false 97473 0143112120 9780143112129 1532 399 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171380264m/97473.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97473.Special_Topics_in_Calamity_Physics 2362 Marisha Pessl 9740 2381 4 11 false Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun May 06 11:46:20 -0700 2007 Mon Oct 01 14:47:17 -0700 2007 Special Topics... has certainly stirred the passions of readers and critics...especially those who love-to-hate first novels by young, successful authors. At the sight of Marisha Pessl's author photo -- lovely, unsmiling introspective waif -- I had to hold down my hate reflex with both arms, both legs, and my forehead. Yet twenty pages later, any evidence of hate (or even a struggle) was gone. I was captivated.

Blue Van Meer lost her mother at a very young age and now hops around the country with her uber-academic, Clooney-esque father, a political science professor. They decide to spend her senior year of high school in one place -- Stockton, NC -- where Blue attends a prestigious private school and attracts the interest of Hannah Schneider, a beautiful and mysterious film studies teacher who mentors an exclusive clique of students, the Bluebloods. The closer our heroine gets to this group and to Hannah, and the more she uncovers about a series of mysterious deaths, the more she discovers about her own past. The mystery made my heart pound and my inner teenager recall the taste of liquor mixed with lip balm. Pessl reveals -- subtlely but powerfully -- that difference between how teenagers see their lives (a whirlwind of importance, majesty, and despair) and the reality of them. Blue is so smart and well-read, yet she's also believably naive, self-critical, self-aggrandizing. I also love how Pessl describes the relationship between Blue and her father. It's hard to write father-daughter stuff in a way that isn't cheesy or disturbing, but this works. I do have some issues with the rendering of Hannah and the Bluebloods...I wanted to know more about them and their relationships with Blue but wound up just thinking rather poorly of them--which was disappointing. And it's weird that someone named Blue would be in a clique called the Bluebloods. (Excuse me while I put on some Joni Mitchell.)

The way this book is written is noteworthy, but style and form illuminate rather than eclipse the story. Special Topics... is organized like a college syllabus for a lit course; each chapter is named after a novel that is at least loosely thematically related (Wuthering Heights, Women in Love, and so forth) to its contents, and throughout, no source is left uncited. Well beyond its ToC, the book pokes fun at academia and living too much in books/films/etc., but it does so with such joy...the cited quotations bloom from, rather than merely garnish, the text. They also show what a life of reading gives us...what a gift it can be. I was reminded of the debate in History Boys about using quotations as little showy flourishes vs. using them to really engage with an issue. Pessl does both, and she pokes fun at the former while showing the limitations even of the latter. And I must say that I love the voluptuous vocabulary of this book, its brimming wit and beauty; it feels just right for these characters and this story.

Special Topics is not a perfect book, and there were certainly moments when I rolled my eyes (but I imagine that Pessl will roll hers too, or is already rolling them, as she ages gracefully into an even better writer) at the grandiosity of it all. But I'm grateful that people are willing to go there, to write like this and feel like this and create a world and a character I wanted to stay with for much, much longer. "Spare" writing has its place, but so does the lush. I applaud it.]]>