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

I was walking to the doctor yesterday when I became aware of being bipedal. I am an ape, my arms hanging, swaying. Hip camber. A birth canal of restricted clearance. I see myself walking, an X-ray motion picture of bones and joints.

I remember the moment I decided I wanted to be a competent walker, bipedal extraordinaire. It was college, accompanying a professor, the head of the department in which I was ostensibly majoring, up the four precipitous flights of stairs in Neuberger Hall, to her office.

I wouldn’t call it a watershed moment. I dislike the term, but even if we’re working with it, I would say that at the time I didn’t have much of a watershed, or a poorly maintained and polluted one, or that my streams were brief and ephemeral. This was during the summer; I was heavily eroded with dry wash gullies.

My professor was pushing deliberately up the stairs like she had cogs or a ratcheting system. I was all pelvis and wrist-bones, a thoughtless concavity. But all of my pumping and flapping near her didn’t adrenalize her pace, she wasn’t tuned to my impatience, each step with Tai Chi-like precision. She reeled details of next week’s assignment like a koan, unperturbed by exertion as we passed the third floor.

When we summitted she was as serene as a goddess, whereas I had to pause heaving on the landing for a few beats before doing a hare-sprint to overtake her tortoise. She didn’t look at me as she unlocked her office door (without, I noticed, my typical jerky movements or my swearing or bangings), all sensibility and purpose, even going so far as to wear a polyester housedress and her grey hair in an maintenance-friendly pageboy.

She, I realized, was the real victor here. I was gasping and wearing platform sandals and something gauzy–this being the sole year in my life that I decided to attack my femininity by a brute force attempt at fashion that made me look like I wanted to be raped.

I was in rapturous admiration. I wanted to be everything then, I was still a teenager, but most of all, at least for five minutes, I wanted to be unflappable and constant. I wanted to be able to walk and walk and walk and be a grownup. I wonder if she noticed this or just concentrated on my most recent, wretched translation of Gogol or Pushkin.

Tags: growing up, teenage