Special Topics in Calamity Physics: My Perspective

When a book is compared to one of my all-time favorites (The Secret History), when the author has written another book I love (Night Film), it’s a no-brainer that I would also love Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.

So, I went into this book with huge expectations, but unfortunately, it failed to live up to them.

About Special Topics in Calamity Physics

After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs), Blue is clever, deadpan, and possessed of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific knowledge.

In her final year of high school at St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. But when the drowning of one of Hannah’s friends and the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it with only her instincts and cultural references to guide her. 

~ Synopsys from goodreads

My Review

In some ways, this book is a coming-of-age story + murder mystery. Blue is a hyper-intelligent and hyper-aware girl who lives a nomadic life with her adorable dad. The two are best friends, and he is a strong presence in her life.

Until she joins a new school, makes a new set of friends, and develops a rather unhealthy fascination with her teacher Hannah Schneider.

She had an elegant sort of romantic, bone-sculpted face, one that took well to both shadows and light.

The book’s first half deals with setting the scene and describing all the characters – in excruciating detail, but with a baffling vagueness. Despite all the detail thrown in, I couldn’t get vested in any of the characters at all. And when bad things started to happen, all it elicited in me was some mild interest.

For example, when Hannah Schneider, depicted in great detail, dies 3/4th of the way in, I should have felt some emotion. But it didn’t quite work like that for me. I just kept reading on to learn how the mystery resolved itself. The mystery resolution was also a bit of a damp squib. Characters that played a big part in the book’s first half suddenly vanished, and the focus shifted to a random side plot that got stranger by the minute.

Another very irritating aspect was the writer’s literary style. Yes, the story is from the point of Blue, a genius, but still, the frequent allusions to literary works were very tiring. I found the writing style very dense and tiring. Maybe I was just not in the right mood for it. Here’s a typical sentence from the book:

Charles and his friends looked forward to the hours at her house much in the way New York City’s celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943 (see Forget About El Morocco: The Xanadu of the New York Elite, the Stork Club, 1929-1965, Riser, 1981).

Now imagine that practically every other sentence reads like this!

My simple self would have much preferred this book without such unnecessary comparisons.

Because the writing was so clunky, I lost interest halfway into the book. And while things livened up a bit with the deaths of Hannah and her friend (such a forgettable character that I don’t even remember his name), it never picked up the pace till the big denouément (which was well done, I have to admit).

Overall, I liked the book for its experimental style and the thought that went into it. For a debut novel, this book is ambitious and clever. I think it could have been edited a bit sharper, and I probably would have liked it better if I hadn’t already read The Secret History (it’s hard for any book to live up to its standards).

I know this book has been a favorite of many book bloggers. So I want to know, what aspects of the book do you love?