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Last Updated: Oct 16th, 2008 - 13:33:17 |
Novels that begin with an unsolved murder are usually good for one simple reason: anticipating a mystery's solution makes literature compelling.
Unfortunately, Marisha Pessl's debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics - which utilizes this time-tested literary device, purposely leaves some loose ends, the bane of the average reader's existence. Fortunately for Pessl, her prose is damn near brilliant, and clever enough that most readers may be forced to forgive her blatant literary transgressions.
"Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider's death, I'll tell you about my mother's," the narrator, Blue Van Meer, offers at the beginning of chapter one. From there we learn that following her mother's death, a mysterious auto accident, Blue spent most of her childhood traveling with her father - a political science professor with an affinity for third-world revolutions - from one third-tier college to another, "the schools no one had ever heard of, sometimes not even the students enrolled in them."
In his defense, Blue's father, Gareth, reveals his affinity for the Common Man. "Why should I waste my time teaching puffed-up teenagers whose minds are curdled by arrogance and materialism? No, I shall spend my energies enlightening America's unassuming and ordinary."
Then, during the summer before Blue's senior year in high school, the two settle down in Stockton, N.C., where Blue enrolls in the private school St. Gallway.
"The catalogue featured the proverbial wound-up rhetoric drenched in adjectives, sunny photos filled with bushy autumn trees, teachers with the kind faces of mice, and kids grinning as they strolled down the sidewalk, holding big textbooks in their arms like roses."
Blue soon finds herself reluctantly welcomed into an elite crew of ambitious students - known to the rest of the school as "The Bluebloods" - and under the informal tutelage of the deceased-to-be Hannah Schneider, a film studies teacher who "liked being incongruous, the lone Bombshell slinking into a Norman Rockwell, the ostrich among buffalo."
Regarding Hannah, Blue feels sure that "somewhere, at some time, she'd been the toast of something. And a confident, even aggressive, look in her eyes made me certain she was planning a comeback."
It soon becomes apparent, however, that Hannah, The Bluebloods, and everyone else at St. Gallway are not quite the people they present themselves to be. Everyone seems to have a dark secret.
As the novel hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion, larger truths are revealed one by one. Blue, a diligent observer with a caustic wit - a Holden Caulfield of the 21st century - slowly pieces the mystery together only to discover a shocking truth about her father's past.
Like a lot of contemporary novels, Special Topics relies on a literary gimmick: constant reference to previous works. In describing Gareth's girlfriends - all of whom Blue refers to simply as the June Bugs - Blue paints an effective picture with only a small flourish of her brush.
"Sometimes June Bugs weren't too terrible. Some of the sweeter, more docile ones, like poor, droopy-eyed Tally Meyerson, I actually felt sorry for, because even though Dad made no attempt to hide the fact that they were as temporary as Scotch tape, most were blind to his indifference (see 'Basset Hound,' Dictionary of Dogs, Vol.1)."
Special Topics is a semi-dry festival of analogy, hilarity and interjection. But be forewarned: Pessl toys with a reader's fundamental trust in an author - the assumption that all questions will be answered. Instead of tying the narrative together into a neat package of plot, Pessl opts for a list of questions, seemingly meant to provoke insightful dialogue about the various possible endings. But all the ending really provokes is frustration, and the reader is left with only one last burning inquiry: Why?
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