Chapter one begins on page 15 and titled, “Othello.”

Two days before buying her new Volvo, Natasha Alicia Bridges van Meer, the narrator’s mother, plowed her Plymouth Horizon, ironically nicknamed Certain Death, into a stand of trees. She was killed instantly.

Flashing back, the narrator’s father describe his wife Natasha using ballet terms—attitude, ciseaux, balancé, arabesque—because she had taken ballet as a girl. They had met at some charity dinner in the Pharaoh Room of the Edward Stillman Collection of Egyptian Art, each on their respective dates with eyes for only each other. Geneva Bridges, Natasha’s mother, foreshadowed, “You vill die unhappy vith him,” in a stilted Russian accent.

Gareth van Meer, the dad, was a highly honored professor having taught in various African, European, and South American countries before settling in Mississippi, of all places. He had racked up considerable honors, including the Mandela Award of the American Political Science Institute and the McNeely Prize of International Affairs. Despite all this, however, Geneva and George Bridges didn’t care for Gareth at all. They were married at a registrar in New Jersey and soon moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where Gareth taught Conflict Resolution in the Third World at Ole Miss, while Natasha worked at the Red Cross and caught butterflies.

The narrator was born five months later and named Blue, after the Cassius Blue butterfly, which was the only kind Natasha could catch. Natasha eventually gave up on catching any other species and often caught 40 to 50 Cassius Blue’s a day. The Lafayette County Police said that Natasha had fallen asleep at the wheel in broad daylight, probably from working through the night on her butterflies. Blue was only five and only remembers her mother through her father’s anecdotes: “And still—she was as fragile as her own butterflies, an artist who feels things deeply. To be sensitive is fine, but it makes day-to-day living—life—rather painful, I’d imagine. I used to joke that when someone cut down a tree in the Brazilian Amazon, or stepped on a fire ant, or when a sparrow flew smack into a sliding glass door, it hurt her” (19).

Chapter two, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” has Blue and her father traveling across the country, Gareth making a living as a visiting professor due to the successes of his various political science articles. Blue spent as much time in the Volvo station wagon as classrooms, whether fleeing Natasha’s ghost or seeking it in dingy motel rooms across the country. Gareth postulated that, “There’s no education superior to travel… thus, when you’re ultimately set loose upon the world… I suspect you’ll have no choice but to go down in history” (24). The hours in the car were spent reciting famous sonnets, vocabulary flash cards, novels, and plays, Blue having to act out famous scenes with an actor’s zeal.

Between ages six to sixteen, Blue and her father had lived in thirty-nine towns in thirty-three states, attending about twenty-four different schools. Blue never fit into any particular clique, preferring to compare herself to Jane Goodall, “a fearless stranger in a stranger land doing (groundbreaking) work without disturbing the natural hierarchy of the universe” (26). But she admitted that if she were truly a “Jane,” she’d be “Pre-Rochester Jane Eyre, which she’d call by either of its pseudonyms, the I Don’t Know Who You’re Talking About or the Oh Yeah, her” (26).  Blue described Gareth as only achieving rugged good looks in middle age and “picking up women the way certain wool pants can’t help but pick up lint” (29). His relationships never lasted more than a couple months, the women sometimes intruding on Blue’s dark, reclusive style. She describes the women in various categories of short-lived beetles, basset hounds, and hormonal madwomen. Ultimately, Gareth and Blue were left mostly in the company of each other.

Chapter three, “Wuthering Heights,” begins with a quote by Dr. Fellini Loggia, Princeton professor and leading sociologist: “’A person’s life,’ he writes, ‘is nothing more than a series of tip-offs of what’s to come. If we had the brains to notice these clues, we might be able to change our futures’” (35). Blue’s clue to her future occurred when she was thirteen in Howard, Louisiana. They had rented a house with a tropically overgrown back yard, so overgrown and rife with humongous bugs that Gareth was persuaded to hire a gardener. Andreo Verduga, a handsome Peruvian who spoke English in the manner of an old-fashioned telegram, immediately won Blue’s young heart.

One night, after weeks of watching Andreo’s ineffective gardening from her bedroom window, he appeared at the front door, covered in blood. The hours spent studying Spanish love poems ended up being used for “I called an ambulance,” and “you’re going to be fine.” Once at the hospital, cleaned of blood splatter, Blue was sitting in the waiting room when her father burst in, who promptly checked for scrapes or cuts through which she might have been contaminated by “that Latino son-of-a-bitch.” After Gareth has made a significant buzz with the nurses, the surgeon arrives, announcing that Andreo will live. Gareth firmly states that they are not involved with this man anymore and directs Blue out of the hospital.

The next morning, Blue brings Andreo a milkshake and a bouquet of pink roses—Gareth had refused her from buying red ones—but Andreo had disappeared from the hospital, probably due to his fake insurance card. Shortly thereafter, Gareth had his blood mopped up and truck towed from their house.

Two years later, Blue and Gareth haunted a Wal-Mart in Nestles, Missouri, for Blue’s fifteenth birthday present. While in the Electronics aisle, Blue noticed the familiar tanned face of Andreo, but quickly lost him in the hundreds of aisles. They left with garden furniture, a coffee maker, and a goldfish, but without Blue’s dreamy reunion.

Chapter four, “The House of the Seven Gables,” begins with Blue fantasizing about any permanent living situation, but Gareth is just as persistently footloose. He had ignored all of the Homestead, Motherland, or Native Soil themes of The Odyssey and The Grapes of Wrath until Stockton, North Carolina, where he unveiled his plans to stay for the entire seven months of Blue’s senior year in high school. Despite his meager paychecks as a visiting professor, Gareth decided to move into a huge five-bedroom Tudor in Stockton. He was determined to make their last year together before Blue left for college “une grande affaire.” Both were dreading the separation. Blue worried that her father was biding time before returning to the Congo to spearhead some revolutionary movement: “This was Dad’s deep-sea secret, never before photographed or scientifically classified: he wished to be a hero, a poster boy for freedom, silk-screened, reduced to bright colors and printed on a hundred thousand t-shirts, Dad with Marxist beret, martyr-ready eyes, and a threadbare mustache” (49).

Gareth gives Blue the massive master bedroom at the top of the stairs and surprises her with her old writing desk from eight years ago already inside. The price tag for buying it back is a whopping $17,000 and Blue continues to worry about her father’s finances. On page fifty, Gareth meticulously unpacks Natasha’s butterfly collection and mounts them in his study.
 

While we never hear about who Hannah Schneider is, starting out with the death of Blue’s mother is a great hook. I really like the idea of Natasha’s ghost always being present throughout this novel. She dies on page one and is still being represented by her butterfly collection on page fifty.

Another great touch is laying out this novel like a textbook with visuals and notations: “(see pg. 81”), “(see visual 4.0).” The comparisons of characters to animals are also tied into this notation system: “(see ‘Panther,’ Glorious Predators of the Natural World, Goodwin, 1987).” Basically, this whole novel is thought out to the point where it’s apparent in individual lines. It reminds me of a Wes Anderson movie where every prop that fills the screen is meticulously placed there.

The characters are incredibly strong in this novel, showing the benefits of character novels. These aren’t necessarily en vogue right now, but this is a great example of a strong one. Blue is a classic observer and everyone in her life is a carefully identified insect. She is a sort of Jane Goodall that observes without affecting the environment around her. Gareth is deftly described by Showing Not Telling—how he goes through women and leaves them heartbroken, like he’s still not over losing Natasha, how he tries to prune his Louisiana backyard jungle with a vengeance, and how he’s obviously still traumatized by Natasha’s death but displays it by being constantly on the move.

As quoted on Publishers Marketplace, Pessl made a huge splash in the literary world with this debut novel:

27-year-old Marisha Pessl's SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS, the story of a young woman and her professor father, pitched as "Nabokovian in scope and style," with a "Hitchcockian and Donna Tarttish narrative" and "Jonathan Franzen and Lorrie Moore-type metaphors," to Carole DeSanti at Viking Penguin, in a major deal [$500,000 and up], at auction, by Susan Golomb at the Susan Golomb Agency (NA). UK rights to Viking UK, in a significant deal [$251,000 - $499,000], in a pre-empt; Dutch rights to Ambos/Anthos, in a very nice deal, in a pre-empt.

On the topic of such a large advance for a first-time author, there was plenty of Internet grumblings about Pessl’s appearance:

Still, before the book’s publication there was grumbling on the World Wide Web about yet another attractive young writer earning a big advance for a first novel. “It’s not that I am mocking Ms. Pessl’s appearance or writing ability,” Sarah Weinman, crime fiction columnist for The Baltimore Sun, wrote on her Web site, “Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind” (www.sarahweinman.com), “just the publishing world’s almost masochistic desire to let attractive packages, so to speak, dictate their buying guidelines.” New York Times, “With Mirisha Pessl, You Can’t Judge a Book by the Photo on the Cover,” Dinita Smith.

Until hearing my co-workers chatting on the fact of appearance affecting advance amounts, it had never occurred to me that such a connection might exist. Luckily, the book stands alone.