Snarklet: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl

Pessl apparently wanted to show off her education with this exceedingly erudite first novel. Unfortunately, she must have napped all the way through her writing classes, since she does not seem to have noted that when one is writing a mystery, one does not spend the first 200 pages dillydallying with introduction...or citing one's sources - real or imagined - in parenthetical asides. And pop quizzes at the end of the book? Sooooo passé.

Despite my dog's heroic efforts to save me from the horror of Pessl's exceedingly long-winded and tragically hip prose, I slogged on to the end and finally - after a month of monotonous struggle - finished reading the thing. I really shouldn't have bothered. Pessl's writing is affected, pretentious, and vain, and none of her characters are even remotely likable. They are rich, brilliant, and disaffected nearly to the point of nihilism. Yawn. Bret Easton Ellis did it better in Less Than Zero, and with much less verbosity.

Like Ellis' first novel, Pessl's freshman opus has also been optioned. I find that mind-boggling in the extreme, but it does support my theory that most film execs have the mentality of rabid ducks. I wish the producers luck.

And a much better screenwriter than Pessl is a novelist.