I feel like Pessl wants to keep one guessing as long as possible about what type of book Special Topics might be-she wants to avoid collapsing the wavefunction, if you will, for as long as possible. Marisha Pessl tries to create a “dark, strong drink” by turning it into a strange brew, and the result is … patchy. As a reader, one can either take this book seriously, at face value-and very probably enjoy it-or one just has to laugh at its earnestness. She describes everything in an overwrought, self-annotated technicolor.

Blue van Meer, our protagonist, is just that kind of girl. Not a sentence goes by without some sort of allusion to a book, movie, or television show-complete with actual citation. It is OMG, LITERARY literary, with neon lights and pink glitter and embarrassingly ill-fitting pantsuits. See, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is not just literary. I have nothing against Jonathan Franzen and will in fact shortly be reading my first Franzen novel … but he says of Special Topics, “Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink.” And if that’s not a warning sign that we are about to enter the land of silly over-extended metaphors, then I don’t know what is. It sports a blurb from Sir Literary Author Himself, Jonathan Franzen, Esq. In fact, if I had to judge this book by its cover, I should have gone off the back cover.

Then, by the time I arrived at the end, I was wondering if it was any of those things at all. (Excellent at writing about them, but terrible at speaking.) Special Topics in Calamity Physics presented me with a particular challenge, because it seems to be so many things. Well, to be honest, I am terrible at talking about books I’m reading, or have read, any time. It isn’t.Īttempting to describe this book to people as I read it was a baffling experience. I just thought I should warn anyone who, like me, mistakenly begins reading the book by thinking it’s about physics. And don’t take this as an indictment of the book for its non-physics focus. Of course, if you are not shallow (like me) and did more than just judged the book by its title and cover, you would know this.

Calamity physics