BOOKS: A literature joy ride

If Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics is one of the most frustrating, gimmicky, esoteric books I've ever read, it is also one of the more interesting and intelligent. There is no doubt that Pessl is asking a lot of her readers in this novel, but if one can actually make it through to the conclusion, it's undoubtedly worthwhile.

Marisha Pessl reading and book signing

Tuesday, May 1 at 7 p.m.

University District store

Special Topics in

Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

528 pages; $15 (book)

The novel is written as a college literature course syllabus wherein each of the momentous 36 chapters are named after a famous work: Othello, Heart of Darkness, Paradise Lost. Each chapter also has a clever tie-in with the actual work it pays homage to; for example, in Moby Dick, a man drowns in a swimming pool. The final chapter is a final exam for the reader, but we'll talk more about that later.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is narrated by teenage Blue Van Meer, daughter of a political science professor father and a butterfly-obsessed mother. Blue's mother passes away when Blue is only 5 years old, and from there, her father whisks her around the country to various small colleges, where he never teaches longer than a semester. The end result of this is that Blue has attended 24 schools by the time she is 16.

Having been raised by her intellectual father, Blue displays an unnerving fondness for exhaustingly annotated facts. She also speaks in metaphor to an extreme degree [HTML_REMOVED] it's like being caught in a hailstorm of similes.

Promising to give his daughter an uninterrupted senior year, Blue's father settles her in at St. Gallway prep school in Stockton, North Carolina. Here, she is recruited by an elite, if somewhat curious, group of geniuses called the Bluebloods. Led by film studies teacher Hannah Schneider, the group meets once a week for dinner and witty repartee.

On a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, something goes horribly wrong, and Ms. Schneider is found hanging from a tree with an electrical cord around her neck. (Don't worry: Blue's story is told in retrospect, so readers learn of this grisly event in the beginning of the novel).

From here, what has previously been a slow-to-develop story becomes a rapid-fire mystery Blue tries to solve. She believes Hannah's hanging to have been murder and not the suicide everyone else concludes it to have been.

Then, in lieu of a final chapter, Pessl presents her readers with a startling final exam, in which, if one has been paying attention throughout the 500-plus pages, a reader may reach a different conclusion than Blue.

For such a marvelous book, Pessl's ending seems like a cheat. Readers barrel through the final 250 pages only to find an indefinite conclusion.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a mixed bag to be sure. Anyone without a working knowledge of English literature would have a hard time following the details of Pessl's plot allusions and therefore have a hard time completing the final in the end.

However challenging this book is, it is also smart and vibrant. It's recommended for anyone looking for something out of the ordinary.