Thursday, July 11, 2013

Review: Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Marisha Pessl)

First, an admission: I am a sucker for fiction that includes parenthetical asides, quasi-scholarly annotations, bibliographic references, et al. I take great pleasure (and great humor) in the snobby intellectualism of the overly educated literati and my participation in that world. So Marisha Pessl’s much-lauded first novel, compared favorably to Donna Tartt at her best (which I would argue was not The Secret History but rather The Little Friend, but that’s a different post entirely), would seem, for me, the perfect book. And while it delivered on the pseudo-intellectualism and quasi-scholarly charm (many of the texts referenced in the novel are fictional, I know, I checked) the novel itself was... slightly problematic. For example, Pessl’s (intentionally?) poorly-drawn Visual Aides are weirdly juvenile and off-putting, making the reader briefly suspect this to be a young adult novel (albeit a well-written one). I would like to think this was intentional, that the author was pointing out the fact that our narrator is, in fact, just a teenager despite her sophistication and intelligence.

Our narrator is the gifted only child of a political science professor. She attends a private school and falls in with an odd but popular group of students (whom she nick-names The Bluebloods) and their charming enigmatic teacher. But here’s the rub. The teacher fell flat. She didn’t seem interesting or charming, she just seemed aloof and depressed which is not enough to compel a group of teenagers to hang out at your house on the weekends. Fortunately the other characters make up for her lack of depth and authenticity. 

Just when you think you know where the book is going, it takes a turn. It gets BIG and weird and there’s a murder or a suicide (it’s intentionally unclear) and the narrator is forced to take responsibility for her behavior and her actions which leads the book to its (mostly) satisfying conclusion.

Pessl’s writing leans towards bombasity but this, in itself, is forgivable because of her obvious talent and vision. Her raw voice is compelling and in the instances when her prose is stripped down to its true core, devoid of all the stylistic trickery, the reader is spellbound. There was also an oddly New Southern Gothic tone to the novel. More Flannery O’Connor than William Faulkner [from me, this is HUGE praise, I adore both]. One is left feeling that, in time, Pessl could be an important voice in fiction