It’s going to be impossible to talk about this novel without revealing some plot details, including those of later (and sometimes pivotal) events. So if you haven’t yet read the novel and want to maintain the mystery and the surprise, it may be a good idea for you to read no further, as spoilers will most certainly follow. That being said, most discussions of Special Topics in Calamity Physics focus on a handful of things; the youth and beauty of Marisha Pessl (she is both young and striking, but that’s all you’ll read from me on the subject), the resemblance of her style to Nabokov (which I will discuss later), and the fact that it’s sort of strange for it to take 350 pages for a 515 page novel to really hit its stride; I’ll discuss that as well, but I think the most obvious and important place to begin is with the narrator.
Our guide through this novel is Blue Van Meer, a precocious 17 year-old girl who is more well-read than most professors I know, and certainly more well read than I am (or perhaps only more widely read, as she makes several mistakes in her many references that, while of no material value to the story, indicate a failure to retain the remedial bits of the information she has accumulated). I was torn throughout the book as to what sort of a person Blue is; obviously she’s erudite, but she lacks any sense of the social graces, and is completely under the thumb of her father, whom she adores, though it’s hardly clear that he’s worth it. He shuffles her around from school to school, from state to state, so often that he becomes her only constant, and her only real friend. He restricts her friendships (or her social encounters, anyway) to those that are related to her academic advancement, and then really only if he feels they are worthy, which he rarely does. Very little is made of this by Blue, as though it were a perfectly normal thing, but it strikes me as being more than a little bit indicative of just how controlling he really is; his ideas become Blue’s ideas and at first she shares his disdain for most people who aren’t up to her own level of learning (it seems out of place for a revolutionary, but more on that later). It seems to me less like a father/daughter relationship than like a strange sort of Stockholm Syndrome.
Later, after Blue has become a sort of mascot member of a misfit-but-still-popular Heathers-like group of students called “the Bluebloods” she comes out of her shell a bit, and into her own, but it’s almost disappointing to find that, underneath it all, she’s really just a regular teenage girl, with the same sort of bizarre and callous inhumanity that characterizes all teenage girls (teenage boys have their own brand of callous inhumanity, but it’s not really relevant to the novel). She is made pretty by a terrifyingly shallow yet still desirable young woman by the name of Jade, a name that can’t be accidental, given her attitudes towards sex (I can’t decide if the late-night trysts in the bathroom stalls at the roadhouse are the result of too little of the shy playing that marks most of our awakenings to our own sexuality, or far, far too much of it). Blue’s newfound physical attractiveness gives her a kind of in, a way to become more than just a mascot for the group and a geeky brain to the rest of the school, but it doesn’t do too much for her personality. She doesn’t entirely let go of her father’s academic hubris, but she translates most of it into an equally strong contempt for the physical. As her transformation from mousy academic to hot teen princess goes on, her remarks about people’s clothes and weight and general body type become more and more at the front of the narrative. She trades one kind of class contempt for another. Her treatment of Zach, the mostly innocent and quite shy young suitor, is quite disgusting, and is really the strongest evidence that she is becoming simply just another Typical Teenage Girl (although I’m not certain such a creature exists in the real world). He is nothing but kind and patient towards her, and he’s painfully aware that he doesn’t live up to her standards. So she finds herself agreeing to a date she doesn’t want, and then simply discards him with no explanation, under the assumption that because she has a deeply selfish reason, that of course can’t be articulated to poor Zach, that even her most pointlessly cruel behaviour is justified (this is what I meant by the inhumanity of the teenage girl). What she does “isn’t about” Zach, so she is perfectly justified in breaking his poor little heart.
The problem is that you can’t hate her for it. She’s never truly at home with the Bluebloods, and her father has her so thoroughly dominated that she’s quite lost most of the time, even when it becomes obvious to the reader that she is being manipulated by everyone, including the lovely Hannah Schneider, who is in many ways more the centre of the book than Blue herself. No matter how horribly she treats Zach, it’s always clear to the reader that she herself is the victim of being used and manipulated by people on all sides, far more deliberately and for reasons that are not entirely clear (although for the Bluebloods it seems obvious that their reasons are a matter of petty jealousy; Hannah Schneider marks her out as her favourite right from the beginning, from before they even meet formally).
Blue does eventually leave behind her father’s influence, but only after she takes it to its most extreme possible end, a massive, complicated conspiracy held together by a web of barely-plausible references that, somehow, is compelling enough to be believable. Once she has reached this point, stopped being a chrysalis and become the butterfly for which she was named, she wakes up one morning to find her father gone. This trauma, by no means the only one she has suffered by that point, forces her to become her own woman, and to shed most of her Typical Teenage Girl persona, and even to come out from under the thumb of her father, although she retains the lessons that both conditions taught her. The reader is left with the impression that, while we may never have liked Blue, and may never have thought her fit or in a position of power, we are left with no choice but to believe that she will be okay, that she will triumph as an intelligent, functional woman, and what’s more, that she deserves such a triumph.
A discussion of Marisha Pessl’s style will not take us in the direction of Nabokov quite as firmly as most reviewers would have us go. I’ve read fifteen of his books, so I believe I am at least marginally qualified to make some statements on the issue. On a purely superficial level, it’s easy to see how the mistake could be made to refer to this book as “Nabokovian”, or “in the tradition of Lolita“. Like Lolita, it has strong element of a road book, although really only in the early chapters, and at the very end, where the constant descriptions of past travels acts more as the key to a puzzle than a plot device or even, really, a theme. Nabokov makes use of quotations, both real and fictional, but not with anything like the density of Pessl, and with a much less shotgun approach. Nabokov’s quotations, paraphrases and references, even when fictional, are all aimed towards a single theme, or a single related group of themes, and they become extremely effective as a result. Pessl’s use of them is also effective, but to a radically different end; they are a stylistic quirk, a mode of obliquely describing the characters and action of the book. Rather than using a metaphor or a simile, Pessl will drop in a short citation that serves the same approximate function. At the level of the sentence, Nabokov operates in a strikingly different way. Metaphors and similes are certainly present, but his prose becomes very much about things rather than ideas of things. Nabokov will spend half a page describing how the light hits a window pane, or how shadows move across a table, the way the colours of various jams light up a row of jars. Yes there is a kind of neurosis in Nabokov’s prose, but his sentences are very slow, physical, and deliberate despite that. Pessl also has a kind of neurosis, but hers is frantic and abstract, much more of the mind than the body, even when her subject is the body. I don’t wish to imply that Pessl’s prose is bad; it is by no means bad, although it takes tremendous concentration. A comparison to Nabokov is simply something that exists only at the most superficial level.
The pacing of Special Topics in Calamity Physics was definitely unusual. I’ve heard reviewers claim that simply nothing happened until page 350, at which point they couldn’t put the book down. For me the point at which I became unable to put the book down occurred at page 314, but I would never claim that nothing happened up until that point. Everything of real importance happened before that point; it was only after that point that why it was important started to become clear. Blue uses her considerable powers of observation to piece together several potential versions of what may have happened to Hannah Schneider, from suicide or a revenge killing to her being murdered to disguise her father’s guilt over infidelity or her own—and Blue’s father’s—involvement in a group of terrorist radicals from the 1970s. The Nightwatcmen theory starts out as less plausible than the others, but Pessl gives us a mountain of evidence and paranoia to sift through, and ultimately it becomes too overwhelming to dismiss, and it becomes, for a while anyway, very real. The lack of a resolution to the questions surrounding Hannah’s death, the gardener’s gunshot wound and subsequent disappearance, the accidental death/murder of Smoke, are an important counterpoint to the sense of absolute certainty that followed Blue and her father around for most of the book, and I applaud Pessl for going the route of The French Lieutenant’s Woman rather than that of a standard whodunnit.
I’ve defended this book elsewhere, even before I had done no more than simply skim it, and I don’t think that was a mistake. It was an excellent read, and I highly recommend this book to anyone who believes as I do that doing a little bit of work, that actually concentrating on a book, is still a worthwhile exercise.
Next up, Ian Fleming’s Dr. No.
