Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
fyi, "calamity physics" is not a real type of physics (george, 2022)
Hi y’all,
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so conflicted in reviewing a book. It took me three tries to get through Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I first started reading it about a year ago, got to page 50, and gave up. I thought it was boring. About 6 months ago, I tried again, to the same results. And I guess Einstein or whoever was wrong about insanity, because I tried a third time and, low and behold, I finished the book in a few days.
Or, maybe I am insane, cuz I dedicated several hours spread across two beautiful days in the park to reading a 500 page book that I ultimately found infuriating. Which is to say, the results weren’t so different after all.
Buttttttt that’s not entirely fair, to me or the book. Yes, I did literally throw it on the floor upon finishing, but that was for George’s benefit. I’d been bitching about Special Topics all day, he deserved some drama at the conclusion too. Butttttt I’d been bitching about it all day because it was all I could think about. So, again, conflicted. Because for all that I found it overblown and under-edited, by the time I got to page 200, I was totally hooked. All I wanted to do was read.
And also, for the record, I will definitely be in the minority for disliking this book—NYT bestseller, award winning debut, six figure auction, 30 translations, blah blah blah. I’m sure it was positively reviewed in important places when it came out in 2007. Jesse, literary tastemaker and guardian angel of this blog, loved it. It’s been compared to The Virgin Suicides (which I loved) and The Secret History (which I hated). So, ya know, take my review with a grain of salt.
Quick summary: Special Topics in Calamity Physics starts with the mysterious death of Hannah Schneider. Her student, Blue, narrates the book. The authorities think that Hannah died by suicide, but Blue thinks it’s more complicated than that. To explain, Blue rewinds the narration back to a few months before Hannah’s death. It’s Blue’s senior year of high school, and she’s a new student at St. Gallway, a private school in a small town in North Carolina. Blue’s father, Gareth, is a career visiting professor of Political Science, never spending more than a few months in any school or state. Because of this itinerant childhood, Blue’s never had friends before. Hannah, who teaches a film elective at the school, takes Blue under her wing. Blue isn’t the first student that Hannah has befriended—there’s a small clique of five that meets every Sunday for dinner at Hannah’s house. They’re all beautiful and aloof—Charles, Jade, Nigel, Leulah, and Milton. Soon Blue joins the clique, and begins to learn these kids, and their enigmatic teacher, aren’t as polished as they appear. Eventually, we’ll see and potentially solve the mystery of Hannah’s death.
So, yes, The Secret History is a great comparison, given that its summary is nearly identical. I love campus novels, even when the characters are hardly in class. I love stories about mysterious cliques of beautiful, charismatic people. And I love literary mysteries that are equal parts lyrical, creepy, and insightful. (And for all of these reasons, I think Twilight is the best love story of the 00s.) Special Topics hits enough of these marks that it’s not surprising I was totally hooked, despite it’s pretty large flaws.
Something else I enjoyed: without spoilers, the solution to the central mystery of Special Topics reminds me of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which I reviewed a year ago. In both books, the past intrudes on the present, forcing the protagonist (and reader) to revise not only their understanding of the past and themselves, but also their plans for the future. Even though both books were published a bit over a decade ago, in this way they resonate with a very contemporary (and very online) experience. I like this set up a lot.
Though I suppose saying the ending of Special Topics contains a “solution to the mystery” is a little misleading. There’s a proposed solution, which may or may not be complete. The question, ultimately, is how can we truly know or understand the past? In the book, as in life, that’s both an epistemological question and also some good ol’ fashion conspiracy theorizin’.
Back to similarities between The Secret History and Special Topics:
The almost unreadable purple prose that their precocious teenage narrators use to tell the stories.
The close cliques of friends who are so shoddily developed that it’s hard to remember which character is which, even 400 pages into the book.
But the most insufferable part of Special Topics are the poorly timed, absurdly long, mostly pointless digressions. This happens many times throughout the book, but its most infuriating by the end. At the height of the climax, Pessl pulls you away from the story to satirize local news. Why? What the fuck is the point? No seriously, this paragraph follows the harrowing discovery of Hannah’s dead body:
I watched the program until the very end, when Cherry smiled and twittered, “Have a great morning!” and the camera zoomed away from her and Norvel, like a fly zipping around the studio. From her triumphant grin, it appeared she was hoping the camping tragedy would be her claim to fame, her Fifteen Minutes (That Could Potentially Lead to a Full Half Hour), her First-Class Ticket to Somewhere (with Fully Reclining Seats and Champagne before Takeoff). Cherry seemed to see it all twisting into the distance like a four-lane highway: “The Cherry Jeffries Talk Show: Spill Your Heart Out,” CHAY-JEY, a conservative clothing line for the serous blond working woman (“No longer an oxymoron"), “Cherry Bird,” the Cherry Jeffries fragrance for Women in Motion, the newspaper article in USA Today, “Move over, Oprah, Here comes Cherry.”
A well placed digression, one that interrupts the action of a story to comment on something that seems only tangential to it, one that appears unrelated to the matter at hand but circles back around by the end of the paragraph to reveal itself relevant either emotionally or thematically or even politically—these types of digressions are the outliers in Special Topics. Instead, we get digressions like the one above—all empty flourishes. They illuminate very little about the world of the book, the “personal” or “political” of the drama, and instead, serve to show (repeatedly, redundantly) how well-read and clever the protagonist is. Every few pages, Blue provides inline citations for fictional books with titles like The Unauthorized Biography of Indonesia Sotto, or Almanac of American Strange Habits, Tics and Behaviors, or Narcissism and Culture Jamming the USA.1 Maybe the above aside is meant to show Blue’s shock and protective emotional detachment. If that’s the case, it would have been more surprising and thereby more striking and evocative for the above to be a single line.
Jonathan Franzen blurbed the book2 and I can see the resemblances between Franzen’s and Pessl’s fiction—big, maximalist books, that can be snarky and satirical, but at their core are earnest and emotional. (Also, they share an agent.) But Franzen knows how to write a well-placed digressions. He’s prudent. If you’ve read Franzen, you’ve had the experience of reaching the climax of a story, and then abruptly being cut off, just when the going gets good, to swap to a strange anecdote or even a new narrator, who you don’t know and don’t care about. You’re frustrated—for a minute. And then you’re caught up again, captivated by the new voice. His digressions can last for pages—but they always connect back in some way, almost magically, to the matter at hand. It’s enthralling.
Pessl’s digressions, unfortunately, are just distracting. They make the ultimate twist at the end of the book seem to come out of nowhere, even though there are plenty of clues, hidden under paragraphs and paragraphs of inanity written in the most stilted, flowery prose imaginable. The metaphors are impressively grating. A sample:
I made the grave error of glancing up at him again. His face—head light-bright from the light on the Turner, eyelashes absurdly long like those of a Jersey Cow—was headed straight toward me, drifting on down like Gondwanaland, the giant Southern landmass that inched toward the South Pole 200 million years ago.
That’s a description of a handsome boy trying to kiss Blue.
Special Topics is nominally structured as a required reading list, like for a college course, with each chapter named after a famous work of literature, mostly novels. It’s pretty much an average high school English class canon (E. M. Forster, Tennessee Williams, Emily Bronte, and plenty of Shakespeare) with occasionally forays into translated literature (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marquis de Sade, Kafka, Ovid). The books have only a surface relationship to the contents of the chapter, from what I can tell. The chapter titled One Hundred Years of Solitude has mostly to do with Blue being isolated. In the chapter titled A Moveable Feast, the clique eats dinner. In the chapter titled Moby Dick, someone drowns. And in Bleak House, two characters visit a sad, empty house that feels haunted. Maybe I’m not being charitable, or I’m not reading Special Topics closely enough, but this graceless relating of text really rankled me. To turn a book into a reading list deeply excites the book lover in me, but it’s executed so lazily and carelessly. The narrator either only has a surface level understanding of the literature she references, or she expects that her readers do.
Which is part of a larger problem I had with the text. Special Topics wants so badly to be perceived as intellectual, but it achieves this in the style of a child, by endlessly referencing facts with very little analysis.
“Always live life with your biography in mind,” Blue’s father tells her. And later, “Spend your energy on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don’t care what those themes are—they’re yours to uncover and stand behind—so long as, at the very least there is courage.” Special Topics, in many ways, is written as Blue’s response to this prompt.
But the story Blue tells is one in which she has very little autonomy, where her limited choices have limited repercussions. She styles herself as a sleuth, ready to uncover mysteries—but the mystery has already been solved by a stranger, someone just a phone call away, who’s ready to tell Blue the whole story. It’s a surprising choice, to have the “answer” to Hannah’s death ready packaged by someone else. It must be purposeful: Pessl just as easily could have had Blue uncover some clue in Hannah’s house. But I can’t figure out what the purpose is.
And moreover, the book hasn’t given me any reason to trust that there is a purpose. Special Topics repeatedly insists that books—and intellectualism more broadly—are no replacement for real life experience. Blue definitely gains real life experience over the course of the book. But she’s still not the agent, she’s a passenger along for the ride. It’s fine that she doesn’t seem to recognize this. But troublingly, neither does Pessl.
Ultimately, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is an ambitious debut by a talented writer, but it misses the high mark it sets for itself. This would be more forgivable if it wasn’t incredibly bloated—500 pages!3—and poorly paced. The murder promised page one doesn’t occur until page 336. Blue doesn’t even begin her investigation in earnest until page 427. And as a reader, you’re annoyed, because the book wasn’t what it told you it would be.
Besides the bad pacing, most of what I’ve described are actually rather minor failings, something that a good line editor could’ve made a point to address or cut or otherwise fix. (The pacing problem can also be fixed, it’s just not what I would call “minor.”) I’m curious what the editorial notes were like—if this book was sagging under the weight of another, more pressing problem; if the editor thought her role was only to have the lightest of touches; or if, with the buzz of a big advance and a young author secured, the editor shrugged and said, “Mission accomplished” before even taking pen to paper.
I’m being mean.
Tbh, I have more criticism of the book, but you get the picture and I’m going way too hard anyway: I didn’t hate Special Topics. Engrossing books are exceedingly rare. When I worked at a literary agency, I was shocked by how many beautiful and totally boring books we received on submission every day. As it turns out, it’s much easier to write a formally and stylistically perfect book, than it is to write an interesting one. I’m most frustrated by how close Special Topics comes to being both.
So yeah, I’d read Pessl’s other books. I have a feeling they’re good.
If you want to give Pessl a chance too, you can buy Special Topics in Calamity Physics here, and I’ll receive a small commission.
What a weekend! I spent the 4th of July getting sandy and sunburnt at the Rockaways, NYC’s best beach. When I first moved to New York, I lived in the Financial District, and every weekend in the summer my roommates and I would take the ferry down to the beach. We loved the ferry. We’d wake up at 7am to catch the early one, before it got too hot to sit out on the top deck. We wrote a fake song for our fake band (Tongue Control) about our love for the ferries: We don’t need a yacht, cuz we got public transit / We don’t give a fuck, bout going to the Hamptons. But now I live in Brooklyn, and the fastest way to get to the Rockaways is by train.
And wonderfully, the train is a really lovely way to get to the beach. New York is in vacation mode, baby! Everyone’s wearing their shorts and sandals. Everyone’s hefting folding chairs, coolers and striped umbrellas. Everyone’s here to relax. The A train to the Rockaways is the scene of New York’s most colorful fashion, besides maybe the L train to Bushwick on a Saturday night. It turns the A from a commuter train to a getaway car. I fucking love it.
At the beach, everyone brought a book, though most (including mine) were still unopened by the end of the day. But George and I had fun checking out what the beach reads of the summer are this year. Tbh, they weren’t that different from last year’s choices—The Song of Achilles, Bunny, Real Life. One guy was reading a book with a pink and orange cover called Abolitionism. Feminism. Now. that George misread as “Abolish Feminism Now.” Most intriguing was the paperback read by a woman with a raffia beach bag that I could fit in twice, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. I’m sold on the title alone.
xoxo,
Book Notes
PS. lmk what books you’ve spotted this week by replying to this email, hitting me up directly at booknotesblog@gmail.com, or leaving a comment.
Which is why I cited my source in the sub-header. I never got past 11th grade science, so how was I to know calamity physics isn’t a real thing?!?!
I have a UK edition, and Franzen must be less cool there, because he’s stuck on the inner cover while Audrey Niffenegger gets the front.
I love love love big, fat maximalist books, but they absolutely have to earn their length, and it’s very rare they do. Most writers are better when a good editor keeps them trim and tidy at 300 pages or so. I’ll die on this hill.
This was fantastic please keep trash talking books