What really happened to Hannah Schneider?
by Anna Patricia G. Valerio on September 8, 2008
Written and illustrated by first-time author Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics has nothing to do at all with physics. Instead, it has everything to do with the question: What really happened to Hannah Schneider?
Such goes the mystery that troubles Blue van Meer, a well-read 16-year-old who is so bothered by the death of her film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider, that she writes a 700 plus-page account of the events that led to her tragic (and possibly staged) demise.
The novel chronicles the experiences of Harvard-bound Blue during her senior year at St. Gallway School, from when she initially met Hannah to when she joined the in-crowd (collectively known as the Bluebloods). Taking a cue from Gareth, her scholarly dad who often waxed poetic on the syllabus (“There is nothing more arresting than a disciplined course of instruction”), Blue outlines the novel as a “Core Curriculum” and assigns each chapter with a “Required Reading.”
Using works that range from the classic A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway to the more contemporary One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Blue annotates the text with both real and made-up parenthetical citations and even provides occasional visual aids.
But even with the constant barrage of literary and cultural references, Blue comes off as naïve and gullible, instead of snotty and pretentious. One is then left with the impression that Blue just has a knack for parroting trivial facts, and is not the incredibly erudite teenager that Pessl makes her out to be.
Pessl’s prose steers clear of clichés and instead uses one-of-a-kind similes and metaphors. To describe how one of the Bluebloods speaks, Blue says “a Southern accent so thick you could probably cut into it and spread it on dinner rolls.” This is a hit-or-miss effort, since there are some analogies that feel awkward and contrived, thus distracting the reader.
But Special Topics in Calamity Physics is far from being complete literary drivel. A mystery novel, a coming-of-age story, and a literary canon primer all rolled into one—to say that it has an interesting plot would be an understatement.
The major downside is that one needs to get past the first 300 pages before getting to the good parts. Blue’s drawn-out back story, with her endless citations, is tedious to read, and one can’t help but wonder whether her anecdotes are even significant to the development of the plot.
Unlike Nancy Drew novels, however, Special Topics in Calamity Physics doesn’t resort to a deus ex machina ending and let the mystery unravel so easily. For something that’s teeming with words, so many things are left unsaid in the story. As the story ends, the characters remain flat and underdeveloped, and one suddenly feels that the novel is too long and too short at the same time.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a bold debut, but its sheer verbosity makes it difficult for it to be read over and over again—a shame, since one may feel the need to read the novel a second, or even third, time to look for clues more closely and find the answer to the question that, even at the last page, remains unresolved: What really happened to Hannah Schneider?
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 g’s
