false3483067003777X978067003777380021905Special Topics in Calamity Physicshttp://photo.goodreads.com/books/1163789565m/3483.jpg
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3483.Special_Topics_in_Calamity_Physics
2362Marisha Pessl97692384414falseFri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Wed Jun 27 11:51:08 -0700 2007Wed Dec 16 22:53:44 -0800 2009 Okay, I'll admit it -- that whenever I hear of another young, good-looking first-time author in New York getting an obscenely high advance on their first book and suddenly becoming The Talk Of The Town, I automatically become suspicious, as sure a response from me as Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of their little bell. And that's because I've been around various people in the New York literary industry now long enough to know, that many of the decisions in that industry are made with the same immature dysfunction of a high-school Homecoming dance; that those who are chosen to become the next "Belle of the Ball" have been chosen perhaps because they're physically attractive, or popular, or are having sex with the captain of the football team, or have personality types that are easy to sell to others, or any of another thousand reasons besides that they simply deserve it.
And indeed, as I started making my way this week through Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the latest book from the literary world to be guilty of all the things mentioned above, the news didn't seem good; that for its first couple of hundred pages, the entire thing comes off as a grandly pretentious excuse for MFA holders to justify the years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars they wasted to get that degree in the first place. The story of gifted child and snotty high-school senior Blue van Meer, the novel at first seems like it'll be going down the same well-worn path made most famous by the 1989 movie Heathers -- wherein a group of precocious teenagers who worship the pop culture of their grandparents' generation stand around not acting like teenagers at all, spouting world-weary attitudes that most high-schoolers have difficulty even understanding, much less affecting. And it doesn't help, of course, that Pessl's writing style simply screams "please love me for all the big words I know, and I hope my cutesy intellectual diversions keep your mind off the fact that the plot isn't actually very good" (see Your Superfluous Postmodern Footnotes Make Me Want to Stab You in the Head: Why No One in their Twenties Should Ever Be Allowed to Read David Foster Wallace, J. Pettus, 7th ed.).
But then...but then. But then I started getting further along into the book, started getting used to the odd halting style of Pessl's writing. And I started realizing that there were other intriguing things going on in the story as well, multiple layers that Pessl was laying down in such a subtle way to not even be noticable at first -- for example, like the infinitely complex relationship Blue has with her intolerably snotty professor father Gareth, of the hermetically tight situation they have formed because of Blue's mother being dead and the two of them living in a different city every year. Or of the way Blue finally and slowly starts acting like an actual teen as the book progresses; the way she lashes out emotionally in awkward situations, her tendency to take the things said to her much too literally, even as she believes herself to be too smart and much too educated to succumb to such immaturity.