narrator nor reader - for 500-plus pages and sustain even the most willing suspension of disbelief. The first-person (she would say First Person) narration by Blue Van Meer is initially charming, but wearing. Very wearing. Maybe it's because I'm a teacher that I find such a relentless exposure to the teen-aged mind (however well-read) to be a bit too precious, too self-consciously charming. The topics that engage when first introduced pale with over-analyzed explication. True, this is how minds can work, picking at things until the thing is gone or in need of triage, but sometimes less is indeed more, as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe wrote (Bauhaus Is a Very Very Very Fine House, Berlin 1933.) Less is not a concept with which Blue engages. The Emphatic Capitals, the parenthetical references (fascinating until I checked a few out on Amazon and found them fictive, then merely amusing) the coy tactic of mentioning something complex on page 387 but withholding context until page 473, all these suit form admirably to function, but all of these do wear a reader down. And I was truly crushed by the made-up titles. Always one to willingly suspend, I wanted to think that a woman who could link Milton with Marlon Brando had indeed read that widely.
The writing is wonderful. Even as the superfluities threaten to drown the reader, she can always find a marvelous turn of phrase or a delirious description floating by to grab for support. "Before they'd always gossiped messily . . . their slurpy voices splattering all over each other and everyone else, but now they sat in the back, next to the water fountain and Hambone Reading Recommendations, carrying on in crackly, roast-potato whispers" (125.) Blue calls her father's girlfriends June Bugs because they are drawn to the porch-light of his brilliance, only to be flicked off the screen-door after a month or two: "Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days)" (p 30.) She follows a friend into a room with "walls painted mortified pink, a yawning grand piano, spindly palms and low sofas that resemble big, floating graham crackers you didn't dare sit on for fear they'd break and you'd get crumbs everywhere" (p 283.) Almost every page yields such treasures, and they make up for a great deal of breathlessness.
Oh yes, it is a mystery. We hear of Hannah's death on the top of the second page, a venerable paradigm. And by time the last page is turned, she is still dead. My friends tell me that the website offers some elements of whodunit amelioration, but in the book no birds sing this tune.
So read it, but not at the end of the semester when you are feeling over-exposed to young minds. The dust-jacket design says it all - an exceedingly clever title fragmented and morphed almost to death, too much for the eye to take in on second or twenty-second glance.
Now for that website . . . .
Book Review: Great use of English language, which, alas, could have been much more.
Summary: 4 Stars
I can see where this book will be highly disliked by great many people and dismissed for been pretentious and empty, just like similar criticism besets works by Umberto Eco, not that I am trying to compare these two authors. And that would be most unfortunate, for important thing for the author is not try to write something smarter than the author is and I do not believe Marisha Pessl crossed that line. It appears to be her first book and we have no way comparing it to her other works. Though I wish she would release on her website her other stories, that she must have written in college.
The book is written as a first person narrative by the main protagonist, Blue van Meer, a high school student. Who happen to be raised by her father, a widower, since her mother's apparent ( or so it seems ) death at the time when she ( Blue ) was in the kindergarten. Her father is an over-educated professor in political hooey. They travel from town to town, while he takes part time jobs of, what I would assume, a visiting professor. In the last year of the high school they settle in XYZ town somewhere in vicinity of Great Smoky Mountains, where Blue enters some kind of elite private school and by means of various happenstances enters group of, perhaps even more elitist than she is, so called Bluebloods, headed by the "Into to Film" class teacher Hunnah Schneider. As the story slowly unfolds and more and more details are reveal to clue us and Blue into what is to happen at the end. A mysterious drowning accident at the Hannah's party sets the narrative to a faster pace, which after even more baffling death of Hannah ["... hanging by her neck... I did not know how, in that instant, it was she. Because it wasn't Hannah, it was unreal and monstrous, something no textbook or encyclopedia could ever prepare you for"] becomes akin to a sprint when Blue, finally, discovers the truth about her father, Hannah and nefarious Nightwatchman (a clandestine group of modern day revolutionaries bent on undermining culture of greed and capitalist excess ), as a result of which her father disappears as well. The ending ties up many loose ends of the book and yet creates equal amount new questions. As story is written by, presumably, Blue, we are also left wondering if her account of events is sound and/or her analysis is completely valid.
Since Blue and her father, always referred as Dad, suffer from acutely inflated sense of I.Q. (for Blue of value 175, page 427) the book is permeated by references of sources, real and imaginary, which in some perverted way is very much appealing to me and also serve the purpose of underscoring Blue's personality. The narrative does not carry any morale ( thank God ), but serves simple (though there is nothing really simple about that) purpose of intellectual entertainment. If one is looking for solutions to "humanity's most persistent questions" he should look elsewhere. Notable also, is that the author has knack for beautiful and often very poetic language. Every once in a while, one is struck by the descriptive power of a sentence or a paragraph, which seem to almost bring people and places to life. It is true that this book could have been much more than it is, but than, again, it would have been something else. At the end we are left with an impression that indeed "We are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things" (page 261).
Book Review: Lighten up and enjoy it for what it is.
Summary: 5 Stars
Don't bother with this book if you don't have a sense of humor, don't bother if you don't like long books, don't bother if you just want plot and a quick read, and don't bother if you prefer a book written in simple, declarative sentences. I adored every word of this novel myself, but I do admit it's not a book for all markets. You are going to like it or loath it.
As I read the reviews here it occurs to me that many readers must have missed Pessl's sly sense of humor (many of Blue's citations are subtle jokes, after all, not pedantry). As for the book's length, well, a good book is never long enough, in my opinion, and the writing here merits 500-plus pages (I've never understood why anyone who likes to read would complain about a book having too many pages!). Whether you like the secondary characters or not (Dad is one of those narcissistic, misogynistic blowhards that infest so many novels...a shallow character it's true, but a father as viewed by his slightly sardonic yet tolerant and affectionate daughter, and so necessarily lacking edges; he's the sort of loser academic who drifts from third-tier college to junior college and on and on, never sticking with one place because he thinks he's too special for the ignorant world -- or is he something else entirely?), and whether or not you find the plot structure derivative, it's Blue's voice that will win you over or chase you off. I liked it, wordiness and all. I found Pessl's writing to be refreshingly loose, fluid, and visual -- not the turgid show-off stuff that you might expect from reading some of the negative reviews. She stumbles in a few places, but that's to be expected in such a young writer.
As for the plot being similar to that of The Secret History, who cares? It's a common enough device -- an aloof and somewhat mysterious group of quirky students wrapped up with a charismatic and/or mysterious teacher. But Pessl has used it here is an original way, and I prefer her writing style to Tartt's. (I re-read Tartt's book after this, just because I'd read The Secret History so long ago, and I wanted to see whether Pessl did pinch the tale. She didn't, and between the two novels Pessl's book wins, hands down.)
I advise readers to stop concentrating on this novel's literary references and read it as the coming-of-age/whodunnit that it is. The Nabokov thing is just a jumping off point for the story, perhaps a flattering nod to those in the know (Blue mentions Nabokov -- and even Lolita specifically -- a few times as a sort of writer's wink). As in any good novel, there are layers and allusions here for those who can catch them, but there's also a good story and some marvelous writing for everyone else. And there is a great deal of humor as well. I thought the "exam" as the last chapter was an awkward device until it dawned on me that it reads like the book club questions you find in paperbacks these days. I do like a writer with a subtle sense of humor.
(nb: The one device that definitely does not work in this novel is Blue's "visual aids." The drawings are just not good enough to add anything. I assume that they are Pessl's own work, since I don't see a credit for an artist. She should have gone with photos, or dropped the whole thing.)
Book Review: Ambitious exercise in navel-gazing
Summary: 3 Stars
As I write this there are already 260+ reviews of "Special Topics in Calamity Physics." There's no point in revealing plot points, but I will share what I noticed while reading the book. The first thing that struck me is the use of parenthetical references, especially heavy in the first two thirds of the book. Perhaps it lends "weight" or "authority" to the author by suggesting the breadth and depth of her reading list, but it detracts from the story and suggests by the use of this device that there isn't much of a plot in the first place, which is unfortunate, because this novel has a well thought out plot buried under the asides.
Second, the writing "style" reminds me of music that has been "overproduced." The prose shows the stitchwork of several different editors/revisions, each tweaking the prose in their own fashion and rendering the novel a patchwork quilt of styles instead of one seamless work. In many places the writing seems forced, self-conscious, as if to answer someone's red ink instead of supporting the plot or developing the character.
Third, for me, the real story began just as the novel ended and I was very disappointed that the author, instead of addressing the amazing confrontation that would have to occur between father and daughter, chose to avoid the moment entirely with a lame plot device... a literal 'exit stage left.' Some refer to this novel as "clever" and to a point I would agree, if only in the author's unwillingness to tackle the hard questions by her use of "clever" artifice and a plot twist. Case in point: the last chapter, presented as a 'quiz.' How challenging was it to write that?
Fourth, what is this obsession with meticulously describing what everyone is wearing when they first appear? I know in creative writing the students are told to describe their characters but surely they learned "show, don't tell" is better... there has got to be a way to show that someone is in a skirt or jeans without painting the picture for me!
I liked the way the plot developed. I thought the cast of characters showed promise but fell short from lack of depth. The ending is no ending. Overall, as a novel, this book was as satisfying as a rice cake: lots of flavor and crunch, but when its over you feel as if you haven't eaten a thing...
Perhaps the script for the upcoming movie would be a better read.
I would like to ask one question: in several places in my copy of the book entire words and phrases are missing from the middle of seemingly random sentences. The white space is there, and from the context you can presume what's missing, but is this a deliberate omission? The first time I saw it I thought it a proofing error, but the missing word wouldn't leave a space where it should have been; the second time I wondered if the missing text were related to the "calamity physics" of the title and that by the end of the novel I would learn that some device had been unleashed on the world that was gobbling up words from books and changing the course of history and literature a la Jasper Fforde. Clearly I was wrong! But the curiosity about the missing text remains, and if anyone has a theory please share it.
Book Review: Inquest
Summary: 3 Stars
Other reviewers have captured the flavor of this long but hyperenergetic book, whose verbal pyrotechnics and kaleidoscopic literary references make for a roller-coaster ride and give one the exhilarating feeling of sharing at least part of the brilliance of the young author and her teenage genius heroine, Blue Van Meer. But opinions are divided about the book's trajectory: some describe it as a tedious set-up leading to a brilliant ending; others see it as exactly the opposite. Which would be your reaction? In an attempt to answer, I want to focus on the book's central event, the death of Hannah Schneider.
There is no spoiler here. In the very first chapter, Blue, a freshman at Harvard, makes clear that she is writing to exorcise the trauma of having been the one to find Hannah's hanged body. Beautiful, cultured, and charismatic, Hannah is a part-time teacher at Blue's high school and unofficial mentor to a group of seniors who reluctantly admit Blue to their circle at Hannah's insistence; the two women appear to form a special bond. But though open and generous with the students, Hannah is an enigmatic figure, with large areas of mystery in her private life that she guards fiercely. Her actual death occurs two-thirds of the way into the book, and immediately the question arises: is it suicide or murder?
I won't reveal how, or indeed whether, this question is answered. The first two-thirds of the book offer hints of an impending suicide; the last third begins to consider the possibility of murder. But even this exploration moves the book into a different genre: that of the thriller or whodunnit. If that is the kind of thing you like, buy the book, zip through the sizzling writing of the first 300 pages, then settle in for a set of surprises and conspiracy-theory plotting to rival Dan Brown. Had the thriller genre been the clear intent from the start, I would have given the book four stars.
But I confess to wishing that Pessl had not even considered murder as a possibility. Blue would not be the first to come face-to-face with suicide in her later teens, nor to discover that close friendships with charismatic adults can also lead to pain. Both experiences cause one to question one's own self-worth, and undermine the foundations on which one is trying to build an adult life. Besides, Blue has a lot else to traumatize her; her mother died when she was very young, and she has since been carted around the country by her PoliSci father, who could be at one of the Ivy Leagues, but prefers brief guest professorships at minor colleges. Her senior year is the only occasion at which she spends a full year at the same school, and each entry into a new social order involves new insecurities and humiliations, no matter how well she triumphs over them. I find it believable and even touching that Blue should use her erudition and wit to work her way through her traumas. Had Marisha Pessl confined herself to dealing with Blue's amply-motivated internal drama, without feeling the need to adduce layers and layers of external events as well, I would gladly have given the book five stars. Even as it is, I consider this a promising near-miss, and look forward to reading her next.