Of all the injunctions given by writing teachers, “Write
what you know” has perhaps the most mixed reputation. There’s a kernel of
useful advice there, but the command has, unforgivably, engendered a volume of
wince-inducing semi-autobiography too large to pulp all at once. Today’s young
novelists face the task of proving that they’re not just narcissistically
rehashing their own lives in a cynical effort to become literary darlings. With
her first 514 pages – not to mention a handful of illustrations – Special Topics in Calamity Physics,
Marisha Pessl stares that particular beast, if not fully down, then at least
into temporary submission.
Protagonist Blue van Meer is a
highly literate young woman; Pessl, judging by the references that pepper the
text, is a highly literate young woman. Blue is driven by her professor father
to what might be called extreme precocity; Pessl, as articles have revealed,
lived the sort of managed activity-laden childhood you read about in articles
on precocious youngsters. Over the course of the novel, Blue goes from dowdy,
ostracized weirdo to gussied-up member of the in crowd; Pessl’s promotional
photos bear the unmistakable once-a-geek look of the former ugly duckling.
Slowly, a pattern emerges.
Is this chronicle of Blue’s
exploits merely a chronicle of Pessl’s, thinly veiled? Said exploits are outlandish
enough to make that unlikely. Our heroine’s father, having permanently adopted
the title of “visiting professor,” relocates every semester, which results in
his daughter’s relocation every single semester. When he announces that they’ll
remain in Stockton, North Carolina – the state in which Pessl grew up, but I
digress – for the entirety of Blue’s
senior year, the promised respite never comes. Rather than settling into some
semblance of normality, Blue falls in with a shadowy group of students brought
together by an enigmatic film studies instructor and winds up solving – or
thinking she’s solved, by way of an elaborate meta-conspiracy theory – a murder
that spends a hefty chunk of the book plying her into obsession.
Unlike many of the past twenty
years’ attempted great American novels, the plot of Special Topics in Calamity Physics is only partially, rather than
totally, overshadowed by the technique with which it’s delivered. Blue’s – or,
none dare suggest, Pessl’s – zeal for all things scholastic keeps in full blast
throughout the first-person narrative. Not only do citations of sources both
real and imagined (“Margaret Thatcher:
The Woman, The Myth”) crop up with tiring frequency, the entire novel is
organized as a high school syllabus. The chapters are titled after, and, to
varying extents, mirror the content of, the great works of sixth-period
English: A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, Madame Bovary, A Room with a View, and so on, causing
the reader to repeatedly flip back to check if that last chapter really was sort of like Paradise Lost.
This is where Ms. Pessl’s lack of a
track record confuses, and why Special
Topics in Calamity Physics would have worked more effectively as a second
novel. Are we reading the words of a finely crafted character, a social hermit
who knows no other mode of expression but the demonstration of her own
erudition, or those of a self-indulgent author? Answering that entails an
unreasonable amount of guesswork, much like that which the narrator herself has
to do to crack her mystery.
As she reveals plot points, or as she
reveals them and then reels them right back in, Pessl repeatedly pulls the rug
out from under poor Blue, not to mention the reader. The pace almost grinds to
a halt in the third act, where the bulk of the revelations – or maybe false
revelations, but we can’t know for sure – are dumped, though, to Pessl’s
credit, not as artlessly as they are in the typical embossed-cover murder
mystery. Nevertheless, the boundaries between truth, fabrication and
speculation blur heavily, ultimately forcing the story to the brink of a
collapse under the weight of its own ambiguity. I’m willing, even so, to give
the benefit of the doubt. The book might well contain an embedded message about
the relativity of truth or the tendency of academics to make much ado about
nothing, a work that, oddly enough, is absent from the syllabus.
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