IN PRINT: Physics for Kids

Marisha Pessl’s debut novel is generating big buzz, but our critic says it’s aimed at the wrong audience

Sam Sacks

The hype machine has struck the book world again, and readers, both serious and occasional, are caught in another dilemma. On one side there's The New York Times and a great many other creditable news organs stoutly declaring that on the evidence of her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl is the next big thing in contemporary letters, from which follows that anyone who is anyone—who wants to be in the loop—must be able to make effortless cocktail conversation on this young woman's nascent oeuvre.


On the other hand, most readers have distinct and uneasy memories of reading previous Next Big Thing debuts (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Everything is Illuminated, White Teeth, etc.) and, upon finishing them, wondering if they wouldn't be better staying in the cinema loop, or the telenovela loop.


The hype machine does not have the best track record; and Special Topics is over 500 pages long. Dear reader, I understand. That's why I'm here: to read these books so that you don't have to. So let's get to it.


Pessl's novel is actually two novels stitched together, with some skill, though lots of seams still show. The first story is of course a coming-of-age, and the potently adolescing heroine is also our narrator, Blue Van Meer. Blue and her father Gareth, a poli-sci professor who loves Ché Guevara, have just moved to a small Appalachian town in North Carolina, where Gareth will teach in a backwater college and Blue will attend private school for one last year before Harvard. (Harvard is a foregone conclusion.) Blue's mother died in a car crash when she was young, and since then she and Gareth have lived in transit, moving from one anonymous podunk to another at the end of every year or semester.


They have each other, but, evidently, no one else; and the reason Blue and Gareth have no friends, we are encouraged to believe, is that they are brilliant and most everyone else is stupid. Gareth, as Blue's guiding light, is a crux character in this book, and unfortunately he is also a terrible deadweight. Portrayed as a kind of lady-killing Polonius, he is supposed to possess not just brilliance, but jawdropping revolutionary brilliance. Yet, although he sententiously holds forth over a hundred times—"drones," as Pessl once has the honesty to admit—he doesn't say a single smart or interesting thing. I began to dread his entrances the way I would the lectures of my own parents.


In any case, Blue is also a pariah, the lot of all sensitive bookworms with devastating wits. But at her new school she's taken under the wing of a gorgeous film teacher, Hannah Schneider. Hannah has befriended five other seniors who form an uppity clique known as the Bluebloods, and even though Blue is still an outsider with these sort-of friends, under their influence she works down the rite-of-passage laundry list: first drink, first fancy haircut, first dance, first snog.


The second story centers upon Hannah, who turns out to be, like Laura Palmer, full of secrets. Hannah won't discuss her mysterious past with her protégés, but death and runaway children keep cropping up vaguely in the background. Hannah dies midway through—we are told this at the outset—but we don't know why, nor whether she committed suicide or was murdered. Thus the second story is a kid-sleuth tale, as Blue takes on the case and finds that her investigation leads back to her own welcome mat. I had better not give the big secret away, but it appears virtually from nowhere and is completely ludicrous and full of holes—if you're a mystery aficionado, you'll groan at the artlessness of the climactic disclosures.


But, I suppose, the stories are not the real story. What has set off the hype machine is instead Pessl's ranging intelligence, her flashy way with words, and her postmodernist brio. She (and by extension Blue) is lashingly whipsmart and Special Topics is jammed with historical data and cultural references from Emperor Claudius to Sonny Von Bulow with, more or less, everything in between. (But please don't make too much of this, reader—it's easy to appear to have encyclopedic knowledge when you can use an encyclopedia.) And the English language can be an excitingly versatile tool in Pessl's hands: nouns become verbs ("her left arm boa-constricting her hip"), become adjectives ("a mashed-potato way of looking at you"), and ingenious similes fly fast, furious and utterly without discrimination.


Pessl dabbles in a few pomo golden oldies like footnotes and crude illustrations, but her chief gambit is to splice Blue's narrative with citations from other books. "And this, I'm ashamed to say, is where memory drops off," Blue will recount and then follow up with, "(see Figure 12, 'Continental Shelf Cliff,' Organic Terrain, Boss, 1977)."


Such apropos-of-nothing citations are on every page, often filling paragraphs, and the most you can say is that you eventually learn to read around them. They are meant to characterize Blue as a girl who indexes her emotions from textbooks (Special Topics is structured like a textbook, with a final exam for an epilogue), but all they actually do is make her an unreal and distant creation who sometimes rather embarrassingly calls to mind the Saturday Night Live character Mary Katherine Gallagher, who was always breaking into monologues from after-school specials to convey her feelings.


I leave it to you, good reader, to decide how much reward you're likely to take from Pessl's verbal gymnastics, which are admittedly indefatigable. I confess that my tolerance for such stuff is low when it is used to paper over klutzy plots and the lack of a single believable character. (In fact, this style-uber-alles attitude significantly contributes to those failings.)


But there is one important caveat that must be understood and that, so far as I am aware, no one has yet pointed out. Special Topics in Calamity Physics is not for or about grown-up people. It is, properly, a teen novel. (Although whether teens will enjoy a book that takes so long to get where it's going is another question.)


First off, all the dialogue has the shiny hyperbolic cleverness and melodrama of shows like Dawson's Creek and The O.C. Then, like an adolescent, the book is capable of only two ways of looking at others: with worship or with derision. The characters are therefore either Olympian deities or stammering cretins. There are lots of cretins, as well as ditzes, squares, bitches, hicks and sluts. The book asks you, incorrigibly, to laugh at people who are dumber and uglier than you are. This bratty, undisciplined novel, while turning up its nose at other cliques, asks its readers to form an elitist know-it-all clique of their own.


An evolution often occurs in a reader's life that can be gauged, among other ways, by one's feelings about Holden Caulfield. Somehow a person changes from adoring Holden to thinking he's a spoiled, boring little pissant. If you're in the latter category, you can safely give Special Topics a wide berth. And you have my permission, next time the book comes up in party small talk, to repeat the particulars of this review. Provided you cite your source.

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