Starred Review. Pessl's showy (often too showy) debut novel, littered as it is with literary references and obscure citations, would seem to make an unlikely candidate for a successful audiobook. Yet actor and singer Emily Janice Card (a North Carolina native like the author) has a ball with Pessl's knotty, digressive prose, eating up Pessl's array of voices, impressions and asides like an ice-cream sundae. Card reads as if she is composing the book as she goes along, with a palpable sense of enjoyment present in almost every line reading. Her girlish voice, immature but knowing, is the perfect sound for Pessl's protagonist and narrator Blue van Meer, wise beyond her years even as she stumbles through a disastrous final year of high school. Card brings out the best in Pessl's novel and papers over its weak spots as ably as she can.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
A self-absorbed scholar and a young girl crisscross America by car, flitting through college towns where they endure ill-advised sexual encounters, heartache and a potent dose of popular culture. Studded with ingenious wordplay and recondite allusions, their story veers between highbrow comedy and lowbrow tragedy as it careens toward a couple of ambiguous murders and some crafty detective work.
Ten points if you identified this as the plot of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Extra credit if you also recognize it (minus the pedophilia) as the plot of a much-ballyhooed first novel by Marisha Pessl, who tackles the art of fiction by vigorously associating everything in her book with something else. Constructing the novel as if it were the core curriculum for a literature survey course, complete with a final exam, Pessl gives each chapter the title of a classic literary work to which the episode's events have a sly connection: Chapter 6, "Brave New World," describes the first day of a new school year, while in Chapter 11, "Moby-Dick," a large man drowns in a swimming pool.
Along the way, there are thousands of references to books and movies both real and imagined, as well as an assortment of pen-and-ink drawings. The book's young narrator, Blue van Meer, has fiercely embraced her father's didactic advice: "Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids." Blue's cross-referencing mania can be surprisingly enjoyable, because Pessl is a vivacious writer who's figured out how to be brainy without being pedantic. Like her protagonist, she's eager to make good use of the many books she's read and the movies she's seen. And she loves similes like a fat kid loves cake (Blue would annotate this properly as a line borrowed from the rapper 50 Cent), never settling for one per page when three or eight will do.
But hunkering down for 514 pages of frantic literary exhibitionism turns into a weary business for the reader, who after much patient effort deserves to feel something stronger than appreciation for a lot of clever name-dropping and a rush of metaphors.
As a Harvard freshman recounting the events of the previous year, when her childhood "unstitched like a snagged sweater," Blue remembers being thoroughly in thrall to her father, a political science professor who changes jobs at third-tier colleges so frequently that by age 16 she's attended 24 different schools. To compensate for this rootlessness (her lepidopterist mom died in a car crash when Blue was 5), Dad has promised his daughter an undisturbed senior year in the North Carolina mountain town of Stockton, where Blue will attend the ultra-preppy St. Gallway School.
It's at St. Gallway that Blue's dedication to her pompous, theory-spouting father begins to waver. Her attention is diverted by the school's most glamorous figures, a clique of five flighty kids called the Bluebloods who meet every Sunday night for dinner at the home of their mentor, Hannah Schneider, a charismatic film teacher.
Blue is miraculously granted admission into this rarefied society, but the reader is not so lucky, having to settle for the novel's customary blizzard of comparisons instead of real characterization.
Most enigmatic of all is Hannah, who's both a concerned mother hen and a shady blur of evasions and secrets, and who may or may not be having an affair with (a) one of her students; (b) Blue's father; (c) random elderly men whom she picks up at seedy diners. Blue makes it clear in the book's first chapter that later in the school year, Hannah will be found hanging by an electrical cord from a tree in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the final third of the book charts Blue's efforts to prove that the teacher did not commit suicide, as the coroner concluded, but was murdered.
Like Hannah, Pessl herself is something of an expert at evasion, nimbly avoiding scenes that might require emotional delineation, hiding behind this Nabokovian sentence structure or that Hitchcockian plot twist, always equipped to defend each dodge with the tacit reproach that, hey, it's only a high-school murder mystery, lighten up. Yet here and there the author betrays glimpses of sensitivity, in Blue's genuine expressions of grief for the early loss of her mother and in this moving evocation of loneliness, framed (of course) in a simile: "To the far-off tune of the blue Volvo driving away, it slipped over me, sadness, deadness, like a sheet over summer furniture."
These briefly poignant moments are enough to make a reader wish for more, for a book that is less about other books and more about life. Having already aced the test of novel-writing as a literary trivia game, the real work for Pessl begins now, if she dares to stop making glib comparisons and starts to stare directly at things, as only she can describe them.
Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
With a murder that occurs in the opening pages and a narrator who joins an elite clique of students, Special Topics bears resemblance to Donna Tartt's 1992 classic, The Secret History—as the novel's publisher is more than happy to remind us. Critics call this comparison a publicity coup, as the two novels differ greatly in narration, orchestration, and tone. Organized as a "Great Books" course, the novel requires careful attention (and literary knowledge) from its readers, especially when Blue spouts esoteric tidbits. Although most critics were utterly compelled by Marisha Pessl's debut novel, a few thought it mean-spirited and too smart for its own good. "A 500-page headache is as possible as a bracing joyride," notes the New York Times.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From AudioFile
Blue Van Meer writes of the year her life "unstitched like a snagged sweater." This first novel is a hybrid, part coming-of-age story, part murder mystery. But first and foremost, it's a dazzling prose circus, full of hilarious metaphors and studded with footnotes, some real, many invented. Emily Janice Card (daughter of novelist Orson Scott Card) gives a bravura performance. She's an innocent, even foolish teenaged girl with the bookishness of an Oxford don. Card dances through this minefield of a text, never getting lost in a sentence or mispronouncing a word. The absence of the drawings present in the text is noticeable but in no way mars this spirited aural romp. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
From Booklist
After 10 years of traveling with her father, a perennial (and pedantic) visiting lecturer at various, obscure institutions of higher learning, Blue Van Meer finally settles in as a senior at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina. There she is bemused to find herself part of a charmed circle of popular kids called the Bluebloods and the protege of the mysterious film-studies teacher, Hannah Schneider. When a friend of Hannah's dies at a party the kids have crashed, this extravagantly arch and self-conscious coming-of-age novel turns into a murder mystery that--although never as Hitchcockian as its publisher claims--is, nevertheless, almost compelling enough to warrant its excessive length. Intriguingly structured as a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class, Pessl's first novel is filled with references to invented books--and to some real ones, too, including several by Nabokov. Overkill? You bet. But, as a result, the novel is generating a great deal of buzz that will excite the curiosity of readers who enjoy postmodern excesses and indulgences of this sort. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Janet Maslin, The New York Times
A whirling, glittering, multifaceted marvel.
Review
A whirling, glittering, multifaceted marvel. (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)
Place[s] the author alongside young, eclectic talents like Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith. (Vogue)
Hip, ambitious and imaginative. (Los Angeles Times)
This skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more. The joys of this shrewdly playful narrative lie not only in the high-low darts and dives of Pessl’s tricky plotting, but in her prose, which floats and runs as if by instinct, unpremeditated and unerring. (The New York Times Book Review)
Pessl’s literary pyrotechnics are just a sideshow; it’s her irresistible heroine Blue who makes the novel’s heart beat. (People, Critic’s Choice)
Wholly original and riotously entertaining. (The Christian Science Monitor)
An arresting story and that rarest of delights, a great ending. (Salon.com)
Required reading for devotees of inventive new fiction. (The New York Times)
Los Angeles Times
Hip, ambitious and imaginative.
The New York Times Book Review
This skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more. The joys of this shrewdly playful narrative lie not only in the high-low darts and dives of Pessl’s tricky plotting, but in her prose, which floats and runs as if by instinct, unpremeditated and unerring.
People, Critic’s Choice
Pessl’s literary pyrotechnics are just a sideshow; it’s her irresistible heroine Blue who makes the novel’s heart beat.
The Christian Science Monitor
Wholly original and riotously entertaining.
Salon.com
An arresting story and that rarest of delights, a great ending.
The New York Times
Required reading for devotees of inventive new fiction.
Glamour
[A] witty romp... Will make you think and laugh. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Harper's Magazine
There is a voice here to like, part Huck Finn, part Holden Caulfield, part Fran Leibowitz, and part Nora Ephron... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
“Dazzling,” (People) “Exuberant,” (Vogue) “marvelously entertaining,” (The Dallas Morning News) Marisha Pessl’s mesmerizing debut has critics raving and heralds the arrival of a vibrant new voice in American fiction. At the center of this “cracking good read”4 is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway school, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with “visual aids” drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.
From the Back Cover
"Marisha Pessl’s dark, funny, captivating novel is so smart and edgy, the reader is irresistibly drawn into Blue Van Meer's complicated world of intellect, murder and mystery, captured by Pessl’s distinctive voice and wonderful story telling."
--Susan Richards Shreve, author of A STUDENT OF LIVING THINGS
"Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink."
--Jonathan Franzen, Winner of the National Book Award and author of THE CORRECTIONS --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Marisha Pessl grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. This is her first novel.
