Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl
Good Reads meta-data is 514 pages rated 3.70 by 5,310 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
Verdict: Fizzle.
Cutting from the chase, verbal pyrotechnics do not a story make. While every one of the 514 pages of this book crackle with wit and energy it reminded me of the wheels of car stuck in snow, spinning, spinning, spinning without movement; all the while digging itself in deeper. It must have been exhausting to write; it certainly is exhausting to read. By the Kindle meter I made it to 40% before resigning in, well, resignation. Ergo to qualify my second sentence above, the 205 pages I read crackle (and then fizzle).
If I had to find another metaphor for reading as far as that, I would say it is like reading only the footnotes to a book on a subject I neither knew nor cared anything about. And on they go for more than 500 pages in their ranks. Neither rhyme nor reason do they make to the reader but each one is perfectly formed.
That inspires me to a third metaphor. The teacher in a college creative writing class takes all thirty student essays and staples them together into a book. The parts, let us assume, are excellent, but the total goes nowhere.
It is impressive that someone could pour this much intelligence into blank pages and yet depressing that it leaves so little impression. Better for many of the pages to have remained blank. I found skipping pages made no difference to my interest or knowledge of the narration. That said, it is the sort of book that literary award panels seem to like: it is contemptuous of readers, flashy without substance, striving relentlessly to be different, and …. You get the idea by now or you won’t get it at all, in which case go directly to GoodReads and do not pass Go.
In similar territory Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (2004) was memorable, and frightening, but this similar book is neither.