Special Topics In Calamity Physics (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
I really wanted to like this book.But it’s a train wreck. The literary carnage is so grotesque and horrifying, you can’t help but look, read. (And I promise you, just take my word for it, that metaphor is better than most that Pessl uses in this debut novel of hers.)Despite what Bayard says, it’s amazing what happens when you stop talking about a text and actually interact with it. I’ll tell you what happens: disappointment. Utter, utter disappointment.For all intents and purposes, the book doesn’t even start until the second half when a certain major character is found dead by the narrator/protagonist. As readers, we learn about the death with the first line of Chapter #1: “Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider’s death, I’ll tell you about my mother’s.” So essentially, the first half of the book amounts to literary blue balls in which Pessl torments us with bad writing and we writhe in agony praying for release.It is a common formula to take the wit and wisdom of an adult and transplant it into an adolescent (from Catcher in the Rye to Juno). Pessl brings this trite technique to a new low. Unlike the social relevance and humor of Diablo Cody or the sparse, unfathomable brilliance of Salinger, Pessl just writes with broad strokes and clunky rhetorical devices. Her writing is hyperbolic and extreme. She seems to pride herself on regurgitating endless references and allusions, but I would prefer that instead of describing someone as having “the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about her,” she just describe the damn person. Do some real work, Marisha.And oh how Marisha Pessl loves similes and metaphors. She and Augusten Burroughs should get together and have some kind of simiphor-off. Sample Pessl snippet:“Charles and his friends looked forward to the hours at her house much in the way New York City’s celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943 (see Forget About El Morocco: The Xanadu of the New York Elite, the Stork Club, 1929-1965, Riser, 1981).I have two problems with this kind of writing.1) I don’t know the way New York City’s celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943. So this metaphor is completely useless to me. Why can’t Charles and his friends just look forward to the hours at her house?2) The damn parenthetical references. They’re throughout the entire book. It’s probably supposed to help clear up my first problem with this passage, but it only serves to remove me from the story in two really stupid ways: 1) I stop reading and go look it up, or 2) Since I’m reading a book about a high school senior who can’t possibly know all of the books and references in parentheses, I can only assume this is Marisha Pessl being an annoying smartass with this kind of crappy Authorial Intrusion.(There’s also “Visual Aids” throughout the book. Drawings by the author. Really annoying. Really stupid. Absolutely unnecessary.)At one point there is a blubbery Mercedes. If anyone can send me a picture of a “blubbery” Mercedes, Authwhore will award you with a free book that is better than Special Topics in Calamity Physics.At one point, people say their names “with paint-by-numbers politeness.” This is a problem because paint-by-numbers are not polite. They can be tacky, painstaking, time consuming, fun, childish, whimsical, or any number of other things, but I don’t think that there is anything polite about paint-by-numbers and certainly nothing polite about a writer using such poorly chosen imagery with reckless abandon and intending people read 514 pages of it.At one point, “he either stared at the kid as if he were a Price is Right rerun, barely blinking, or replied in his molasses accent: ‘Nunna ya goddamn business.’” How do you stare at a Price is Right rerun? Well, Pessl knows that no one knows, so she tells us. You barely blink. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh………shouldn’t she then just have wrote that “he stared barely blinking” instead of “staring as if he were a Price is Right rerun, barely blinking?” Yes. Yes she should have. And that is why this book is categorically, officially, absolutely bad. (If you’re still wondering how exactly you stare at a Price is Right rerun, this book will also leave you wondering how you look at a snag in tights. Riveting stuff, really.)At one point, “Officer Donnie Lee happened to have saturated himself in Paul Revere-like cologne (it rode far ahead of him, alerting all of his impending arrival).” Which doesn’t even work! Paul Revere rode to warn people not of his own arrival but of the British’s. So I guess that’s why it’s Paul-Revere-like? But isn’t there a better image for something that travels ahead to warn of itself? A fog horn, perhaps? A screeching buzzer on a truck?At one point, “Hannah was wearing a housedress the color of sandpaper…”The color of sandpaper??? Pessl, how imprecise can you be!!! Is there a worse writer? What type? What grit? What brand? I’ve seen gray sandpaper, black sandpaper, brown sandpaper, rust sandpaper, beige sandpaper……..At one point, the narrator/protagonist has a fight with her father and proceeds to throw books at him. I was really hoping to learn that Marisha Pessl had some true postmodern class and sense of humor by having her throw this book at him.It didn’t happen.I threw my own copy instead.For the record, Marisha Pessl is still hot.Not Sophie Dahl hot. But still hot.
I waited a long time to read this book - years, in fact. I was more curious than I was excited, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Ultimately, I was not just disappointed. I was MAD. Here, as I explained them to a friend, are the key issues with this book: 1) Every single sentence is overwrought and overstuffed with a pretentious, stilted, stupid simile (CONFIDENTIAL TO MARISHA PESSL: There are, in fact, literary devices other than similes; I just employed one called "alliteration" in the main sentence back there). To an extent, I get it - the narrator is supposed to be a smug teenager, sure, pretentiousness abides like so many tiny Lebowskis (see what I did there?). And after all, HOW ELSE WILL THE READER KNOW THE CHARACTER LIKES TO READ A LOT? But a truly masterful storyteller - the kind who deserved the accolades this book got - would have found a way to make Blue's "voice" less excruciating. 2) A minor point, but significant: The book is supposed to take place in a very specific, contemporary-ish time frame. But Pessl's lack of direct acknowledgement of the mode of being in 2004 (say, cell phones...the Internet...Wikipedia...Google) just about became a plot hole. Speaking of, I just found one of the story's main premises - that an attractive 44 year old teacher would just hang out with her students as friends - so totally absurd in a post-Columbine, post-Mary Kay Letourneau world that it brought my blood pressure to unhealthy levels. The story is and is not contemporary, and the characters lack the sensibility or perspective that actually living in the United States in 2004 would have given them. This also relates to #3.3) Pessl also obviously did NO research on what an academic career actually is or entails. The academic world she portrays is roughly akin to Kafka's portrayal of America in Amerika, written without his ever having gone there, except even the fragments that exist of Amerika represent a masterpiece and Calamity Physics is rotten tripe. Ooh, a metaphor! PAGING MARISHA PESSL, who clearly never took Introduction to Poetic Devices: Way Beyond Similes. Anyway, the premise of an itinerant academic who is still well-respected and published is blatantly absurd, almost fantastic. Oh, you're an adjunct / lecturer who moves multiple times per year? Yet you have a $17,000 desk? Also, people keep HIRING you? I dismissed it for a while under the guise of what we'll call here Magical Realism, as well as the half-assed mystery Pessl sets up in the final fifth of the book, but after a while, the way she played fast and loose with the academy made me so livid I wanted to take this out back and burn it on my pillar of back issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education. I wish I could think of something conciliatory to say, but I hated this book. I only finished it because my new thing is finishing all books I start, and it didn't take me years with this one only because I got it from the library. The kindest thing I could possibly say is that Marisha Pessl is punching way above her weight. Unfortunately, she ain't no Nabokov. The laborious process of reading this book felt like 514 pages of a precocious child shrieking, "Aren't I clever?" into my face, only they were pronouncing clever incorrectly because they were not, in fact, very bright, and also projecting spittle into my face every single time. With apologies to the late great Roger Ebert, and his masterful take-down of North (1994), "I hated this book. Hated hated hated hated hated this book. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant reader-insulting sentence of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the readers by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
What do You think about Special Topics In Calamity Physics (2006)?
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a puzzle, a Rubik's Cube of a story created by Puzzlemaster Marisha Pessl. You receive all the information needed to solve the puzzle throughout your reading, but it's not until the end, when each side of the cube is perfectly constructed, that you see the Blinding Truth. The sides of Pessl's Cube aren't basic colors. Instead of fashioning rows and columns of nine small blue squares on one side, nine yellow squares on another, nine red, nine green, nine orange, nine white, you twist and turn to find the sides of the cube are assembled of quotations from literary texts.Side 1: The Secret History (Tartt 1992)Side 2: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle 1892)Side 3: Metamorphoses (Ovid 8)Side 4: Whereabouts (Swithin 1917); a travelogue by British essayist Horace Lloyd Swithin, a fictional manSide 5: Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (Bugliosi 1974)Side 6: Das Kapital (Marx 1867)Solving this puzzle requires immense esoteric knowledge, knowledge that the average reader will not have. Enter Blue van Meer, 16 years old and smarter than you'll ever be. She's a lovely protagonist because she gets to the core of what these Secret History-esque stories are all about: belonging. She's an outsider who infiltrates an established group and finds herself. Sort of. There's a line in Special Topics where Blue says she once felt like a smudge but after joining the exclusive Bluebloods group, she feels like a straight black line. I get so happy when a character becomes a defined, concrete line. But Pessl illuminates the dark side of this black line too. By belonging, we lose ourselves. By belonging, we open ourselves to hurt. People no longer own themselves when they place themselves in a group. As soon as you attach your lifestory to another's, you lose control and suffer the consequences.But what's most incredible about Special Topics is its discussion of these deeper themes accompanied by a thrilling story. Nothing is what it seems. For many readers, I expect the first half might be difficult to get through. The story builds to a moment that has already been spoiled in the introduction. Also: the narration is wacky. Blue has an extraordinary cultural lexicon that she mines in order to pack her writing with fake references, real but very obscure references, multiple parenthetical asides in a single sentence, Concepts Written With Capitalized Letters To Endow Them With Greater Significance, and questionable metaphors (example A: "I was forgotten like Line 2 on a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard;" example B: "a wound that squirts blood like a grape Capri Sun"). The writing is frenetic and dense, but to use a questionable metaphor of my own, I found the prose like Chipmunkified music. You know, those songs that have been upped--both pitched up and sped up--to mimic the voices of speaking tree-dwelling rodents. When I hear a normal song destroyed like that, I first think, "How awful!" But somewhere between the second chorus and the bridge, I am swayed. I start to think, "Maybe the song is better like this." So it goes with the writing. It's gimmicky and snappy and amazing and awful all at once but after a while, it sinks into your brain and it's intoxicating, absolutely perfect for what's being said. So give in to the music and start trying to solve the puzzle (you won't). But after reading, you will feel like this: Very few people realize, there's no point chasing after answers to life's important questions. They all have fickle, highly whimsical minds of their own. Nevertheless. If you're patient, if you don't rush them, when they're ready, they'll smash into you. And don't be surprised if afterwards you're speechless and there are cartoon tweety birds chirping around your head.
—Jill
This first bit is my initial reaction to the book. I'm keeping it up because I still think it's valid. However, see bellow for my post-reading thoughts. Oh, how I hate this book. The parenthetic statements are making me homicidal. The dad is a jackass of unparalleled proportion, and I have yet to see Hannah do ANYTHING that warrants Blue's fascination. Sure, she picks up strange men in diners, but really, who hasn't? The writing is way too fond of its own wit, and I'm sick of all the figurative language. It's crammed in like a hermit crab in a too-small shell (that simile is my own (and purposefully poor), but not unlike the fifty million that litter every page of the book).Now, it does have one thing going for it: plot. If someone were to tell me what the book is about without my having to read it, I'd be thrilled. Because I certainly do want to know what happens, but damn, it's a slog.After finishing: As you can tell from the above, I initially hated this book. I was eagerly awaiting the end so I could grant it ZERO stars. And I stand by my claims. Call me old-fashioned, but I think a sentence should have no more than one simile or metaphor. And I think that figurative language should be spread out a bit, because it gets to a point that it's annoying and distracting. Now, I acknowledge that this overcrowding might have been on purpose--the story is told in a teenager's voice--but it was annoying and distracting. The same thing goes with with the over-abundance of citations (although near the end of the book, there's a confrontation in the dad's office, and the citation bit gets pretty funny). And I know the dad is supposed to come off as an ass, but it made me impatient. Finally, the teen dialog was dismally inauthentic. Dee and Dum especially rang false. So I still have some reservations about the book (as my boyfriend will tell you, it's a bit banged-up because I threw it a few times).So how did it go from zero stars to four? Well, it all happened around page 311. That's when the language loosened up a little, and Pessl let what she really had going for her--the plot--take over. At this point, the story takes a dramatic turn, and it almost seems to become a different book. It made a quick transformation from AWFULLY LAME to a pretty cool action/mystery piece. I will say that I felt like this was an abrupt change that though (again) may have been on purpose, was a little awkward. But damn, who cares? From that point on, I couldn't put the book down, I kept turning back to clues in earlier pages, I accidentally let my 7th period silent reading go on ten minutes too long. Just like Blue realized she'd been duped, I saw that what I thought was a completely shitty book was, in actuality, quite fantastic.I have some problems with the last chapter--it was a little self-indulgent, I thought--but it's a small complaint.I hope that people who are hating this give it a chance.Well played, Marisha Pessl, well played. You got me.
—Casey
several people I know and like loved this book. I'm about halfway through and I hate it so far. it's sooo wes andersonish, a tale of WASPS who think they're clever (and are, too clever by half!) it's filled with nice words, and some of them are put together well, but I really don't see the big deal. except, oh right-the author is young, and goodlooking. the cover is eye-catching. Did I mention I hate it? I might even have to stop reading (if I could, I'd italicize that.) I almost never give up on a book. it's making me feel like Confederacy of Dunces did-which is a terrible feeling for me. tho it is fun to click the one star every once in awhile. can I give it a black star? or a pile of poo? if there were a pile of poo option, I might even give it 3!
—Gwenn
