Pessl, Marisha - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

According to rules set out by Raymond Chandler, a detective novel must have a powerful and bedazzling narrative that keeps even the most intelligent reader guessing. And then the novel should climax with a “whodunit” revelation that is somehow both surprising and inevitable. The reader remains one step behind until, finally, the last piece falls into place and, with a whisper or a shout, the culprit can be named.

A successful mystery writer often performs this precarious balancing act by pitting a brilliant hero against an equally formidable villain. (Sherlock Holmes and his arch-enemy Professor James Moriarty, for example. Or Encyclopedia Brown and Bugs Meany.)

The hero of Marisha Pessl’s wonderful debut, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, is Blue Van Meer, a fantastically well-read sixteen-year old girl who, since her mother was killed in a car crash ten years ago, has been traveling the country with her father. Gareth Van Meer forfeited his Ivy League post soon after his wife’s death, opting instead to fill guest lecture positions at dozens of small state colleges, never staying for more than a semester in any position. He is also working on a book about a shadowy (possibly imaginary) group of assassins known as the Nightwatchmen.

As they racked up miles on their blue Volvo, Gareth took it upon himself to prepare Blue to meet any intellectual challenge. Father and daughter had Shakespeare “Sonnet-a-Thons.” They attempted to memorize The Waste Land, did vocabulary flash cards, author analogies, and essay recitation. They quoted and studied and dramatized literature. Blue read War and Peace in elementary school. From the classics, to history and psychology, to the trashy biographies of movie stars - there are few books Blue hasn’t read. She has seen an extraordinary number of films, too. She is well-schooled in classical music and has a strong grasp on art history.

What’s more, Blue seems to have subsumed every cultural encounter (highbrow and lowbrow); she has internalized the most arcane trivia. She measures her father’s relationships using the gestation periods of the animal kingdom: “Dad’s romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).” She describes one teacher as “guiltily watchable” and “addictive,” like Dynasty and As The World Turns - “one felt something fantastically bitchy was about to happen.” Blue, who is also the narrator, annotates her story:

I felt, not dread or apprehension, only an awareness that something grueling was looming in front of me, something so vast I couldn’t see all of it, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to take it on (See Nothing but a Compass and an Electromteter: The Story of Captain Scott and the Great Race to Claim Antarctica, Walsh, 1972).

Blue’s story is laid out like a syllabus, with each chapter named after a book of the Western Canon. The book’s conclusion is a final exam.

Gareth and Blue finally settle in the little town of Stockton, North Carolina where Blue attends a swanky private school for her senior year. A teacher, Hannah Schneider, pressures her to join the school’s “in crowd,” known collectively as “the Bluebloods.” At first Blue is shy and awkward. Her social development, after all, has been mostly cerebral. She prefers to be the anthropologist, observing her peers with “the quiet precision of Jane Goodall.” But Blue is soon caught up in the life of the Bluebloods. She dyes her hair and starts lying to her father. She begins to drink and hang out at bars using a fake ID. She falls in love for the first time. She also gets caught up in her new friends’ favorite pastime - investigating Hannah Schneider’s secret past. The Bluebloods eavesdrop on Hannah’s late night trysts at the Cottonwood Motel. They try to ascertain the identity of a mysterious “Valerio.” They witness a suspicious drowning death at a party at Hannah’s house.

Hannah takes the Bluebloods on a hiking trip in the Great Smoky Mountains and winds up dead, hanging from an orange electrical cord. Blue was the last person to speak to Hannah and the first to discover her body, which isolates Blue from the rest of the Bluebloods. She doesn’t believe the official verdict that Hannah’s death was a suicide. She undertakes her own investigation, her erudition as her guide, and finds sinewy connections to her own family. Now she fears for the safety of her father.

It is a tribute to the complexity of the story and the talent of the author that Special Topics in Calamity Physics cannot be easily summarized in the space allotted here. Pessl spent years creating spreadsheets and developing detailed character backgrounds to keep track of the twists and turns and clues her young heroine must follow. It is only when Pessl strays from the murder mystery that the book becomes bogged down under the weight of its many characters and subplots and Nabakovian wordplay. The Second Act is sometimes excruciatingly slow and fifty pages too long. But the reader will do well to push through it. A dramatic twist - and an exciting climax Raymond Chandler would be proud of - awaits at the end.