Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Hardcover)

by Marisha Pessl (Author) "Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it..." (more)
Key Phrases: handicapped stall, Hannah Schneider, June Bug, Eva Brewster (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Pessl's stunning debut is an elaborate construction modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course—36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep—that culminates with a final exam. It comes as no surprise, then, that teen narrator Blue Van Meer, the daughter of an itinerant academic, has an impressive vocabulary and a knack for esoteric citation that makes Salinger's Seymour Glass look like a dunce. Following the mysterious death of her butterfly-obsessed mother, Blue and her father, Gareth, embark, in another nod to Nabokov, on a tour of picturesque college towns, never staying anyplace longer than a semester. This doesn't bode well for Blue's social life, but when the Van Meers settle in Stockton, N.C., for the entirety of Blue's senior year, she befriends—sort of—a group of eccentric geniuses (referred to by their classmates as the Bluebloods) and their ringleader, film studies teacher Hannah Schneider. As Blue becomes enmeshed with Hannah and the Bluebloods, the novel becomes a murder mystery so intricately plotted that, after absorbing the late-chapter revelations, readers will be tempted to start again at the beginning in order to watch the tiny clues fall into place. Like its intriguing main characters, this novel is many things at once—it's a campy, knowing take on the themes that made The Secret History and Prep such massive bestsellers, a wry sendup of most of the Western canon and, most importantly, a sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age and identity. (Aug.)
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From The Washington Post
A self-absorbed scholar and a young girl crisscross America by car, flitting through college towns where they endure ill-advised sexual encounters, heartache and a potent dose of popular culture. Studded with ingenious wordplay and recondite allusions, their story veers between highbrow comedy and lowbrow tragedy as it careens toward a couple of ambiguous murders and some crafty detective work.

Ten points if you identified this as the plot of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Extra credit if you also recognize it (minus the pedophilia) as the plot of a much-ballyhooed first novel by Marisha Pessl, who tackles the art of fiction by vigorously associating everything in her book with something else. Constructing the novel as if it were the core curriculum for a literature survey course, complete with a final exam, Pessl gives each chapter the title of a classic literary work to which the episode's events have a sly connection: Chapter 6, "Brave New World," describes the first day of a new school year, while in Chapter 11, "Moby-Dick," a large man drowns in a swimming pool.

Along the way, there are thousands of references to books and movies both real and imagined, as well as an assortment of pen-and-ink drawings. The book's young narrator, Blue van Meer, has fiercely embraced her father's didactic advice: "Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids." Blue's cross-referencing mania can be surprisingly enjoyable, because Pessl is a vivacious writer who's figured out how to be brainy without being pedantic. Like her protagonist, she's eager to make good use of the many books she's read and the movies she's seen. And she loves similes like a fat kid loves cake (Blue would annotate this properly as a line borrowed from the rapper 50 Cent), never settling for one per page when three or eight will do.

But hunkering down for 514 pages of frantic literary exhibitionism turns into a weary business for the reader, who after much patient effort deserves to feel something stronger than appreciation for a lot of clever name-dropping and a rush of metaphors.

As a Harvard freshman recounting the events of the previous year, when her childhood "unstitched like a snagged sweater," Blue remembers being thoroughly in thrall to her father, a political science professor who changes jobs at third-tier colleges so frequently that by age 16 she's attended 24 different schools. To compensate for this rootlessness (her lepidopterist mom died in a car crash when Blue was 5), Dad has promised his daughter an undisturbed senior year in the North Carolina mountain town of Stockton, where Blue will attend the ultra-preppy St. Gallway School.

It's at St. Gallway that Blue's dedication to her pompous, theory-spouting father begins to waver. Her attention is diverted by the school's most glamorous figures, a clique of five flighty kids called the Bluebloods who meet every Sunday night for dinner at the home of their mentor, Hannah Schneider, a charismatic film teacher.

Blue is miraculously granted admission into this rarefied society, but the reader is not so lucky, having to settle for the novel's customary blizzard of comparisons instead of real characterization.

Most enigmatic of all is Hannah, who's both a concerned mother hen and a shady blur of evasions and secrets, and who may or may not be having an affair with (a) one of her students; (b) Blue's father; (c) random elderly men whom she picks up at seedy diners. Blue makes it clear in the book's first chapter that later in the school year, Hannah will be found hanging by an electrical cord from a tree in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the final third of the book charts Blue's efforts to prove that the teacher did not commit suicide, as the coroner concluded, but was murdered.

Like Hannah, Pessl herself is something of an expert at evasion, nimbly avoiding scenes that might require emotional delineation, hiding behind this Nabokovian sentence structure or that Hitchcockian plot twist, always equipped to defend each dodge with the tacit reproach that, hey, it's only a high-school murder mystery, lighten up. Yet here and there the author betrays glimpses of sensitivity, in Blue's genuine expressions of grief for the early loss of her mother and in this moving evocation of loneliness, framed (of course) in a simile: "To the far-off tune of the blue Volvo driving away, it slipped over me, sadness, deadness, like a sheet over summer furniture."

These briefly poignant moments are enough to make a reader wish for more, for a book that is less about other books and more about life. Having already aced the test of novel-writing as a literary trivia game, the real work for Pessl begins now, if she dares to stop making glib comparisons and starts to stare directly at things, as only she can describe them.

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; Later Printing edition (August 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067003777X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670037773
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (281 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #130,580 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

283 of 315 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An ocean of words, so much left unsaid , August 13, 2006

By	Amy Tiemann "creator of www.MojoMom.com" (North Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Part of me is tempted to give "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" 3 stars, but that would give the impression that I found it mediocre and passionless. On the contrary, part of me loved the book to 5 stars, but the excessive loquatiousness of the narrator's expression nearly drove me to distraction. So my mathematical reducion will stay at 4 stars, with reservations explained. By Chapter 8 I was still not engaged enough to convince me that I was going to actually read the whole book. But by the end I stayed awake reading as late as I could one night, and stole away enough time the next day to finish it. Reading this story was like running a reverse marathon that started out as a meandering stroll and ended in a sprint.

And when I say marathon, I mean marathon. Most reviewers have noted the length of the book, weighing in at over 500 pages. Individual sentences stretched on and on with strange metaphors, literary allusions and references, and parenthetical comments galore. Much of it was dense academic blathering--in character, to be sure, but still very annoying to read. Oftentimes I'd find myself strugging with a long sentence, breathlessly awaiting a period like a drowing person begging for someone to throw her a life preserver. If you can get through this style of writing, there is a compelling story waiting to be decoded, but this book won't be for everyone. Though I felt like I was cheating a bit, after the first half of the story I gave myself permission to give up on close textual analysis and read like a skipping stone. The author's pacing picked up in the later stages of the book as well, but as a reader I did make a conscious choice to step in as an editor.

If you still think you'd enjoy the book, I'd say stop reading the reviews and just go read it. I'll say a few more things without being too spoiler-ish. After reading narrator Blue's interpretation of events, I am dying to talk to other people who have read the book to find out what they think really happened. Blue unleashes a torrent of thoughts on her readers, but they are the analyses of an incredibly erudite 16-year-old who lived within the heart of a very tangled web. In other words, what is left unsaid in the story is almost as compelling as the picture that Blue assembles as her own understanding. Blue is an unreliable narrator, not in the sense that she is trying to deceive the reader, but rather that there is only so much truth she can piece together and face. The true brilliance of Marisha Pessl's writing is that she provides enough information to allow the reader to come to some very different conclusions than Blue, based on Blue's first-person narrative.

Maddeningly, though, I came looking for a story, and I don't have time to immerse myself in solving a dense puzzle. Pessl ends the book with a "Final Exam" that stands in for the last chapter. It was a choice hailed by many critics, but it left me feeling hollow and put out. The "testing" of the reader occurs throughout the book, in ways amusing and annoying. Recurring words and images (variations of the word "oily" and references to coins and stillettos) felt clunky, rather than enlightening. Pessl has created a website for the book that would most likely yield additional clues if one would search diligently for the secrets. But much as I love the TV show "Lost," but have no interest in the ongoing "Lost Experience" on the web, I am resigned to accepting that I may never unravel the knot that still lies at the heart of "Special Topics in Calamity Physics." Writing a master's thesis on Nabokov would be a good place to start, but I think we'd all agree that's asking a great deal of one's readers.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful read., May 29, 2008

By	C. McMullen - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Paperback)

After reading several reviews of Special Topics in Calamity physics, I was hesitant to read the book, but I am very glad that I did. Although the other reviews are correct in saying that the beginning is rather slow, the book gains speed right around page 170. However, the information provided to you in these first 170 pages ends up being rather important by the end of the story. There are a lot of little things, mostly small bits of information about Hannah, but other things as well, that end up coming into play much later in to book, somewhere around page 400. I agree that parts of the text could have been cut out, but I fail to comprehend why one would want to do so. Marisha Pessl's writing technique kept me entertained throughout the 170 pages of seemingly useless information. I found myself captivated by her use of both citations and wonderfully detailed descriptions. Also, Pessl's twists in the story are far beyond what I expected. They kept me on the edge of my seat throughout the book. I was especially interested in Nigel, although I am not sure why. I don't identify with his character per se, but I wish she had developed his, and all of the Bluebloods characters a bit more. The only thing about this book that I didn't like was the lack of an ending. I understand that that was somewhat the point, to leave it open for interpretation. It was even mentioned earlier in the book how much Gareth Van Meer hated absolute endings because it left nothing up to the imagination. So although I think that this is a fitting ending, I, being one of the "Americans" that he speaks of, wish that the ending had been at least a bit more definite. All in all, I think that Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a very well written book. It is not, however, a "quick read" (Although it may be considered one for Blue.)

96 of 113 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating book by an up and coming author, August 14, 2006

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

It is clear that twenty-something Marisha Pessl has talent, judging from the reviews already garnered for her debut novel, SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS. It is also a given that many will automatically compare SPECIAL TOPICS --- or, as I like to call it, "The Book That Is Bound To Wind Up On Many End-Of-The-Year-Bests Lists" --- to Donna Tartt's THE SECRET HISTORY. What hasn't been decided is whether or not readers will trudge through the 300 or so "set-up pages" in order to get to the truly exhilarating final 200.

From the get-go, SPECIAL TOPICS might seem a bit off-putting to some. Its plot unfolds, for the most part, on yet another wealthy high school campus, narrated by a protagonist (who some will swear bares a striking resemblance to Pessl) who is quite precocious and full of Big Ideas that are exhaustingly annotated, often with references to various books in parentheses --- a cumulative bibliography of sorts. Each chapter, although plot-driven, is tied to a certain curricular theme --- mainly, a well-known and often revered work of literary mastery (OTHELLO, HEART OF DARKNESS, THE TRIAL, PARADISE LOST, etc.). There is an Introduction, of course, as well as a cleverly designed afterword (aptly titled "Final Exam") that consists of questions readers might enjoy noodling over after finishing the actual story. All in all, it's a kitschy package for the publisher and booksellers, and a clever ploy to attract potential readers who may or may not be into the gimmick.

To give a brief synopsis of the book without giving anything away, SPECIAL TOPICS follows 16-year-old Blue van Meer and her father (a distinguished college professor) as they flit around the country, living in various college towns, mostly for one year at a time. Most of the book's meat takes place during Blue's senior year of high school at St. Gallway, a prep school in a small North Carolina mountain town called Stockton. To her surprise, Blue is soon befriended by the Bluebloods, an exclusive group of co-eds led by a film teacher (yes, a teacher), Hannah Schneider. For much of the book's beginning, the action (or lack thereof) revolves around Blue's interactions with various members of the Bluebloods, while she attempts to adjust to her new environment, maintain her valedictorian status, and continue on in her close but motherless relationship with her father. Thus far, the story is fairly status quo and reads as such.

A little more than halfway through the book, however, SPECIAL TOPICS takes a turn for the better and becomes infinitely more interesting. After a number of other minor yet noteworthy calamities, the Bluebloods go on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains and Hannah Schneider winds up dead, dangling from a tree. (Not to worry, this detail is mentioned in the Introduction.) What follows is an adrenalin-driven thrill ride that is so clever and so delightfully complicated that readers will surely be kept on the edge of their seats until the very end. And the best part is that the whodunit is never fully solved --- or is it?

The question still remains: Does the gruesome conspiracy theory mystery disguised as an erudite treatise on teenage angst and literary greatness gimmick work?

Pessl's heavily weighted academic and artistic background (she studied English and Creative Writing at Columbia, and has dabbled in acting and the fine arts) is clearly present on every page of the book. Her incessant attention to detail, thematic chapter headings, and aforementioned literary side notes are often accompanied by art class line drawings as well. The effect of this combination lands somewhere between the tantalizing and the absurd. Sure, it's helpful to have a bit of defining background, but sometimes the onslaught approach (especially when reading a juicy murder mystery) feels like overkill and a little unnecessary.

Yet, despite it all, many readers will still slog through the minutiae to find themselves fully captivated by Pessl's scintillating world of intrigue. Her pacing toward the end of the story is spot-on, and her talent for playing up the suspense without ever fully giving in to it is brilliant. She excels at writing for shock value and never underestimates the intelligence (and imagination) of her readers. After reading the "Final Exam," some more dedicated readers might even feel the impulse to read through various sections of the book again in order to fit the pieces of this fascinating puzzle together.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling