I was terrified and immediately imagined all kinds of wicked Bible salesmen and bloodthirsty misfits (see O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 1971) The narrative is peppered with literary quotes and references, many real, but some made up.

The book is presented as a syllabus, with each chapter named after a great work of literature (Othello, Madame Bovary) and it finishes with a ‘final exam’. If this sounds a bit like The Secret History, or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, well, it is probably meant too as this is a novel about literary borrowing and literary conventions.

Most extraordinary though was the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about her, as sense of RKO, which I’d never before witnessed in a personīlue is surprised when Hannah invites her to join their elite little group and begins to question Hannah’s interest in her, but a mysterious death and an even more mysterious suicide, means that this coming-of-age high school novel shifts gears and turns into a full on detective thriller. Here Blue encounters a group of elite students, the Bluebloods and their charismatic and mysterious Film Studies teacher Hannah Schneider with whom she is immediately captivated. We have the highest number of graduates in the country who go on to be revolutionary performance artists It was always Dad and me, the way it was always George and Martha, Butch and Sundance, Fred and Ginger, Mary and Percy Bysshe.įor her final year of high school, they settle in a private bohemian college in North Carolina where Brilliant and arrogant as he is, he is devoted to Blue and her intellectual stimulation and they travel across the country Paper Moon style, discussing books, poetry, theatre and film which leaves Blue almost pathologically bookish.

The novel is the first-person narrative of Blue Van Meer, a precocious and bright teenager who since her lepidopterist mother’s death has travelled with her father Gareth, an academic on the move, taking up visiting professorships in schools around the country. It is a heavy burden of expectation for any book, but Special Topics in Calamity Physics almost fulfils it.

Marisha Pessl’s debut novel was published amid a storm of hype – publishing bidding wars, support from Jonathan Franzen, that famous head shot and articles in The New York Times, and all before it hit the shelves.

Calamity physics novel