Blue has spent her childhood travelling the US with her Dad, a charismatic professor of political theory. When the time comes for her senior year, they decide Blue should spend the whole year at one school for a change, and she enrolls at the prestigious St Gallway. There, she befriends a group of students who congregate around an enigmatic teacher, Hannah Schneider, whose apparent suicide will have devastating consequences for Blue and the life she has known.
When I picked up Special Topics In Calamity Physics whilst dusting at work, it had been sitting in that exact spot for an entire decade, unpurchased, unread, unloved. This intrigued me, because it's very rare for a book to last that long without being bought, damaged and thus disposed of/donated, or recalled on return. I suppose I felt sorry for the thing, and it wasn't exactly unappealing: the jacket is a pleasingly shiny black with a rather nice font. So home in my rucksack it went.
It took me around a week to finish, and I have to say, this was one of the oddest reading experiences I've ever had, and you're about to get a slightly odd review out of it. I came to this book expecting private school camaraderie and coming-of-age; maybe a little of Dead Poets Society or The Graduate - with a murder mystery, as promised by the blurb. From the title, I assumed it might have a scientific element. My expectations were as academic and traditional as a navy blazer or ink pen.
That's not what I got. At least, not entirely. Those elements were there, but so were the darker coming-of-age themes of drunkenness, sleazy bars, and promiscuity, as well as a running commentary on the state of American society, and as the plot unfolded, forays into the world of gritty crime thrillers and conspiracy theory movies. Since reading some other reviews, I'd noticed that many readers felt Special Topics couldn't decide what genre to be. I definitely think the blurb could have been clearer, as rather than starting with a teacher's death and detailing the subsequent events, the novel opens with an older Blue after the fact, and then backtracks, taking us through the school year before the main event. To my mind, this meant a disappointing curtailment of the sleuthing I had been expecting! (My premise above is, I hope, a better summary).
'At this point, Dad must have decided I'd had enough, because he stared at Coxley very intensely for a moment and then, as if deciding something, stood up from the end of the bed (see "Picasso enjoying high times at Le Lapin Agile, Paris," Respecting the Devil, Hearst, 1984, p.148).' ~ Special Topics In Calamity Physics p.344
The real talking point of Special Topics is the writing style. Blue's story is laid out like an academic course guide, with sections and suggested reading materials, each chapter named after a book (whose themes the respective chapter loosely echoes). The text itself features extensive references and occasional footnotes. I haven't checked to see if all the texts mentioned are real, but I'd guess with the exception of Blue's father's publications they are, in which case Pessl's own reading must be truly vast. The conceit is that Blue is incredibly well-read, thanks to her arrogantly erudite father, so presumably it's intentional that the constant name-dropping of texts is so pretentious. On top of references, Blue is very fond of The Extended Metaphor That Takes Up Half A Page, and Using Capitalisation For Emphasis, which was in turn clever and tiresome, especially when long digressions into sardonic observation appeared just as the action was revving up. The biggest positive about this novel is that I was genuinely hooked as the plot moved along, so it was annoying to have to wade through the wordplay.
Ultimately, it's hard to discuss Special Topics without spoilers that would entirely ruin it, as the plot rapidly descends into something darker and more cataclysmic than one would expect from the early parts of the book. I'm still not sure what to make of the twists: I felt shocked, but almost as if the unfolding events towards the end were so far-fetched there would have to be a catch; it would have to come tumbling back down to the normal school escapade I'd expected. Perhaps what saves the novel is that it's unclear whether the catch exists or not: just as Blue, when watching Breakfast At Tiffany's, wants Cat to stay lost, her own story refuses to come in out of the rain and end with comforting resolution. So much so, that she ends her syllabus with a multiple choice test, which (literally) calls into question everything that the reader may have believed about various characters throughout the story.
If you enjoy school settings, dry social commentary, intellectualism, murder mysteries, intrigue, or stories that won't be shoe-horned into a box, then you'll probably find something to admire in Special Topics if you ever decide to pick it up. But I can't promise you'll like the combination of those elements in one seemingly unassuming, obscurely titled volume, or that you'll be reading the same book you took down from the shelf when you finally put your pencil down at the end of the final exam.
My rating: ⭐️⭐️✨