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.

Countdown to 9/11

I love the LA Public Library's "Hot off the Press" program. They make a selection of popular new books available at the branches for a 7-day loan period. So you have to read fast, but you don't have to wait forever on the hold list.

This is how I got my hands of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. It's on pretty much every best books of 2006 list, but has apparently also become fashionable to hate on as of late. (I'd provide links, but I'm on this 7 day deadline. Maybe later.) But I'm not a hater by nature, and even if I were inclined to be, I loved this book.

Messud's characters are awesome - they move in rarefied circles and are comfortable in the kind of intellectual banter that most of us don't get on a daily basis. So in some ways it's hard for me - even as a graduate of another elite university - to identify with them. On the other hand, they are charmingly flawed and selfish. And oddly enough, I love the ways that they are frustrated by the petty imperfections of those they love the most. Because after all, who doesn't carp about their friends?

Anyway, the book starts in March of 2001, and jumps through the odd numbered months through to September, to that fateful day, and then beyond to November. As the reader, you know all along what's coming, and how it will - must - affect their lives and plans. And at the same time, I at least found myself reliving my own pre-9/11 live, just out of college, and wondering if it would have been different had I known what lay ahead.

If you've read the book, let me know what you thought of the characters. I was most drawn to Danielle, and wasn't sure if that was the author's intention, or a reflection on myself. And insights into Ludo are particularly welcome.