Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessel is a challenging book. The story of a Father and Daughter who move around the country a lot and have the richest, fullest intellectual lives this side of Professor Higgins chatting away with a second, younger, female Professor Higgins with side commentary provided by Sherlock Holmes. If I had not listened to Emily Janice Card’s brilliant audio book version, I doubt that I could have plowed through this baffling and brazen bit of business.
I used to read a lot of books on writing. Mainly on writing Science Fiction. I whipped out a couple of dreadful novels in high school and have even tried my hand at Nanowrimo. One of the these books talked about the Great Science Fiction Books-among them were Solairis and Wild Seed. I read both books on the author’s advice and both were pretty amazing-though of course, completely different.
In listening to Special Topics on Calamity Physics I have found it to be an amazing book as well. It reminds me of Solaris is a number of ways. First of all, the world of Solaris is hyper detailed, books and magazines and references of every imaginable type are quoted at length, sometimes for entire chapters. Special Topics on Calamity Physics has footnotes-every other sentence. It’s as if the author knew she had to do all this research and it seemed a real waste not to use it-ALL of it- for something.
So it is an endless litany of quotes, titles, copyright dates and pocket reviews. Not that this is really a bad thing. I can almost see this as the standard form of the book of the future. I can see this as an Amazon Kindle title with all the quoted titles embedded and linked to their website. But the desire to explore these other worlds would be so tempting that you would never finish a book so festooned with external links. All those reference books, if there are any real reference books quoted, would be far more interesting than anything the original author could come up with. As I listen to the rambling, nearly incoherent, often baffling story, I find myself wondering about the references mentioned and the statics spouted like the Moby Dick–Herman Melville, Dec 31, 2002, Penguin Classic.
Of course, the whole point of an audio book is that you can listen to it while you are driving, which is what I most often do. This makes the desire to fire up the web browser and search for some obscure book a bit more difficult to pursue. And the story is surprisingly griping, filled with twists and turns and Wow, didn’t see that comings.
Oddly there is one point where the Mandarin Oriental is mentioned as being a very expensive flower, at least I think it was the Mandarin Oriental-without any mention as to what, exactly a Mandarin Oriental is. For a book stuffed to the gills with useless information it would have been nice to know that it was a Lily. It is mentioned much later in the book that it is a Mandarin Oriental Lily, but this still tells the reader, such as myself, who is not an expert on flowers much of anything. It seems to be a very rare flower with a very common look. I am still not sure what flower it was.
I’m one of those annoying people who watches a movie and predicts, usually accurately, what is going to happen. And maybe if this was a movie, I would have seen it all. But in the long drawn out and filled with distractions audio book, I have been genuinely surprised a number of time. Of course, by the time the books reaches it shocking ending and amazing revelations, you are ready for anything. UFOs landing in the back yard, Nessy doing the backstroke in the family bath tub, Houdini sending a messages that yes, by God, there is an afterlife.
Still, when the shocks first start coming, they are fun and unexpected. At least, I wasn’t expecting them. Though the fact that the first sentence of chapter one of Special Topics on Calamity Physics is Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider’s death, I’ll tell you about my mother’s-should have given me a hint of things to come. The events of the first part of the book are so dull and filled with mundane events that the endless footnotes seem the perfect addition to a perfectly tiresome tale.
It does get better, a lot better.
Like Moby Dick, Ulysses, and The Name of The Rose, I’m sure someone will make a horrible movie out of this great book. Some books are meant to be read, or at the very least, listened to-not watched. It takes time for the myriad details and seeming minutia to sink into the mind and for that Aha! moment to arrive in shocked and splendid glory.
Special Topics on Calamity Physics suffers a little with Marisha Pessel’s desire to do something shocking every ten sentences as the book draws to a close, but it is still fun. The ending is a bit of a let down, but there is every possible that Blue Van Meer will ride again.
