Summer School

 

If the coming-of-age murder mystery is, by now, well-trodden ground--incarnations range from Donna Tartt's The Secret History to television's Veronica Mars --then Marisha Pessl manages nevertheless to create something refreshingly original with her first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics . It is, like its title, at once playful and academic, a showcase for Pessl's deft prose and considerable intellect.

At first glance Special Topics seems full of pretentious gimmickry--the table of contents is styled in the form of a course syllabus with Great Books as chapter titles, and it even comes with a tongue-in-cheek final exam. Even more distracting are the countless parenthetical citations interspersed throughout the text, referencing works both real and imaginary. Indeed, even after immersion in the book's mock-academic tone these additions never seem entirely successful, but at least they manage to feel fitting for the overall style.

It is a style defined in large part by Pessl's narrator-protagonist, Blue van Meer, a shy but hyper-intellectual sixteen-year-old whose childhood is spent following her professor father from one Podunk college town to another, never staying longer than a semester. A precocious child, Blue looks at the world a bit askew, and her strangely cutting insights grow to form one of the novel's great joys. Near the story's outset, these are focused primarily on the foibles of high school life--Blue's father has promised to spend her entire senior year in the town of Stockton, North Carolina, and Blue manages to find herself almost instantly a member of an elite clique called the Bluebloods.

Everything here is, as one might expect, a tad unusual--the clique's leader is in fact an enigmatic film teacher at the school, the same Hannah Schneider whose lifeless body will, we are told, hang from an orange extension cord before the school year's end. And even as Blue compares herself to Jane Goodall among the apes, we become aware that Pessl is presenting us not with a naturalistic depiction of high school life but with a subtly twisted world. Yet even with this feeling of lurking mystery and a gruesome death on the horizon, the first part of Special Topics drags somewhat--the standard high-school fare is simply too tired, even buoyed as it is by Blue's intellectual exuberance.

The character of Gareth van Meer, Blue's father, serves as a bright spot in this uneven beginning. A traveling academic since the sudden death of Blue's mother, Gareth never stays anywhere, or with any woman, for long; his romances are so short that Blue has taken to calling his female companions June Bugs. His is a personality full of apparent contradictions: he is an inspired instructor who disdains his students, he is a cad to his lovers but a doting father. Despite hiding behind a layer of erudition, his blustery, ambiguous personality seems oddly the most fully realized among the characters, and his Nabokovian (but platonic) relationship with his daughter is drawn with considerable feeling and depth.

As Hannah Schneider's impending death approaches and the stakes rise, though, Pessl begins to truly come into her own as a writer. Even as the pace of the story begins to accelerate, the characters deepen and the events expand in scope. Amid the many twists and turns come suspense and romance, betrayal and loss--after a long wait we are finally given external happenings that match the intricacy of Blue's inner life. The result is a last third that manages to be thrilling, affecting, and supremely clever, while maintaining Blue's quirky tone and eminent readability.

Throughout Pessl writes with breezy associativity--once she likens a woman's legs to "giant thick candy canes minus the red stripe"--and she makes copious references to things both esoteric (Quantum Field Theory) and banal (Bermuda shorts). The narrative is self-conscious if not self-referential, and Pessl periodically offers exaggerated phrases in capital letters--some people are, for example, "bruised by Life's Elbows, Kidney Punches, Head Butts and Bites on the Ear". Taken together Pessl's prose is virtuosic but surprisingly light, her intellectual references and breathless labels end up as riffs--grace notes even--without seeming to weigh down the text.

If Blue van Meer's voice, glittering and immature, manages to conceal Pessl's limitations as a writer, it also reflects, in some roundabout way, some important feature of our generation. "A joke is when I repeat something we both heard somewhere else and we laugh," proclaims one particularly funny Internet cartoon, and Blue's superficial referentiality seems somehow appropriate for a time in which we seem to be connected, albeit loosely, to the whole world's information. Perhaps Special Topics is what happens when Nabokov meets McSweeney's --but at the very least it amounts to a great read and an excellent debut.

 

Edward Su is a senior in Eliot House.