Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
Viking, HK$202
Marisha Pessl's debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, came with the standard-issue accoutrements of hyped-up novels of today: a handsome advance, breathless pre-release publicity, and references to the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Hitchcock, Donna Tart and Jonathan Franzen. The latter, who shares the same literary agent with Pessl, writes on the book's cover that 'beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark strong drink'.
Shrouded in the fog of the promotion drivel is a novel whose intriguing title has nothing to do with its contents, which is structured as a high-school English course and has for its chapter titles various classics from the western canon.
Blue van Meer is the precocious teenage narrator of this whodunit that masquerades, for the greater part of the book, as a deposition on American McCulture and Great Works of Literature, before returning to its initial premise.
Blue, who owes her singular name to her mother's love of Lepidoptera, is brought up by her widowed father, Gareth, an itinerant professor who refuses to be tied down to any university for long. As they traverse the American countryside, Gareth educates his daughter with his 'Sonnet-a-thons'.