Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
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Book Reviews of Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Book Review: Big Hat No Cattle
Summary: 3 Stars
This book, like the reading list within, brims with ambition and enthusiasm. Marisha Pessl loves to write and each page teems with cool ideas, twisted plot devices, and hairpin turns of phrase. I must confess to enjoying the language more than the plot, not because I didn't like the issues raised about homegrown terrorism and the loss of the revolutionary spirit of the mid-20th century, but because I felt that the author was continually exerting her control over me. The more I liked the protagonist, the more I wanted her to escape the confines of the plot and assert her own identity. She makes a perfectly fine sleuth - and I was glad that she could discover her place in the world and free herself from the manipulative adults around her - but I couldn't help feeling that the author had trapped the reader in something similar. There just wasn't enough breathing room for another opinion or an independent appreciation of the very appealing main character.
Having registered that complaint, I must counter with the pleasures provided by the exotic characters, young and old alike, the exuberant use of literary references, both actual and imagined, and the joys of thinking again about the legend of the Nightwatchmen. (Tom Morello should definitely have a hand in the score of the movie.) I was very sorry to discover that Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night was not an actual biography of Charles Manson. Like many of the book's small delights, it made me long for a real world as rich as Ms. Pessl's imagined one. The novel was funny, suspenseful, and true enough to the emotional vagaries of adolescence to ring true despite the lies, exaggerations, and sheer abundance.
Book Review: Take this book----please (Youngman, Henny, 1935)
Summary: 2 Stars
Pessl needed an editor to require her to cut at least 100 pages and to get rid of most of the literary allustions and citations, real and unreal. Less is more.
I wanted to like this book. I really did. I liked the chapter titles and I liked the premise and I liked the big nod to Nabokov. I am certainly that Nabokov would NOT have nodded back, however. As I approached page 200 I realized that I really did not have to finish this book and that it had failed to capture my interest. I returned it to the library with the guilty relieved sense of liberation of somebody leaving the scene of a hospital vigil.
I like long books. I thrive on the Victorian triple-decker. I like a good mystery. I even like some young writers (Zadie Smith and Jonathan Frantzen--I'm talking about you!)
But this book did not take me away. I kept on thinking that the father could in no way have earned so many one-year job contracts. I kept on seeing the author being clever and cute. I want to be caught up in clever and cute and not feel as if a performance is being forced upon me.
That being said, if Pessl continues to write and if she learns how to revise (or to revise better) I think I would look at her future works. Find youself an excellent editor. Take advice. Learn to prune your preciousness so that the reader is not caught up in a trecly thicket of it but rather can see and enjoy each shining moment. Don't hit us over the head with a plank--get yourself a little hammer and repeat the words "lapidarian" and "riparian" and apply them to your work.
See how annoying it can be when somebody tries to be cute?
Book Review: Did someone say the Secret History?
Summary: 3 Stars
Although I must admit to enjoying the last 200 pages of this book I cannot say the same for the first 300. This book could have been edited down dramatically. The last 200 pages in fact seemed to be somewhat of an entirely different book and story. Many of the characters that you believe to be relevant to the story turn out to be just pawns carrying you along - most of what seem like main characters, turn out to be completely irrelevant to the main plot.
What bothered me most about this book was that the start of the book and parts within the middle were a complete ripoff of "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt. This books starts off by revealing the death of Hannah Schneider in the first chapter, without giving too much details to her death. In the opening chapter, of the Secret History, the reader learns of the death of student Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. Here too, few details are given. Then the parallel beginnings start off with new students who are brought into "secret societies" of students that surround a single professor the only difference being the sex and age of the main characters. In both of these inner societies there is a Charles and in both groups there is a gay male student. In both stories there is a murder in the woods. Really, can this get any more similar. One person suggested to me that maybe this was part of Pessl's method of bringing in other snippets from books and movies throughout the novel but I don't think she is being that clever.
I will give Pessl kudos for her great writing but she could take some lessons in editing down the her content.
Book Review: Who do you write for, Marisha?
Summary: 3 Stars
That's what I continuously think when I read the book. I get the strong feeling, and it doesn't lessen when I approach the end, that she is not writing for us readers, but she is writing for other authors/professional book reviewers/herself.
Oh yes, she really is good, but as for many others here, many of her words are lost for me as I skip over whole pages to get to what Blue actually was talking about. I don't like reading a sentence followed by a page of distraction (witty distraction, but still, distraction) followed by the continuation of the original storyline, and so on and so forth. There is nothing wrong with the actual story, except that it is rather thin, if you look away from all the distracting text. It would be more pleasant and captivating if it was written more coherently.
Another miss is the back cover text in my issue: it describes an event that happens close to the end of the book. This made me even more impatient, since I was waiting for the book to start during the first 2/3rds of the book. Most things before the thing that happened to Hannah was introduction, and when you view the story like that the division between introduction, central story part and conclusion gets very strange. The most interesting part is that after what happens to Hannah and that only gets a few pages of space.
Actually, I think my three stars are too generous, but I'll let them be three. The more I think about the book, the less impressed I am. The only thing I'm still impressed about is her extensive knowledge, but that hardly makes for fun reading, does it?
Book Review: A brainy murder mystery.
Summary: 5 Stars
The New York Times named Marisha Pessl's (1977) stunning first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, one of the ten best books of 2006. Set in a North Carolina private school (St. Gallway), the Hitchcock-like murder mystery tells the story of its narrator, Blue van Meer--a precocious adolescent with a wicked sense of humor and an impressive vocabulary, and her widowed father, Gareth, an equally brilliant academic (reminiscient of Harold Bloom). Following the death of Blue's butterfly-obsessed mother, the two live a peripatetic existence, traveling from one college town to the next (at age 16 Blue has attended 24 different schools), until settling in Stockton for Blue's senior year, where she befriends a group of eccentric students ("the Bluebloods") and their charismatic and possibly sociopathic film teacher, Hannah Schneider. Hannah is an enigmatic character who, until she is found hanging by an electrical cord from a tree in the Great Smoky Mountains, appears to enjoy sexual liasons with everyone from one of her students to Blue's father to random old guys she meets at diners. Blue relentlessly filters every life experience through books as clues surrounding Hannah's death fall into place. In fact, the book's 36 chapters constitute a college reading list--a course syllabus in The Western Canon--Madame Bovary, Othello, Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick and Howl--and Pessl even ends her novel with a final exam. Suffice it to say, her readers will earn extra credit if they have a degree in English Literature before starting this highly recommended, 514-page novel.
G. Merritt