I just finished
Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics this weekend. It took me two months to read. This is not common for me. I read quickly and I read books to their ends. Setting a novel down for days at a time, closing the covers with a huff after only having read 10 pages, it’s just not me. And it is not Ms. Pessl either. Rather, there was a strange alchemy:
Special Topics in Calamity Physics + me = disgust.
When I was only a few pages in, I turned to a dear friend and beta, who is quite the literary kindred spirit, and said, “You have to read this book. I think you will love it.”
Said Literary Kindred Spirit, “I read it and I can’t put my finger on why but it annoyed the shit out of me.”
As I, too, began to get annoyed, I wondered what it was about this book that had so irked us both. The characters are great, the plot fun and well laid out, the relationships bore the hallmark of reality, and the writing was clever. So, why did we both have trouble with this book?
The answer, when it dawned on me, was intriguing.
The protagonist and narrator, Blue Van Meer (we’ll get into her name in a future post), is a precocious young woman. That should not annoy either Kindred Spirit or me, as we could both relate.
Blue is incredibly well read and clever, citing sources through the novel. In the first pages, it is charming but after a while, not so much. Blue suffered a characteristic that a clutch of Kindred Spirit and my college friends (did I mention we developed our similar literary palates at college together?) shared. This group all went to a prestigious private high school where they were taught that the height of education was proven by the ability to hold erudite cocktail party conversation about anything. They were raised to quote
Rumi and
Janis Joplin and
Euclid with equal ease. But only one quote per source; cocktail party clever is a mile wide and an inch deep. I am not friends with anyone from this clutch anymore as their friendships, like polite banter, ran shallow.
Hence, my disgust with Blue Van Meer.
I am writing about this, not because of my dislike for the character, and not because I genuinely think Ms. Pessl wrote a great book that you should read (and you should!), but because this reading experience reminded me that writing is a dialogue. As a writer, I try to think about my reader, try to imagine a pace that will keep them interested and characters that are dimensional and true to themselves while likeable enough to read. But I forget that readers are each individuals that bring their own thoughts. No reader is a target demographic, they are people who went to college with hurtful clever people and who cry easily at depictions of father-daughter relationships and dislike Westerns solely because the simple and innocent always gets tortured just to hurt the harder protagonist.
I’m not sure how this reminder will affect my writing but I sincerely hope it will.
