Author, Marisha Pessl
I’d read a bit about this book and what an amazing piece of work it was (especially coming from such a young author). Naturally, I was intrigued. So I picked up SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS while on vacation.
Marisha Pessl is an amazing writer. She is obviously one who is well-read, intelligent and hopelessly enamored of words. She loves words and wordplay so much, she writes with the giddy enthusiasm of a kitten chasing a string or a child, running from one Christmas gift to the other, trying to figure out which toy to play with first. In her energetic prose, Pessl does tend to pile on the metaphors, like a customer at an all-you-can-eat buffet piling mashed potatoes onto her plate. She crams them onto the page, like rush-hour commuters onto a subway car. And her sentences (frequently interrupted with sometimes long parenthetical thoughts that may occasionally drift from the original topic of the sentence, but that’s okay) are often a profusion of words, tumbling over each other, much like boulders in a landslide.
And then there are the citations (plus illustrations or, as they're called in the book, "visual aids"). Yes, a clever device (some even do double duty as metaphors, such as, “We walked by what had to be Bethany Louise’s room, painted gum pink, a pile of clothes on the floor (see 'Mt. McKinley,' Almanac of Major Landmarks, 2000 ed.)”) that demonstrates the protagonist, Blue Van Meer’s, scholarly upbringing under the tutelage of her itinerant professor father. (Not to mention that she's incredibly well-read. Is there a book or article she hasn't read? Is there no source she's unable to quote at the drop of a hat?)
Blue’s mother having tragically died in a car crash after a long, tiring night of working on her butterfly and moth collection (her specialty), the father-daughter duo set off on an extended road trip, in which Blue gets to attend a multitude of schools over the years, treating each new venue as a place to observe human behavior, rather than develop close ties (which will only have to be broken when she moves yet again) and develops a close relationship with Dad that some people might envy (compare Ryan O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, 1973).
Yes, it’s a youthful, showy, poetic, almost gymnastic kind of writing. The kind that, when it puts one so young into the exalted heights of the New York Times bestseller list, might lead an older, more jaded person to feel a bit put out (see F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce in Amadeus, 1984).
But you know what? While part of the charm of this book is its abundance of zeal and cleverness, and we can forgive a gifted young writer any tendencies to soar like a hawk and do loop-de-loops like a stunt pilot with her words, what really matters (and what’s really true) about this book is that it tells a terrific (in every sense of the word) story about someone you can really care about.
Pessl’s story has a well-structured plot, in which Blue finally settles in during her senior year at a private high school with a group of favored students known as the Bluebloods--and, given her unconventional upbringing, Blue’s desire to be included with them surprised me, even disappointed me a little (see Lee Fiora of Prep by Curtis Sittenfield (Random House 2005)). Nonetheless, it’s the only way you can really get to know Hannah Schneider (who we learn right from jump dies by hanging), become familiar with her dark secrets and delights and take a glimpse, along with Blue, at how the other half lives.
And what starts off looking like a father-daughter road trip chronicle turns into a coming-of-age story, in which Blue starts to rebel (ever so slightly) and keep secrets from her father, which all leads up to the scene where Hannah’s found dead. That’s when Blue (thinking things are not what they seem, always observing, looking for the truth) starts checking into the whole thing. Her investigation leads from one revelation to another and the plot twists come so fast and furious, they leave you breathless. Until, at the end, Blue is left pretty much feeling like this (see Visual Aid below):
I have to say that, as a mystery writer who’s come to expect the unexpected, I actually anticipated the final, apocalyptic revelation (and even expected it to be worse). But it did nothing to ruin the book at all. In the end, like any great mystery novel (and although this is not genre fiction, it is at its core, a mystery), the reader is left, mouth agape, saying, “The clues were right in front of me. I just didn’t see them.”
ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that this book ends with a final exam! (No kidding.) In keeping with the pedagogic nature of the work, Pessl finishes the story off with a set of questions--true/false, multiple choice and one essay--that actually raise some interesting theories about the story and suggest topics for discussion, much like the suggested topics for book club discussion at the end of other books I've read. And, no, Pessl does not provide answers.
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