Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl

This book caught my eye when it was first released - with that title, how could it not - but whenever I noticed it come up in discussion (mostly online), it seemed to be getting dipolar reviews. I was still curious, but didn't act to indulge that curiosity until receiving the recommendation of a friend - not a gushing, frenetic recommendation, but a hint that there might be a good deal in this book that I'd personally find entertaining. Entertaining it was, but flawed.

Blue van Meer is a ludicrously precocious high school senior who has spent her life moving around the country as her father, a political science professor with an interest in revolutionaries, bounced from one semester-long gig at a third-rate university to the next. Her father is a good-natured narcissist, affectionate, but with Pygmalionesque tendencies where his daughter is concerned - he spends dinner conversations, car rides, and trips to Wal-Mart grooming his daughter into an intellectual elitist worthy of his beloved Harvard (and ready to blow her academic competition in each new town out of the water).

The van Meers settle in North Carolina for Blue's senior year, and she falls in with a group of friends ring-led by Hannah Schneider, a part-time teacher at their school with a house full of rescued animals, a penchant for worn clothing, and a mysterious past. The first half or more of the book is devoted to developing this group of relationships by means of a series of quirky coming-of-age vignettes. My favorite: when Blue's new friends coach her on underage bar hopping, and giver her the identity of a college sophomore studying Chemical Engineering, and the advice, "Always say you're seriously into engineering. People don't know what it is, and they won't ask, because it sounds mind-numbing."

The novel changes abruptly with a turn of plot that's foretold in the first pages - Hannah takes the students on a spring camping trip and is found dead the first night. Blue spends the remaining chapters recovering from the trauma and trying to solve the mystery of Hannah's death - including what her father might know about it.

The one thing that can definitely be said for this book is that Blue has an original voice. "Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated," Blue's father instructed her, and throughout her narrative, Blue clings devotedly to this rule (see Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Pessl, 2006, p. 4). Like that. So the novel is copiously annotated with references real and invented. I listened to the book on audio, and didn't find these constant interruptions troublesome, but I suspect it would have been distracting on the page, since there were so many that some pages must have had a dozen notes. I know some have read this as a pretentious display, and I can understand that impression, but I couldn't help but imagine that it must have been fun doing the research. Still, the technique was probably indulged beyond the reader's comfort. Ditto the use of simile - one can only take so much of a single literary device.

More problematic is the lack of cohesiveness. It's not just the plot that twists with Hannah's death, it's the entire narrative. If the mystery was meant to be the tension point of the book, it's weakly resolved, and the first section was overdone - the scene could have been set with far less bulk and lost little of its character. And the second half I can only describe as unnecessarily weird. If I encountered such an extreme change in texture in an older book, I'd be researching the author to find out whether he'd undergone a change in neurological condition in the middle of writing the first draft. That's not to say the second half is bad, or even worse than the first, but it's strange to feel disoriented in the middle of something that's so unusual to begin with.

Special Topics is absolutely filled with fun, quirky (if a little self-indulgent) elements that I enjoyed, but the structure of the novel as a whole was confused. I found myself easily imagining Pessl's style working in a short format - a short story version of Catcher in the Rye meets Sophie's World meets Men and Cartoons. The issues with this book shouldn't be excused for being the work of a young novelist, but, in my view, they aren't enough to make it uninteresting.