Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
Viking ₤16.99, 514 pages

“A beautiful woman must expect to be more accountable for her steps, than one less attractive,” maintains Lucy Selby, a character in Samuel Richardson’s 1753 novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison. More than two centuries later, this observation still holds true.

Marisha Pessl, an attractive 28-year-old from North Carolina, who was offered a substantial advance for her debut novel - the spectacularly titled Special Topics in Calamity Physics - has suffered her fair share of scorn in the US media. But the insinuation that the former dancer, actress and financial consultant’s model good looks - and their marketing value - are the sole reason behind her success is unfair. Special Topics in Calamity Physics is an electrifying first novel.

Narrated by 16-year-old Blue Van Meer - who has spent an unorthodox childhood travelling around the US with her academic father, Gareth - it is at once a coming-of-age tale and a literary thriller. At the outset Blue, who is now a student at Harvard, describes how the year before she discovered the dead body of Hannah Schneider - a teacher from her high school - who had apparently hanged herself. Blue then goes back in time to explain events leading up to Hannah’s supposed suicide, before detailing its astonishing aftermath.

Thanks to her erudite father and his fanatically extensive reading list, Blue is a prodigy. She has spent her life analysing nearly every great writer in world literature - among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jane Austen and Moliere - as well as the works of great philosophers and thinkers, from Socrates to Marx.

Maintaining that “there’s no education superior to travel,” her father has also moved her on to a new town every school term, creating a rather alarmingly tight-knit father-daughter bond as they drive endlessly across state borders reciting Coleridge or Wordsworth at each other.

To ensure Blue’s place at Harvard, however, Gareth decides - much to his daughter’s joy - that they are to settle for her entire final high school year in the mountain town of Stockton, North Carolina. It is here that Blue belatedly discovers teenage life through the friendship of Hannah and an elite group of pupils from St Gallway School, who secretly meet at the teacher’s house. A charismatic blend of Miss Jean Brodie and Rita Hayworth, Hannah is wonderfully glamorous, and Blue, whose own mother died years previously, is drawn to her.

But it is the narrator herself who is Pessl’s most fascinating creation. As a deeply intelligent yet quietly passionate wallflower, she is like a modern Jane Eyre, but with the cynical wit of Lisa Simpson. She is also the bespectacled nerd of a million high-school dramas, but one who manages to quote Nietzsche and Nabokov while befriending the jocks and cheerleaders.

Adhering to her father’s advice that everything she writes must be “exquisitely annotated”, Blue constantly references sources - some real, some fake - from every conceivable written, cinematic, artistic and musical genre as she tells her story. So when one of her new friends lends her a dress for going out to a bar in, she writes: “...Jade had gone to considerable lengths to pick out my outfit: four-inch malevolent gold sandals two sizes too big and a gold lame dress that rippled all over me like a shar-pei (see ‘Traditional Wife’s Bound Feet’, History of China, Ming, 1961, p214. ‘Darcel’, Remembering ‘Solid Gold’, LaVitte, 1989, p29).”

Or, when she does not want to go on a proposed camping trip: “I felt, not dread or apprehension, only an awareness that something gruelling was looming in front of me, something so vast I couldn’t see all of it, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to take it on (see Nothing but a Compass and an Electrometer: The Story of Captain Scott and the Great Race to Claim Antarctica, Walsh, 1972).”

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a startling take on the thriller - reading like a Dawson’s Creek script interspersed with various Oxford Companions to literature and selected extracts from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It takes a while to get going, and Blue’s incessant annotation is at times overwrought, but the gripping conclusion is well worth pressing on for.