At that point the teenage insights of the book's narrator, Blue van Meer, become only part of a more complex construction, and it becomes evident that Pessl has hidden a secret history beneath her novel's surface.

All Pessl must do is dispel the suspicion that she is dawdling and indicate that serious ingenuity is at play. The extremely good news: 'Special Topics in Calamity Physics' soon jettisons its booster rockets and begins to soar. At first this takes some getting used to. Pessl shoehorns so many of these asides into 'Special Topics in Calamity Physics' that her narrative unfolds in a state of perpetual interruption. 159).' Most of the fakery is witty, but occasionally it falls flat. Sometimes the references are real, but more often they are bogus: 'She was now disturbingly peaceful (see 'Lake Lucerne,' A QUESTION OF SWITZERLAND, Porter, 2000, p. Like this: 'I decided to take control of the situation (see 'Emma,' Austen, 1816).' Or: 'I knew I'd probably flee without warning, like Hannibal's elephants during the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C.'

This novel's blatant gimmickry also promises trouble: Pessl endlessly recycles the idea of citing literary attributions or historical antecedents for every thought. Whether she is reinventing, satirizing or dissecting the conventions of prep lit, she has confined herself to a small canvas and a wearyingly familiar world. Foer wound up far exceeding the expectations he created, but Pessl starts out on thinner ice. Otherwise she risks sounding pitiably overeager to impress. It also means that the narrative, described as 'Core Curriculum,' is sectioned into chapters named for works by writers familiar from the classroom.Ī fledgling author who invokes Shakespeare, Flaubert and Allen Ginsberg for a tale of boarding-school intrigue had better live up to her grandiose aspirations. In Pessl's case that means sustaining the mock-academic brio of her title throughout a long, serpentine, seemingly lightweight schoolgirl story. Marisha Pessl's 'Special Topics in Calamity Physics' is the most flashily erudite first novel since Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Everything Is Illuminated.' With its pirouettes and cartwheels, its tireless annotations and digressions, it has a similar whiz-kid eagerness to wow the reader.

Calamity physics novel