After disarming heavyweight literary agent Susan Golomb with an unsolicited pitch letter (unheard of!), Marisha Pessl found her debut novel—a 500-page slugger, Special Topics in Calamity Physics—the cynosure of a fevered bidding war. In the end, it fetched Pessl a sixfigure jackpot and heaps of tongue-wagging critical acclaim.
Despite the novel’s vacillations—it begins with a formidable bang, nosedives for a spell, then surges forward explosively— Special Topics is a dazzling thriller, meticulously crafted and audaciously executed. When Gareth van Meer, a blinding swagger of erudition and ego, accepts a bottom-tier professorship in Stockton, North Carolina (to “enlighten America’s unassuming and ordinary,” of course), his brainy daughter, Blue, coolly prepares to wrap up her senior year at pompous private school St. Galloway.
Inside the “gray-topped, heavy brow” building, however, she’s summarily encircled by the bluebloods, a pestilent coterie of sniffy, vainglorious spoiled-rottens who devotedly pirouette around their bewitching film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider. Despite having the resolve of “an implacable nun,” Blue’s also taken with “the lone bombshell slinking into a Norman Rockwell,” and can’t help but feel romanced by “the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about [Schneider], a sense of RKO.”
Blue and the gang spend weekends languidly loafing at Schneider’s place, showcasing their spurious wit while attempting to unravel Pessl’s prose is utterly intoxicating—nouns function as verbs, metaphors are fantastically fresh. An unremarkable character is “an extra packet of salt one misses at the bottom of a bag of fast food,” and Blue’s narration is rife with wild literary references and footnotes, many of which Pessl has cooked up herself. Once the initial spell of wizardry wears off, however, the consistent interruptions feel tiresome and vertigo inducing.
Three-quarters of the way in, though, the mystery Blue promised to solve in the novel’s first pages—how it is that Schneider wound up dead during a Bluebloods overnight romp in the woods—finally heats up. Pessl pulls out all the stops. The relentless plot intricacies are arresting, the suspense killer and the final twist dizzying.
