Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Brilliant rendition of an unforgettable brainy teen who feels compelled to leave her world of books to solve the mystery of a teacher’s death. Many will find the book too long with not enough meaningful human action, but I found the world of the lead character’s mind grew on me as a doomed, but attractive, refuge from the narcissistic void facing many youth today.

Sixteen year old Blue van Meer moves to a small town in North Carolina with her political science professor dad and recounts her senior year at an exclusive private school, St. Galway. She takes up with a disaffected clique of privileged kids which regularly gathers at the home of art teacher Hannah. We are told from the beginning that Hannah dies a mysterious death and that the impact of her death is linked in Blue’s mind with making sense of her own mother’s death when she was an infant. As Blue’s father moves nearly yearly from college to college, she grows up never experiencing any long lasting friendships or community ties and, consequently, comes to adopt her father’s mode of relying more on the lessons and ideas from books than the real world.
This approach to life as one big lesson plan is a fascinating place to dwell for awhile as a reader. Blue’s witty recourse to the insights from novels, philosophies, biographies, music lyrics, and movies is fun and fresh at the beginning. This wears thin and begins to irritate after 100 pages or so. Having books chapters named after famous books begins to seem absurd and pretentious. If you are like me, it soon dawns on you how fatally flawed and sterile Blue’s mode of existence is. She really can’t connect emotionally to anyone, and you almost wonder if she isn’t missing something in having no serious challenges from the usual teen obsessions with drugs, sex, and rock and roll. I almost felt like cheering when she cries for the first time over a vicious public comment made by a boy she likes.

Luckily for the reader, Blue eventually gets engaged in doing something in the real world through pursuing the mystery of Hannah’s death. In the process, she learns that neither Hannah or her father were what they seemed, and she begins to emerge from her chrysalis. This character is going to loom in my mind for a long time as some kind of parable. At the moment, I translate it as being like a dweller in Plato’s cave who tries to make sense of reality not with his own senses, but by recourse to a vast library, a strategy fated to have limited success.

Not great. Has it's moments but over all never drew me in. I dropped it to 2 stars as while it has some appeal it left my mind whenever I was away from it. I could take it or leave it and when it went back to the library I pretty much lost it all. Never got involved, didn't "catch my interest" and faded quick.

To each their own, maybe you'll like it better. Who knows, maybe I was just in the wrong mood???

This may be the best book I've read all year, which isn't to say it's perfect. In fact, there are about a million reasons to hate it that most of my fellow reviewers have already touched upon: the gorgeous young It Girl-looking author for one, or the denseness of the writing (some have called it overwritten), the pretentiousness of it all. And yet, for sheer impact, I don't think I could come up with a single thing to top it. This book really gets in your head and doesn't leave it the same again. I almost returned it a chapter or two in because the book is about the size of your standard dictionary and it was madness to begin it going into final exams. I couldn't bring myself to postpone reading the rest though, because it was just too good to set aside. Ultimately, I polished off the last quarter or so of the book in a single night too gripped by the suspense to put it down until I found out how things resolved themselves.

There is something just too compelling about the main character. Blue is a near-genius who may excel in nearly everything but her social development remains severely stunted due to being dragged cross-country by her hilariously pretentious and snarky professor father. Newly arrived at the last in a string of schools to finish out her senior year, the hapless Blue gets sucked into a coterie of intense over-achievers who orbit around an even more mysterious drama teacher. While her association with them gives Blue the chance to finally act like a teenager for the first time in her life, there are disturbing undercover goings-on that are unraveled that make her (and the reader) question everyone's agendas and motives, including her father's, who seems somehow connected to it all.

Although the book looks back on the events surrounding a dramatic incident revealed to us early on, more and more half-truths and deceptions unfold as the book progresses that lead to even bigger bombshells. Just as you don't want to like the book and yet you do, Blue is exasperating and heartbreaking at the same time, the book is darkly funny and absolutely terrifying. I know a lot is always said about Infinite Jest---which seemed to me too clever by half---but this at least has a payoff that's worth the effort.

This is a story told through books themselves, a whodunnit, a coming-of-ager. Some will find this book too gimmicky...the use of a syllabus outline, the visual aids, the fact that the first word of the book is dad and the last word is me (thus encapsulating the entire story arch), the final exam. But this book made me feel the way I did during a college lecture on Lolita, where the professor broke down Lolita by numbers, the numbers of the license plates, the hotel room numbers, etc. They all swirled and anagrammed their way into a ridiculous formula at the end. And so it turned out, that not only was Nabokov churning out a literary masterpiece, but a mathematical formula as well. Who knew? Certainly not 21-year-old Me. It might be gimmicky, but these sort of books are the literary equivalent of walking while chewing gum while playing the cello - the authors are strange maestros of many art forms. And so I've concluded that Nabokov is the silent, invisible uncle of "Special Topics", Pessl's patron saint, and not just because of the butterflies and the old professor/precocious girl pairing.

I really wanted to like this book.

But it’s a train wreck. The literary carnage is so grotesque and horrifying, you can’t help but look, read. (And I promise you, just take my word for it, that metaphor is better than most that Pessl uses in this debut novel of hers.)

Despite what Bayard says, it’s amazing what happens when you stop talking about a text and actually interact with it. I’ll tell you what happens: disappointment. Utter, utter disappointment.

For all intents and purposes, the book doesn’t even start until the second half when a certain major character is found dead by the narrator/protagonist. As readers, we learn about the death with the first line of Chapter #1: “Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider’s death, I’ll tell you about my mother’s.” So essentially, the first half of the book amounts to literary blue balls in which Pessl torments us with bad writing and we writhe in agony praying for release.

It is a common formula to take the wit and wisdom of an adult and transplant it into an adolescent (from Catcher in the Rye to Juno). Pessl brings this trite technique to a new low. Unlike the social relevance and humor of Diablo Cody or the sparse, unfathomable brilliance of Salinger, Pessl just writes with broad strokes and clunky rhetorical devices. Her writing is hyperbolic and extreme. She seems to pride herself on regurgitating endless references and allusions, but I would prefer that instead of describing someone as having “the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about her,” she just describe the damn person. Do some real work, Marisha.

And oh how Marisha Pessl loves similes and metaphors. She and Augusten Burroughs should get together and have some kind of simiphor-off. Sample Pessl snippet:

“Charles and his friends looked forward to the hours at her house much in the way New York City’s celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943 (see Forget About El Morocco: The Xanadu of the New York Elite, the Stork Club, 1929-1965, Riser, 1981).

I have two problems with this kind of writing.
1) I don’t know the way New York City’s celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943. So this metaphor is completely useless to me. Why can’t Charles and his friends just look forward to the hours at her house?
2) The damn parenthetical references. They’re throughout the entire book. It’s probably supposed to help clear up my first problem with this passage, but it only serves to remove me from the story in two really stupid ways: 1) I stop reading and go look it up, or 2) Since I’m reading a book about a high school senior who can’t possibly know all of the books and references in parentheses, I can only assume this is Marisha Pessl being an annoying smartass with this kind of crappy Authorial Intrusion.

(There’s also “Visual Aids” throughout the book. Drawings by the author. Really annoying. Really stupid. Absolutely unnecessary.)

At one point there is a blubbery Mercedes. If anyone can send me a picture of a “blubbery” Mercedes, Authwhore will award you with a free book that is better than Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

At one point, people say their names “with paint-by-numbers politeness.” This is a problem because paint-by-numbers are not polite. They can be tacky, painstaking, time consuming, fun, childish, whimsical, or any number of other things, but I don’t think that there is anything polite about paint-by-numbers and certainly nothing polite about a writer using such poorly chosen imagery with reckless abandon and intending people read 514 pages of it.

At one point, “he either stared at the kid as if he were a Price is Right rerun, barely blinking, or replied in his molasses accent: ‘Nunna ya goddamn business.’” How do you stare at a Price is Right rerun? Well, Pessl knows that no one knows, so she tells us. You barely blink. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh………shouldn’t she then just have wrote that “he stared barely blinking” instead of “staring as if he were a Price is Right rerun, barely blinking?” Yes. Yes she should have. And that is why this book is categorically, officially, absolutely bad. (If you’re still wondering how exactly you stare at a Price is Right rerun, this book will also leave you wondering how you look at a snag in tights. Riveting stuff, really.)

At one point, “Officer Donnie Lee happened to have saturated himself in Paul Revere-like cologne (it rode far ahead of him, alerting all of his impending arrival).” Which doesn’t even work! Paul Revere rode to warn people not of his own arrival but of the British’s. So I guess that’s why it’s Paul-Revere-like? But isn’t there a better image for something that travels ahead to warn of itself? A fog horn, perhaps? A screeching buzzer on a truck?

At one point, “Hannah was wearing a housedress the color of sandpaper…”
The color of sandpaper??? Pessl, how imprecise can you be!!! Is there a worse writer? What type? What grit? What brand? I’ve seen gray sandpaper, black sandpaper, brown sandpaper, rust sandpaper, beige sandpaper……..

At one point, the narrator/protagonist has a fight with her father and proceeds to throw books at him. I was really hoping to learn that Marisha Pessl had some true postmodern class and sense of humor by having her throw this book at him.

It didn’t happen.

I threw my own copy instead.

For the record, Marisha Pessl is still hot.

Not Sophie Dahl hot. But still hot.

i didn't really read this. i read about 30 pages before announcing (to the book's cover), "I HATE YOU, BOOK. SHUT UP!" anyone who wants more details as to why i despise the book that everyone else is raving about might need to buy me a drink first.

All right, all right you can all go elsewhere if you’re astounded by my rating. For those of you who stick around, either out of curiosity, and/or to berate my taste here goes. M. Pessl is a very smart young woman who also possesses a wicked sense of humor. Her novel is a fun read if you are prepared to skim and skip without guilt. A clever coming of age story of a wholly delightful young woman who I would have readily befriended and defended. A mystery, sort of, and an exploration of humans and a few animals too. It’s long, too long. Yet I missed it when I’d finished. I re-read the final exam just for fun. Amusing.

È stato faticoso. Non come lavorare in miniera o riasfaltare le autostrade ad agosto, ma come può esserlo un romanzo di settecento pagine in cui ogni azione e concetto vengono illustrati da una media di due metafore e/o similitudini che vanno a pescare le loro immagini in tutti i campi del sapere umano.
Un libro che per due terzi è una storia di formazione narrata in prima persona dalla protagonista, Blue van Meer, una ragazzina insostenibilmente colta (e non incline a tenersi per sé la sua cultura), che tutto a un tratto si trasforma in un thriller fantapolitico – e sì, in un certo senso tale svolta era stata anticipata, ma chi se la immaginava di tali proporzioni?
Un infinito snocciolare di citazioni di autori e opere, alcuni arcinoti, altri inventati di sana pianta dalla giovane e presumibilmente altrettanto coltissima autrice Marisha Pessl (all’epoca al suo esordio).
Una struttura che ricalca un corso universitario, con ogni capitolo che mutua il titolo da un classico (più o meno) della letteratura mondiale e si chiude con un esame/questionario (da non saltare perché nascoste tra le risposte a scelta multipla ci sono le battute finali della storia).
Eppure la trama regge, non sbava, tutto torna, alla fine ma torna.
E Blue, pur non smettendo mai di essere una saputella autocompiaciuta, si arricchisce poco alla volta di un’umanità e di una profondità che me l’hanno fatta amare, lei che dice di aver letto il Mein Kampf in seconda elementare, o che per descrivere una persona al ristorante deve citare Keats (e chi sennò?).
Perché in fondo è una sedicenne, sola, inesperta e tradita (da chi non posso dirlo), che si ritrova a passare in mezzo a un tornado e che quando ne esce (questo non è spoiler perché la narrazione parte dalla fine) ritiene che valga la pena di scrivere la storia di quello che le è successo.
Complimenti Marisha.