After Tana French’s first novel, In the Woods, I was left breathless and absolutely committed to buying her sophomore effort. It’s not that I regret it, but it didn’t show the same care and craft. While still displaying some of her hallmark subtleties and qualities, it felt rushed, and lacked both in believability and polish. But she is still addictive, and there were a few late nights spent racing through this compelling tale.

Irish detective Cassie Maddox no longer investigates murders–her experiences in In The Woods caused her to switch departments to the definitely-less-awesome Domestic Violence unit–but a young woman is murdered in the countryside outside Dublin who is physically identical to her. Maddox gets sucked into on a risky but fascinating undercover operation in which she pretends to be the deceased, living with the victim’s four weird-but-extraordinary housemates in a ramshackle Georgian mansion. As an effectively eerie twist, the dead girl had been using an alias and character invented by Maddox and her erstwhile mentor, Frank, for an extended undercover drug investigation.

The elements that bugged me stick with me more than the good bits; I think I take for granted French’s general skill with writing and storytelling. I was annoyed that I couldn’t believe in the premise of someone being so identical to someone else. I was bothered that she could pull it off–fooling this girl’s closest friends. I was jarred by how hyperbolic Maddox’s reaction seemed to be to every minor epiphany. I was bored to nausea by her boyfriend, Sam O’Neill, another detective. I found the four housemates’ supposed profundity and closeness forced. They are always “beautiful” or “angelic.”

And yet I would read it again. It’s not a masterpiece, but it has a pull, like gravity.

LibraryThing Tags:  mystery, ireland, fiction, novel, crime, detective, tbr, fun, wanttoread

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Tags: Books, fiction, ireland, mystery, novel, reading, review

There are the following pre-prequisites for reading this book, if you wish to do so comfortably.

I recommend that you take any illusion you have about being well-read, fold it, box it, and tuck it away during the use of this novel.
Then brush up on your Nabokovian grammar and ironies.
Finally, don’t think too hard–even though this is sort of a test.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a grueling yet not-to-be-missed romp through a kaleidescope of dark teenage fantasies (ostracism, inclusion by an elite–if cruel–clique, the mysterious and beautiful teacher taking you under her wing, father obessions, a really weird/cool first name, death, sex, intrigue) rammed through a filter of literary allusion, leaving you gasping and wondering what the hell just happened. Oh, and there’s also a murder mystery, which feels like “PLOT” in big, dripping red letters and is pushed into the back third of the book.

Protagonist-narrator Blue van Meer is a 17-year-old who is equally at home quoting Byron as sulking or having sexual misadventures. Since the death of her mother at age five, Blue and her snarky poli-sci professor father have been marauding around the country Lolita-style (OK, without the pedophilia), tracing Americana-dense road-trip paths between temporary teaching gigs. For Blue’s senior year they batten down and stick to one place for more than a couple of months–fictional Stockton, North Carolina–so Blue can attend the preposterously academic St. Gallway school.

Blue’s adherence to her father’s forceful tenets are total and provide the framework of her existence. Gareth van Meer serves out profound quotes with the comforting regularity of pitches in a batting cage. Blue lobs them back as defense in her miserable experiences with sociopathic misfits from St. Gallway, patching over bruises with her father’s absolutist statements (they are anything but sentimental or gentle, but give Blue a sense of rigid righteousness).

Almost immediately as they settle in Stockton, Blue is emotionally adopted by part-time film teacher Hannah and integrated with with a group of savage teen “Bluebloods” who are also her quarry. Mostly this involves tipsy weekly dinners Chez Hannah, during which Blue waxes on about how wonderful, mysterious and beautiful dark-haired Hannah is. So Blue tells us, though we never really see anything phenomenally alluring about Hannah. But Blue is intoxicated with her.

The introductory chapter is a retrospective, and we immediately find out that Hannah is dead, rather gruesomely. So we watch with a mounting sense of tragedy as the rest of the story unfolds.

Utlimately, I am jealous of Blue. At 17 I was a self-absorbed, scattered wreck. She’s self-sustaining, book-smart and witty. Perhaps Pessl was writing of her ideal younger self, perhaps Blue is what dorks like me wish we could have been. I am knocked off kilter and cross-eyed by “Calamity Physics” and its complexity would require several more reads to get to the bottom of.

Tags: bildungsroman, literary, mystery, nabokov, teenage