---

---

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS
    By Marisha Pessl
    Viking, $25.95, 528 pages
    REVIEWED BY JOANNE MCNEIL
    
    People generally don't remember their adolescence fondly. Yet the muck of hormones and bad skin can seem romantic in retrospect. In recent years, adults have enjoyed "Mean Girls," Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep" and the off-Broadway production of "Spring's Awakening." Following this trend, Marisha Pessl has published her first novel about a plucky protagonist suffering the trials of high school in the midst of a Nancy Drew-style murder mystery.

    She is Blue Van Meer, the first of Ms. Pessl's many hat tips to Vladimir Nabokov, who tinged several of his characters' names with blue (Starover Blue, John Shade, Dr. Azureus). Ms. Pessl's Blue was named after the Cassius Blue moth -- another nod to the famous lepidopterist (Nabokov was particularly obsessed with blue butterflies). 

    [ ... ] 

    In Ms. Pessl's hands, Blue engages in namedropping rather than scholarship, so that the novel pays no more homage to Flaubert or Nabokov than a teenager who has listed books by those authors in her Myspace profile.

    Of course, Blue is meant to be lugubriously precocious, but there is no sense of the puppeteer winking at us, as Nabokov with Kinbote and Humbert. So when the digressions border on the preposterous -- Blue reads "Mein Kampf" in the second grade! -- readers lose faith in the author.

    Ms. Pessl also very often describes characters based on what film stars they resemble. For instance, Blue's nomadic college professor father, Gareth, is likened to George Clooney. But we can't superimpose Mr. Clooney's characteristics into the story without established motivation and depth, which never comes. 

[ ... ] 

    Readers are soon exhausted by the distracting wordplay and sitcom hijinks; which is a shame, because the suspense in the last 100 pages of this book shows real promise. And Ms. Pessl's illustrations are marvelously decadent Aubrey Beardsley-inspired sketches.

    But a beautiful stage can't save mediocre actors, and ultimately the problem with "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" is that the reader can't sympathize with Blue or her bloviating father. The book is an exercise in flaunting talent rather than an honest attempt to move readers or impart any wisdom. Without magic, pathos and the intensity of youth, it is instantly forgettable.
    
    Joanne McNeil is a newspaper reporter and fiction writer.