First Impressions Can Be Dumb

The first impression you are likely to get from Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics is that the book is the author's attempt to inform the world that she's a genius. You are given Blue van Meer, daughter of renowned professor Gareth van Meer and the late Natasha Alicia Bridges van Meer, and from her perspective you are then given an imperial heft of literary, academic, and cultural allusions. Blue is smart, and her father is the smartest. For the sake of snarkiness it could be safely assumed that the salient theme of the book's first part is "Look at these two van Meers, how smart they are."

Blue's narrative unassumingly heaps on the literary flair to make the book, and the characters that inhabit it, seem inaccessible, cold, and not apt to be well liked. So why keep reading? You might figure that a book of 514 pages has got to give at some point and that there's something to the intricacy of the form that has been forged. Right?

And then it happens, on or around page 134, that the lugubrious plot becomes swift by virtue of sex in a bathroom stall and all of the book's elements that were once odious are now integral, understood, and indispensable.