Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
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Book Reviews of Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Book Review: Dry Academia disguised as fiction
Summary: 2 Stars
With this review I am probably shining a glaring spotlight on my woeful ignorance and many will probably twitter and giggle behind their hands commenting on my stupidity. I am willing to bear the brunt of scorn to tell others like me no matter how cheap this book is don't bother picking it up unless you suffer from insomnia.
The first thing you notice about this book is the Chapter titles. It is explained why it is set out like a summer reading list, but I won't go into that now. I suppose if you look deep enough (and have actually read the books in question) you can figure out why the author used each one as the title of that chapter as opposed to another, but having not read many of the titles it was lost on me and it is never explained.
The second thing I noticed, just having gone through a tutorial on MLA format in college writing, was that this lady is the poster child for citing your sources. In the beginning she sites everything, every quote, every observation, and even some things I thought didn't need to be cited. She talked about how someone looked or acted and the very next thing you would see (see such and such page blank of textbook A author John Doe 1976). Luckily for the reader by the middle of the book it seems she tires of this as well and these citations become few and far between.
This story drags on and on though. In the beginning she talks about the reasons for writing "her story" which leads you to believe that this incident that keeps her up at night is the climax of the story, but if it is it falls flatter than a pancake dropped on the floor. It is the very definition of anticlimactic. You get this whole build up to a life changing moment in this character's life, a moment that affects her years and years later only to have the barest of mentions of it as the story plods on. I admit I have not finished it. Maybe that moment was not the climax she led us to believe in the beginning it was going to be. Maybe the climax is still to come, but right now I am having a difficult time trying to get myself to read through the rest of it.
The critic reviews say, "Dazzling... (People critic choice)", "A whirling, glittering, multifaceted marvel. (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)", Hip, ambitious and imaginative (Los Angeles Times)". Again the critics have let me down. Come on criticize already, isn't that your job? This book is dry, uninteresting, full of it's own importance that is unwarranted. I feel like the author is like a lot of teenagers using lots of big words and obscure references that nobody but themselves understands to make themselves appear smarter than they are. It feels as if maybe I should be smarter having read so far through this, but I'm not. This book has the feel of a boring base college course that you wish wasn't required, but you drudge through because you have to. I know one thing, I won't be taking any follow up courses from this woman.
Book Review: Cadillac Knot You're Mom
Summary: 1 Stars
This is a mystery novel and the mystery centers around why it got good reviews. A knockoff of `The Secret History' (even the weekly dinners! Couldn't you have made it breakfast, just as a gesture?) with an extra helping of that book's more obnoxious elements, this one should probably not have been so well received. Why it was written is less of a mystery, this is the book most of us consider writing or try to write during the summer after college when feeling quite sophisticated from having learned the names of twenty authors and gotten an A on a lit paper. Luckily for most of us, a cruel but true friend ridicules the draft and we start over or give up. Where Ms. Pessl's chums were on THAT important assignment only they know for sure. What they might have told her is that if you are going to drop 14 pompous allusions for every fifty words it makes you look like such a snob that you really have to be presenting a quality product to back it up. Much like working French phrases into a conversation, it can be pretty neat but it had better be done right. The writing in this book falls short.
Never mind the `modern email' editing style of allowing properly spelled but nonetheless wrong words into the final edition (there/their, vane/vein, &c) the writing itself reminds me of my daughter's first knock knock joke: Knock Knock/Who's There?/Cadillac/Cadillac Who?/Cadillac Not Your Mom!. She understood the mechanics of the device but not the meaning or art behind them. Without my daughter's (pretty solid) excuse of being three years old, Ms. Pessl looks ridiculous writing `my memory stutters and stalls like a motor which refused to turn over'. Well, pal, if something refuses to turn over it can't get going and it needs first to get going before it can stutter and stall. It's like saying `I crashed down as hard as an airplane that never took off'.
Hey, no one can really stand the scrutiny of a million pedantic jerks like me without a few weaknesses showing up, that's no crime, but whether or not you have the goods is something one really ought to consider before making a superior and self-congratulatory drama of it. Ms. Pessl may well become a good author someday but she will always have this thing lurking in her past, as will the gaggle of supposedly sophisticated reviewers who ended up looking just as amateurish falling all over it. In fairness, many have said the last 200 pages were the good stuff and I never got that far. But even assuming it's true, you show me a five hundred page book with two hundred good pages and I'll show you a poor job.
Book Review: No quarks here...
Summary: 4 Stars
Some book titles tell you exactly what you're going to get inside. If you see Murder on the Orient Express, you expect and get a mystery. David Copperfield is about David Copperfield. Most titles are ambiguous: based on the title alone, what can you expect from Gone With the Wind or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? Marisha Pessl's debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, fits in a third category: the deceptive title.
I knew what to expect from reading the back-of-the-book description, but every time I mentioned reading the book, people would think it was some arcane science book; certainly no one thought it would be a fictional memoir of a teenage girl. That's what it is, however, the tale of Blue van Meer and her senior year at St. Gallway, a private school in Stockton, North Carolina.
Blue's mother having died when Blue was very young, she has spent most of her life being raised by her father, a nomadic professor who drags Blue from town to town as he goes through a series of jobs and lovers. Gareth van Meer has decided to settle in Stockton, however, in an effort to get his daughter into Harvard. Gareth has provided Blue a good, wide-ranging education, but in social situations, she is still undeveloped.
This will change in St. Gallway, where she is befriended by Hannah Schneider, a part-time teacher who spends a lot of time hanging out with five students: Jade, Charles, Nigel, Leulah and Milton. To an extent, these students are all users, exploiting Hannah's own loneliness and providing a friendship that is, at best, shallow. They allow Blue into their group, but are similarly disdainful of her. This fragile group will be sorely tested after Hannah kills herself; this will also lead Blue on a quest for answers that will reveal far stranger things than she could have imagined.
The strength of the book comes as much from Blue's unique narrative voice as anything else. Gareth is, to a large degree, an intellectual snob, and Blue has inherited some of his detachment. She often describes things almost as if she were writing a sociological study, including plenty of citations and illustrations. She is not a robot, however, and occasionally her emotions are reported, though even these are told with the remoteness of time.
Pessl's initial book is good, if sometimes a bit too wordy (of course, this does fit with Blue, but can be trying on the reader). Overall, however, it is a good, smart read with a fair portion of humor, worthy of a high four stars.
Book Review: Oh, I give up ...
Summary: 3 Stars
Add me to the list of those who gave up after about 50 pages -- something I think I've only done once or twice before with a novel. This book was recommended to me by a librarian who loved it, so even though it was annoying me by page 3, I stuck with it. (I should have been warned by that librarian's having told me she'd loved "Memoirs of a Geisha," which is probably the worst book I've ever read.)
I was getting impatient with the overwriting, the endless similes and metaphors, the literary references, the intellectual preening, and the adoration of the author for her protagonist, and I was wondering when it would let up and the author would get on to something else, already. So I checked here to see what other readers thought, and after reading their comments, I decided not to waste my time wading through a few hundred pages of precociousness to get to the payoff. There are just too many good books waiting.
I think Pessl had a clever idea, but she just beats it to death. In my opinion, previous reviewers hit it on the head with their comments about how she would describe a hot dog and that this seems like the novel a recent English major grad's friends would talk her out of publishing. The excuse that it is supposed to be the protagonist, not the author, being so self-consciously intellectual only goes so far, because one of the reasons this kind of writing is a mistake is that the author does not disappear enough; it is impossible to look at Blue without seeing Pessl herself. Perhaps if she had fallen out of love a bit with her protagonist, Pessl could have achieved that distance, but she just wasn't able to do it.
It's not the worst we've ever seen. I like literary gimmicks; it's just that there has to be some good storytelling and good writing, too. Many of the overwritten passages are clever, and none was awful (like "Geisha" or "DaVinci Code" -- those were hopeless). But not EVERY passage needs that kind of display. It leaves the reader exhausted. Where was her editor? For that matter, where was the influence of all the terrific writers Pessl has read herself?
I'm sorry this sounds so harsh. I have a feeling we are going to see some terrific writing from Pessl in the future, especially if she gets herself a good editor (and listens to him/her). I just don't understand why THIS book got so many good reviews.
Book Review: Hire me, Penguin! I could have edited this into something worth the hype.
Summary: 2 Stars
There's not much I can say that hasn't been said, but I would like to reiterate that there's a lot of good material here--it's just that there's even more bad material. The overall impression is that the author is smug and self-indulgent, eager to demonstrate both academic and pop-culture fluency. The frequent similies are downright stupid; the book would be better off without them. Someone's glass of iced tea was "like a sweaty upper lip." Or the other way around, maybe--I don't remember. Condensation. Who cares? What does it have to do with anything? Why do we need pointless details about EVERY character who makes an appearance in two of the novel's 500+ pages?
The constant name-dropping and fact-dropping also wear on one's nerves. For all Pessl's supposed learnedness, she didn't do her homework on the basic character details like names and ethnicities. Gareth Van Meer is a German? How did he end up with a Dutch surname and the first name of a Arthurian Round Table Knight? And last time I checked, ze Germans have trouble wiss ze voiceless dental fricatives. Speaking of names containing sounds not native to the person's language--Geneva (presumably pronounced with a J sound) as a Russian Jewish woman's first name?! Russian women's patronymics and surnames sometimes end in -eva, but that doesn't make Geneva Russian, even if you pronounce it with a hard G. Speaking of patronymics, why does Blue's mother not have one, and instead have the Spanish/English middle name Alicia, AND have only a nickname (Natasha) for a first name?
Another pet peeve was the book's obsession with Harvard. As a Harvard grad student, I can attest that many if not most people who go to Harvard for undergrad are riddled with insecurity for the rest of their lives and need to remind people constantly that they went there. (Of course, grad students are not immune. I go there, did I mention?) I pegged Pessl to be one of these, but a little biographical digging proved otherwise. Considered alongside the copious academic citations, are these references supposed to make the book a love letter to the academy in general? Why? Everyone in the academy hates it... So, I'm not sure why she goes to such pains to tell you how good Harvard is. Don't tell all the tourists in the Yard, but on the whole, the place is just average, or even a little below. Kind of like this book.