[Subfallen]

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<u>Special Topics in Calamity Physics</u>: Marisha Pessl's first novel...a Nabokovian high school murder mystery.

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I'm going to have to go ahead and...um...disagree with you on that one.

Most of the time Special Topics seems just an elaborate excuse to deploy a lifetime's store of simile and metaphor. (Which Pessl undoubtedly accumulated on yellow legal pad.) Her prose is jarringly active; her characters are in constant paroxysm, over-acting even for caricatures. Nabokov knew that life mostly happens <u>to us</u>, while Pessl brings "self-determination" explicitly out of the subtext and into mawkish lectures delivered by both Dad and Blue.

Now perhaps all the "grand themes" from "the Western canon" would be bearable if either author or character actually understood them. But Blue takes art like a shortcut to a superiority complex, demeaning and dehumanizing an endless series of minor characters who serve little purpose except as targets for her wit. Never mind that art and science's greatest heights have been scaled to <u>redeem</u> the common man---Pessl just sees new perches from which to spit on him.

Of course, like all insecure "visionaries" who desperately need the world to notice their grand posturing (Kierkegaard, 1843), both Dad and Blue really long for the admiration of the wretched masses. Captive audiences, esoteric awards, valedictorian honors, clique membership: these are the top values for our heroes.

Most disastrously, the tone and style of Blue's dialogue (dry, manufactured) exactly contrapose her internal monologue (overwrought, quirky). In a first-person narrative, this is unforgivable. Nothing here, nothing, "cries truth from the blood" (Nietzsche, 1883). Special Topics in Calamity Physics is just-readable fluff with a horizontal plot line,

Final Rating: 2.5/5 Stars

And just to emphasize how inapt the Nabokov comparison really is...

Pessl: "As I read the startling details about Catherine Baker's life...I started sprinting like an Errand Boy all the way back to that conversation with her, when I was alone at her house, retrieving her every word, expression and gesture, and when I dumped that splintered cargo at my feet (something 'night,' police officer, The Gone), I turned around and sprinted for more." (Special Topics)

Nabokov: "A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing." (Lolita)