Took me a really long time to get into Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics. First, the title scared me. It would have been months since I'd read a review, had it recommended to me, or done whatever it was that led me to buy the book. I saw the title and thought: OMG, I've bought a book on physics! Now whatta I do? Forcing a calm I wasn't close to feeling, I read the back cover and a few blurbs. I breathed a sigh of relief. At least the book was fiction. Next the thickness of the paperback registered. Easily a doorstop. I checked the number of pages. Over 500. Strike two. I looked valiantly for a third strike but couldn't find one. I started to read, and it was touch-and-go all the way through. Like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead, when Special Topics was good, it was very good, but when it was bad, it was horrid. Goods and bads that I noted:
1) The narrator, Blue Van Meer, is about to start her senior year at a prestigious private high school. Her father, an itinerant college professor, has taught political science at many universities—usual in the offbeat branches in little-heard-of towns. Since his wife, also Blue's mother, is dead, Blue has moved everywhere he taught. Blue's sense of St. Gallway, her upcoming school, begins when she reads some introductory pamphlets. The accomplishments of its graduates didn't read like those found in most brochures. "We have the highest number of graduates in the country who go on to become revolutionary performance artists, … one out of every ten Gallway students becomes an inventor, … 10 percent will study stage-makeup design, 1.8 percent puppetry, … one out of every 2,031 Gallwanians gets into The Guiness Book of World Records. Wan Young, Class of 1982, holds the record for Longest Operatic Note Held …" (page 63) All right, I'm hooked. Any author who can come up with those specifics has my attention. For at least the nonce.
2) Quite often Pessl's use of language —probably misuse of language to a lot of educators—fascinated me. Blue and her new friends have followed Hannah, a teacher at St. Gallway, as she picks up a man at a seedy bar and takes him to an even seedier motel. The teenagers amuse themselves aimlessly as they wait in the car. Blue says, "I sort of Vietnamed too." (page 145) Pessl is really good at taking nouns and turning them into verbs and vice versa. And, IMHO, her switches work. Didn't one aspect of Vietnam involve soldiers putting in their year, filling time and waiting for it to be over?
3) Blue's often pompous professor father does come up the occasional well-turned phrase. Example: "Americans need to master lingual before they attempt to be bilingual." (page 159) Ah, yes. I have memories of when I was a pretty burned-out professor who would occasionally answer the office phone with "English and other foreign languages."
4) Pessl refers to a huge number of books. Some I recognized; others I didn't. Many of the unfamiliar ones sounded interesting so I'll be checking to see if they really exist. Inquiring minds and all that.
5) Blue attempts to read (to understand) Hannah and notes the following: "Maybe she was simply a matter of Faulkner: she had to be read very closely, word by painful word (never skimmed, pausing to make critical notes in the margin), …. Eventually I'd come to her last page and discover what she was all about. Maybe I could even Cliff Notes her." (page 184) Cool analogy and, again, that amazing use of language.
6) I loved the names of Hannah's two white Persian cats—Lana and Turner. How perfect.
7) Sometimes I questioned Pessl's details—of which there are nine zillion. At one point Blue and Hannah are in a restaurant and Blue calls her father on "the pay phone by the cigarette machine." (page 257) It jarred. The novel is set a year ago ("It had been almost a year since I'd found Helen dead." ((page 5)) ) I have trouble believing neither Beth nor Hannah had a cell phone.
8) At one point Professor Van Meer holds forth on fallout from the protests of the 1960s. "With their delusional self-importance, ad-hoc violence, it becomes easy to dismiss anyone voicing dissatisfaction with the way things are as freaky flower chiles (children?)." (page 260) That thought was with me at the anti-war protest yesterday when a) a kid around eight years old, in a car with his parents, felt free to give me the finger and b) a group of young adults told us to "go somewhere else, you queers."
9) During a visit to Paris, guests in the hotel where Blue and her father were staying "were emptied out into Place Vendome like cream of potato soup from a can." (page 265) What made the author pick cream of potato? Why not clam chowder? Plain old vegetable? Any ideas? The choice jumped out at me and I'm still wondering.
10) "If Servo (a friend of Blue's father) was in a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, he'd be the Painfully Tragic character, the one who wore bronze suits and alligator shoes, the man who worshipped all the wrong things so Life had to bring him to his knees." (page 275) A Willie Loman who "got it"?
11) Nigel, part of Hannah's student entourage, is in her house, talking to Blue. He picks up and puts around himself a full-length fur coat. Later he twirls. "The mink dutifully Christmas-treed around him." (page 284) Christmas-treed? Dutifully? Cool.
12) A cop is summarizing Blue's misadventures on a camping trip—and summarizing it well. "He could shrink any plot of Dickens into haiku." (page 342) High school students would love him.
13) A woman talking on the phone gets caught up in her message. "… her words stampeded into the receiver …" (page 433) Another expression that grabbed me.
14) Pessl mentions the movie Elephant Walk and comments parenthetically that it's "a film no one had ever heard of except descendants of Peter Finch." (page 488) Excuse me! Not only have I heard of it, I watch it anytime I know it's on TCM. Graypanther, you with me on that?
So, bottom line: Recommend? Not recommend? Answer: a shrug. I loved it in the spots quoted above. The plot though, when it finally gets 'round to having one, is bizarre and horrible complex. All in all, not worth 514 pages. Would I give the writer another try? Another shrug. Depends on how long her second (and next) book is.
