The Curse of the Supersmart?

There is a list of authors who make me mad. Chief among the members are husband and wife team Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. Really I'm just jealous because they are incredibly talented and doing something they love and are just about my age. Added to the list is Marisha Pessl, the precocious-seeming author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

This book enjoyed a good deal of buzz, although less than Claire Messud did for her book (see my review below). Like Foer and a growing number of young authors, she is a master of the gimmick. In this case, her protagonist is hyper-read, perhaps even more precocious than Pessl herself. Blue Van Meer narrates (from the distance of a year) her senior year in high school, the first time that she and her itinerant lecturer father have settled in a place for an entire academic year. Blue fills her narrative with in-text references to other works - of fiction and non-fiction. She mixes real and fake works willy-nilly. (I was particularly disappointed to note that "British chick-lit classic 'One Night Stand' (Zev, 2002)" does not seem to exist.) But these details add humor and insight to Blue's observations, and strengthen Pessl's characterization of Blue as a preternaturally smart young lady who really only knows things based on books, her father's proclamations, and her distanced analyses of her peers. When life gets "real" on her, she can barely cope.

But luckily (I guess), real life for Blue Van Meer is bizarre as f***. We know we're in a murder mystery, but the first 300 pages of what really is a tome are lead-in. With Blue as the Lindsey Lohan character in Mean Girls, more or less. It's a stronger and more sympathetic satire of (privileged) high school culture than Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep (more here and here). And then we get to the murder mystery and all hell breaks loose. I spent the last 200 pages wondering what on earth was going on. Blue has an over-active imagination, and it's a good thing she does, because otherwise she'd never keep up with real events.

That's it. I think anything more would start to give too much away. Blue and Pessl both take some getting used to. But if you take the time to get into it, you'll be rewarded with a strange and funny and almost Usual Suspects-like mystery.