Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Blue van Meer, the narrator and heroine of Special Topics in Calamity Physics, is a Keats-quoting wunderkind at the prestigious St. Gallway School in Stockton, N.C., gracefully able to reference works of both high (Jane Eyre) and dubious (Remembering "Solid Gold") literary merit.
Her creator, Marisha Pessl, is emerging as a wunderkind of the publishing world, engendering well-deserved comparisons to Donna Tartt and Jonathan Safran Foer as a result of her dazzling debut novel.
After a childhood spent hopscotching among third-tier college towns in the family Volvo, Blue and her professor father, the George Clooney-clone Gareth, settle in Stockton for her senior year. (Her mother, Natasha, died in a car accident years before.)
There Blue is pulled into an elitist clique of kids known as the Bluebloods -- who turn out to be a pretty bruised bunch, or so we're led to believe -- led by a mesmerizing yet mysterious teacher, Hannah Schneider. A pair of deaths occurring under murky circumstances -- were they accidents? suicides? murders? -- puncture the Bluebloods' cozy, drawing-room world, and Blue assumes the role of a postmodern Sherlock Holmes.
The story, especially as the whodunit arc shifts unexpectedly, is by turns gripping and dark, funny and poignant as Pessl sketches (sometimes literally, because Calamity Physics includes character illustrations) a broad picture of adolescent angst and family ties, however twisted.
But the real star of the doorstop-weighty tome is the nimble prose. Pessl's talent for verbal acrobatics keeps the pages flipping with minimal effort. Nouns smoothly become verbs: Fingers windmill a cigarette. Blue light velvets a room. Long hair ivies over an armrest. Descriptions are bitingly vivid: Low sofas resemble "big, floating graham crackers you didn't dare sit on for fear they'd break and you'd get crumbs everywhere." The sky sits "hoisted into the air by the trees ... the stars, little rhinestones" like those in the cowboy boots of one of Gareth's many ex-girlfriends.
It's hard to sustain the metaphorical cartwheels, however. Packed with such fresh imagery, it's jarring when Pessl stumbles, repeating phrases. (More than once she compares time spans to Ming Dynasties and describes how interlocking arms "pretzel.")
Still, Pessl clearly loves playing with language, and with literary convention. Beginning with the title, as knowingly dull as "English 101," Pessl is winking so much you wonder whether the 28-year-old already has crow's feet. The accompanying drawings? They're labeled "visual aids." The myriad parenthetical references? Many of them are as mythical as The Odyssey (see Remembering "Solid Gold").
Structured like the contents of a class syllabus, chapters are named after great works culled from the Western canon, from Othello to, fittingly, at the very end, Metamorphosis. All are listed under the rubric "Required Reading."
Indeed.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
By Marisha Pessl
Viking, 514 pp., $25.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
