Hot authors write hot novels – generally

The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls.
-- Marisha Pessl; Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl is hot (fit; I’m practising my English slang). Proof:



Do hot (fit) authors tend to produce hot (fit?) novels? This is an ancient metaphysical (and indeed, existential) question pondered by all philosophers from the pre-Socratics to the post-postmodernists (popomos) (see Introduction, Philosophy: the Basics, Warburton, 2004, p. 1).

Let us use the inductive principle to tackle this problem. In the first case, Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics seems to confirm the above statement.

An extraordinarily erudite novel – Pessl references most of the Western canon in literature and history, plenty of Hitchcock and film noir, and makes up some funny references too – Special Topics amazingly doesn’t collapse under the staggering weight of its erudition. If you have mentioned 38 author’s or playwrights’ names in the contents page alone, you need to make sure that the ensuing novel has enough steam to not sink under the heavy weight of association. Pessl hardly falters in her 500-page novel, and makes proud Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Kafka, and Ovid, as well as introducing something of her own to modern fiction.

The characterization is superb: Gareth van Meer is a brilliant political science professor who knows a lot more than a little bit about everything. He and his daughter, Blue, live at a different university town every semester. They drive around America from one town to the next reciting poetry and learning philosophy: “Driving with Dad wasn’t cathartic, mind-freeing driving (see On the Road, Kerouac, 1957). It was mind-taxing driving. It was Sonnet-a-thons. It was One Hundred Miles of Solitude: Attempting to Memorize The Waste Land.” Gareth so impresses his daughter that Special Topics, presented as Blue’s autobiography, contains witty (to the reader) aphorisms of Dad (Dad with the capital D) such as “a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it” and “[Americans] know God – many of them attest to daily chats with the man. And the idea that none of us can truly know anything at all […] is a though they’d rather be shot in the arm with their own semi-automatic rifle than face head on. Personally, I think there’s something terrific about not knowing, relinquishing man’s feeble attempt to control. When you throw up your hands and say, ‘Who knows?’ you can get on with the sheer gift of being alive”. Although Blue is certainly a character in her own light, her character is inescapably molded by Gareth’s own exuberant one. That Gareth himself is only seen through Blue’s own words firmly situates the novel in the realm of postmodernism. (Curiously enough, I never read the word postmodern in Special Topics. Choice vocabulary from Pessl includes: “outré”, “obsequious”, and “nuts”.)

Pessl’s writing style is superb (see “Why Use One Metaphor When You Can Use Two, Three, or Even Fifteen?”, The Basic Elements of Style, Drummer, 2001, p. 133). At times the 500 pages can get tedious – I found the couple of chapters on the Nightwatchmen rather boring – and a few of Pessl’s turns of phrase spice up the narrative. For example, Zach Soderberg’s voice is “stiff as new shoes” and the days trudged by like “bland schoolgirls”. Another pleasing aspect of Special Topics is that it doesn’t answer the text’s most pressing questions (we never know who killed Hannah Schneider and what happened to Gareth); it instead uses an unreliable narrator who herself does not know what has happened. So although the novel has “the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with” (so says Dad on Michelangelo Antonioni’s black-and-white film L’Avventura), Special Topics is ultimately more pleasurable on a more sophisticated, higher plane.

(But personally, I found the last chapter, “Final Exam” to be a bit of a letdown. [What does that say about me … ?] Gareth says that the semester course structure provides “order”; yes it does, but there is no romantic orgasmic climax to end the novel at its zenith.)

We thus have one case of one hot author writing a hot novel. Let us consider another author, Emily Brontë:



She’s not hot. And her only novel, Wuthering Heights, sucks (badly too). So the general case does not hold, I think ... ?