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First novels are dangerous, risky creatures. They’re a gamble for the publisher and the novelist, and for everyone in between. Perhaps that’s why truly daring first novels are so few and far between, and why they garner such disproportionate attention amongst their peers.
For the almost irrelevant hullabaloo about Marisha Pessl’s literary debut, with the hefty Special Topics in Calamity Physics, it was difficult to know what the book was actually about. Bloggers from the fair to the ridiculous snarked about her good looks, her privileged upbringing, the advance and all the zeroes it entailed. All this was well before the book came out. And all of it irrelevant.
Special Topics takes a close, self-conscious look at the life of Blue Van Meer, the precocious daughter of a tangle of intellectualism and pretension masquerading as a father. Gareth Van Meer is given to declarative statements and short love affairs with women of a certain age that Blue refers to as his June Bugs. His wife, the divine and ethereal Natasha, died suddenly, leaving Gareth and Blue rudderless and drifting from university town to university town across the US, which is where Blue starts us on her strange narrative.
But not before telling us that this story is about Hannah Schneider, who died. Blue’s story really begins in Stockton, North Carolina, where she spends her senior year of high school entangled with five fellow students (Jade, Leulah, Charles, Milton, and Nigel – each with their own startlingly flashy personalities) and the attentions of the charismatic Hannah, their film teacher who draws the six of them into a teenaged attempt at the Algonquin round table, with about the same amount of booze. The climax of the novel, at Hannah’s death, sends the hitherto-normal novel into a paroxysm of thrills, detective work, and almost bizarre roller-coaster bends.
But I make the mistake of saying Hannah’s death in the novel is prefaced by any kind of normalcy. If Blue Van Meer is Pessl’s conduit, she’s been stuffed like an animal at a taxidermist with every manner of literary and cultural reference under the sun. A June Bug, as Gareth explains, “turned out to be of the Sylvia Plath variety”. Blue noticed a classmate as being “a Goodnight Moon (Brown 1947). Goodnight moons had duvet eyes, shadowy eyelids, a smile like a hammock and a silvered, sleepy countenance that most people wore only during the few minutes prior to sleep…”. Blue’s descriptions are positively drenched with references, allusions, witty comparisons – proof of the insular, bookish world she’s grown up in.
Okay, so there’s an explanation for the bracketed bibliographies that nestle in otherwise ordinary sentences on every single page. It’s like reading a academic journal on something obscure, which is, of course, the idea. It doesn’t make it any easier to read. While Blue’s riotous use of literary and cultural references makes for a delightful romp through pretty much the entire 20th century, the effect of the constant parenthetical sources is jolting and distracting.
The strength of the book lies both because of and in spite of these quirks. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more singularly well-defined teenaged heroine like Blue, especially in a first novel. What suffers in the book has nothing to do with her sharp outline and ebullient opinions. And you’d be equally hard-pressed to find a book that starts out so cerebrally and takes such a sharp left turn into gripping film-noir gumshoeing.
So yes, there are certainly flaws in Pessl’s well-dressed debutante. Perhaps they’re even rookie mistakes, the result of young hands being applied to so ambitious a novel. But beyond just the gems of fresh originality in Blue, the humor is perhaps the most unexpected consequence of such a high-falutin’ story. Describing a colleague of her father’s at dinner, Blue reflects dryly, “his hands behaved like fat, startled tabby cats; without warning, they’d pounce two to three feet across the table in order to seize the saltshaker or the bottle of wine.” Looking at the portrait of Jade’s mother, Blue observes:
The woman had wandered deep into her forties and, to her evident panic, had been unable to make her way back. […] (If Dad saw her he would not hesitate to call her a “badly aged Barbarella.” Or he’d use one of his Stale Candy remarks reserved for women who spent the great portion of their week attempting to half Middle Age as if Middle Age was nothing more than a team of runaway stallions: “a melted red M&M”, a “stale strawberry Sweet Tart”.)
And beyond the unexpectedly down-to-earth humor, Pessl is good with words, something perhaps her detractors were hoping against. The novel might be dense with plot and references and almost elitist jokes, but it’s also littered with that elusive beast, the well-turned phrase. Describing Hannah: “…she reached over the arm of the couch, yanked open the end-table drawer and seized a half-empty pack of Camel cigarettes. She tapped one out, windmilled it agitatedly between her fingers and looked at me with anxious interest, like I was a dress on sale, the last one in her size.”
Amid all the external noise (bloggers bemoaning her advance and her Raphaelite good looks) and despite some of the internal noise (endless parentheses, jarring, near-unbelievable plot twists), Special Topics in Calamity Physics stands on its own for nothing else than its sheer daring. It was not a safe book to write, or publish, but like any good debutante, it has stepped forward with the merits of its good breeding and unique voice. And if I had to pick a date, I would always rather spend time with a flawed work of boldness than anything impeccably polished and bland.
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I had heard so much hype about sexy Marisha Pessl’s debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I stilletto’d right out on my lunch break to pick up my hardback copy. My hopes were high. The book had everything you wanted in a chick lit thriller: an Ivillage endorsement, a tantalizing cover, and an freaky, evocative website. I loved the creepy details the kicked things off: the butterflies, the film class secret society, the mystical mother.
Then I got to reading, and things quickly went from titillating to tedious. The set-up of the book, a mock-syllabus, is supposed to be sly, but is instead excruciatingly apt. Special Topics reads like a real syllabus, and I was the student skimming over all the boring parts to get to the juicy stuff. But beneath all the jihad and June Bugs, the juice never really came. Sure, lips locked, people perished and secrets were eventually unveiled, but still (much like an overly-ambitious syllabus) Pessl is never really able to take us beneath the surface of her story. You’re invited as a spectator to her amazingly deep thought pool, but you never really get to dive in and swim with the psychos.
A lot of this distance from the story can be attributed to a lack of character development.
Her characters are apparently cunning and complex, but they feel like overly-intellectual paper dolls, painted, smug. Mere braininess cannot replace the prototype of boisterous, flawed, eager and endearing characters that are chick lit’s bread and butter, and Pessl seems to miss this mark.
For example, one of the main flaws of the book is that we only hear things from the main character Blue’s perspective. In an attempt to make her flawed and endearing, Pessl’s depiction of Blue is so self-deprecating one really feels like the girl is a wretched specimen indeed, as worthless as the common butterfly for which she is named. I am sure Pessl is aiming for a beloved Bridget Jones’s underdog affect, but it simply doesn’t stick because it is Bridget’s bad habits and struggles that make her lovable, not her self-loathing. Blue is so holier-than-thou and flawless, one really can’t relate to her, and by the end of the book you really identify with the other character’s hatred for Blue and how annoying she is. I sense this was not the author’s intention.
On the other hand, Jade, Nigel, Charles, Milton and Leulah all have the potential to be salacious and fascinating characters. Jade especially, with her decadent life and gorgeous rags, could easily inspire the acclaim of say, the bewitching character of Caitlin in Judy Blume's Summer Sisters. But Pessl never allows them to be any more than shadowy, chattery background characters. Even when Milton and Blue make out, one doesn’t really get a sense of him. He remains an affable mollusk who eventually betrays Blue. It is obvious this betrayal is supposed to be spectacular and telling, but it feels very anti-climactic, partly because of Blue’s lack of reaction and because we don’t really know Milton too well, so nothing he does can really stun us.
A chapter told from each of their perspectives would have done wonders for the book, even if they said only what we expected them to say: that Leulah was desperately resentful of Jade, that Nigel had a huge crush on Milton, that Charles loved Hannah so much he fantasized about killing her. A flashback from the intriguing Natasha, maybe revealing that she actually hated Gareth, or a June Bug’s viewpoint of Blue’s Elektra Complex would also have felt fresh and illuminating. These little revelations could have done much to draw us deeper into the plot, but they never occur.
Nowhere is this lack of character development more potent than with Hannah Schneider, the apparent heroine of the book. Hannah is supposed to be this sexy, intriguing woman with the charisma of a cult leader, basically. But a reader never feels particularly drawn to her. She doesn’t ever say anything particularly witty or charming, and she is portrayed always as vague, manic, fluttering and frayed. I don’t know about you guys, but in my life I avoid people like this. They freak me out. All her stay cats, her movie posters, her bizarre ramblings, her terrorist involvement…none of it added up. She just felt sloppy and undone and I was glad when she was gone. Again, I suspect this was not the author’s intention.
What Pessl lacks in character development however, she compensates for in cryptic metaphors. The woman averages a metaphor per minute, per mention, per millimeter of each page. Not just any metaphors either, long, extended, mutating metaphors that felt less illuminating and more egotistical, like reading ten of Ovid’s metamorphosis in a row. Far from adding gravitas or momentum to the plot, these dizzying metaphors serve one purpose: for Pessl to say, “Look how much I know-that you don’t.”
In fact, the entire mystery just feels like an elaborate ruse for Pessl to show off her fancy Barnard College pile o’ knowledge. Nowhere is this more obvious than the end of the book. I hate mysteries that end with information that is not supplied to readers until the very last pages. The readers should have all the same information the author does and be given a fair shot at solving the mystery for themselves. The genius of a mystery is providing information that could be read a bunch of different ways. To withhold evidence the reader could never have possibly predicted is not only unfair, it is-you guessed it-egotistical. Pessl alone wanted to unravel her elaborate ending, to wow us with her research and knowledge of less-known terrorist groups and cult behavior. But you know what? I hate her ending.
Here’s why: I hate that Blue’s Dad, the one truly charming and evocative character in the book, turns out to be a bad guy. The implication that he knew about Blue being taken out into the forest by his crazed mistress to be left for dead is just disturbing. The fact that he could just up and leave her after all that “You are the most important concept I have ever known” crap also doesn’t ring true. I also hate that the Bluebloods just drift into the background and nothing definitive ever happens with them (there’s no epilogue, no ten years later, no dazzling secret society unveiling). I hate that Servo turns out to be Gracey. Once again, a cult leader’s gotta have some charisma, the heady, irrepressible kind that bubbles out no matter how much you repress it. I get that the whole bumbling old man Falstaff thing was supposed to be a pose, but someone as perceptive as Blue should have felt something sexy brimming under his surface. Instead she declared that she hated him, a phrase she herself admitted never using. This is not the reaction one should have against someone who inspired Hannah, at a similar age, to resign herself to a life of killing and pillaging purely on this fellow’s urging. Despite the old man guise, Servo still could have been a spell-binding storyteller, had an electric sense of humor, an encyclopedia brain, strange apartheid mementoes in his house, anything that would have made him less patently dull and more darkly subversive. The whole not- taking- pictures thing does not a guru make.
Here’s my list of preferred alternate endings: A) If the Nightwatchmen thing had to go down, I would have much preferred that Andreo Verduga the gardener be Gracey. He was more sultry and brooding and obviously had the sort of appeal that made formerly sensible young girls want to fall to their knees and follow him. Meow! That’s the stuff a good chick thriller is made of.
B) Hannah takes them all out into the forest. We learn later that Charles insisted on this trip and originally wanted it to be the two of them. Hannah agrees but insists on bringing the others along. While there, Charles comes on to Hannah but she refuses. Later he finds her hooking up with Milton. This is more realistic because chicks always go for the implacable drifter over the pretty boy who tries too hard. Charles decides to kill Hannah. He makes her go into the woods with him and then hangs her. Blue finds her. Suddenly they are all lost in the woods and no one knows who the killer is. Was it Nigel, the apparent sociopath? Was it Leuluh, seemingly unassuming but desperately resentful of Hannah’s beauty and charm? Was it Jade, out of paranoid suspicion or revenge on her mother figure? Was it Milton, the man who was too emotion-less to be real? Was it Blue herself, because she found out Hannah was responsible for the death of her mother? Pessl had actually set up this story line perfectly, but decided not to use it. As a result, this book started out with potential to be a juicy thriller, but ended up like a flat lesson in irrelevant history. The most exciting part was hearing about the seven-person homicide at the costume party. That’s the kind of trivia that keeps you turning pages, not obscure wars and weird political figures.
Perhaps I am judging Pessl too harshly in light of her contemporaries, but it is impossible not to compare her to her peers. Her syllabus motif has none of the pomp and cheer of say, Becky Bloomwood’s bank statements and letters to her bank managers. Her underdog Blue has none of the lovable slob qualities of the beloved Bridget Jones. The eccentric camaraderie of the BlueBoods can’t hold a candle to the motley protagonists and plucky personal lingo of the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Her mysteries don’t intersperse social satire and real women’s worries the way Jennifer Weiner’s or Susan Isaac’s do.
But I think in terms of contemporaries, my biggest disadvantage was reading this book on the heels of the astounding duo by Melissa Banks: The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot. The difference between Pessl and Banks may be as simple as their first names. Marisha’s debut just feels like a dressed-up, desperate version of Melissa’s strong, sure prose. Marisha postures with cryptic references and intellectual allusions you have to wade through. You fight to stay awake and wonder what it is she’s trying so hard to prove. Melissa’s books rely not on intellect but incisiveness, guiding you definitively through the equally complicated stories that weave in and out, but you never feel lost or caught in a web, just mesmerized by the author’s honesty and beautifully spare prose. Melissa Banks’s metaphors bring you in deeper, make you feel closer to her. When she talks about feeling like a solid at a liquid party, you sigh “yes!.” When Pessl goes on about some random South American coup in 1952, you go “Huh?”.
Banks is by far the better novelist, providing empathetic material in an unsually elegant form. Pessl is clearly suited more for the type of essays, high brow lectures, and fist-pounding soliloquies expounded by her father in this disappointing debut novel.
I do think Pessl is a brilliant person. But like most super-smart people, Pessl’s intellect is so over-the-top as to be alienating. Her amazing brain packs a wallop that overwhelms her plot. Bank’s subtle genius merely winks at the reader as all the while her gentle prose slowly transforms you. So I’ll take Fishing over Phsyics any day of the week (syllabus notwithstanding.)