Female Pynchons?

[Paul Di Filippo]

I had some hopes for this volume, but not after reading this review:

http://www.weeklydig.com/arts/articles/ 
special_topics_in_calamity_physics



Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Deadly chick lit virus claims another victim
	 	by Luke O'Neil
	 	Issue 8.40
	 	Wed, October 04, 2006

Setting aside the somewhat sexist implications of a term like "chick  
lit," a subject that’s sparked much debate in the publishing world (as  
well as in these pages) of late, many publishers seem convinced that  
the skim-milk adventures of zany but loveable girls fumbling toward  
some marketing-tested marriage of love and consumerism is the only  
thing that will sell books right now. It’s much like the clumsy,  
gluttonous signing period following an exciting new rock band’s debut.  
The original may have been catchy and seemed groundbreaking and  
refreshing at the time, but now the scores of imitators—although long  
of hair and disheveled just so—are short on teeth, short on punch,  
thrice duplicated.

It wasn’t until about halfway through Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in  
Calamity Physics that it occurred to me that this is what I was dealing  
with. I’m not sure if that’s a testament to my obliviousness, or to  
some skillful publisher’s packaging sleight of hand. What they’ve done,  
you see, is taken a harmless piece of so-called "chick lit" and dressed  
it up in (big L) Literature’s clothing, then smuggled it across the  
border of my bullshit detector. The book is a stomach-turning blend of  
conflicting styles. It’s Frankenstein’s monster in a novelty tuxedo  
T-shirt.




I suppose I should have realized what sort of book I was reading when  
chapter after chapter continued to detail the ins and outs of a  
precocious high school girl piloting her confused, (but highly  
intelligent!) pubescent hull through an exclusive (yet mysterious!)  
social circle, and the attenuating social dramas, stigmas and crises of  
materializing and dematerializing friendships that ensued. But I  
expected more. After all, the New York Times Sunday Book Review had  
been so triumphant in its coronation of Pessl as The Next Big Thing.  
"Nabokovian," they said. It is no such thing.




None of this would be a problem if Pessl didn’t seem to have fallen for  
her own marketing hype. Calamity Physics is an innocuous coming-of-age  
story that barely succeeds as genre fiction. Nothing of consequence  
happens until some 300 pages in (one character’s introduction and  
subsequent death comes so quickly that the reader, not to mention the  
characters, barely have time to even register why we should care).


This book is impressive in its scope of failure, actually. Even as a  
voyeuristic look into the lives of high school students, it falls  
short. What little sex and drug use there is seems like something  
stitched together and thumbtacked to a dorm-room corkboard from  
articles torn out of Jane magazine. Elsewhere, it’s overburdened with  
metaphor. One potentially steamy make-out scene cuts to one character’s  
thoughts about archeological digs in Aztec ruins. Sexy! Pessl is only  
in her 20s, but she seems so far removed from actual high school  
conversation and behavior, it’s perverse. At times, it’s like watching  
MTV with “cool” grandma.




But even more problematic, the book is thick on the page with  
incongruous literary allusions, cinematic cross-references and set  
pieces culled from famous works of art. These are devices that sound  
intriguing in theory, but Pessl flubs it. The protagonist’s every  
thought is cluttered with so much highbrow meandering, it becomes  
impossible to spot the line where genuine emotion blends into  
meta-ironic, extra-literary horseshit. The anorexic plot is incapable  
of bearing the weight of its ambitions. Pessl spends at least a quarter  
of her sentences on puffed-up would-be dazzling metaphors that stink up  
the room. She simply can’t get out of the way of her own wagging  
tongue. Another quarter of her text is wasted on faux-academic  
journalistic cross-referencing:


 


"When we go in March, there won’t be any bugs. And if there are, I’ll  
drown you in Off," Hannah said in a severe voice (see “1940 publicity  
still for Torrid Zone,” Bulldog in a Henhouse: The Life of James  
Cagney, Taylor, 1982, p.339).


 


No. I won’t see that. That sort of thing yanks the reader right out of  
the story, such as it is.




On top of all that, every chapter of the book shares its title with a  
great work of literature: Moveable Feast, Portrait of the Artist as a  
Young Man, The Trial, etc. You could check the books and try to figure  
out the connection, but the story itself doesn’t inspire that sort of  
investigation. And after having read it, I frankly doubt there is much  
to search for in the first place. Instead, the effect is like a  
horrible local rock band releasing an album with songs called “Sgt.  
Pepper’s,” “Pet Sounds” or “Blood on the Tracks.”




Relying heavily on commentary from the protagonist’s grandiloquent  
windbag of a father for her heavy lifting, Pessl unwittingly distills  
the foul essence of Calamity Physics in one of that character’s  
numerous remembered digressions:




"One can only take so much inflated self-importance before one feels  
ill … This morning, when we went to the Sorbonne, me with my briefcase  
full of notes, essays, my résumé—like a fool—it turned out there was no  
job opening as he’d led me to believe … I was trapped in her  
crypt-office for hours.”


 


SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS


AUTHOR | MARISHA PESSL


PUBLISHER | VIKING ADULT


PRICE | $25.95 (HARDCOVER)
calamityphysics.com

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 11176 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20061008/d5de391b/attachment.bin>