It almost seemed as if the author had become disinterested with the coming-of-age story, and decided that she instead wanted to write a murder mystery, so she tacked on a new opening sentence (“Before I tell you about Hannah Schneider’s death, I’ll tell you about my mother’s.”) and voila! Now the author has a reason to suddenly shift the tone, the focus, the characters, the very plot of the novel. This goes on for about 400 pages, and then the book suddenly shifts focus for the last 100 pages, plunging us into Hannah’s death and the mysterious conspiracy behind it. The story is far from perfect, but we eventually fall into, wondering what sort of woman Blue will become. This propels us forward into the narrative, but quickly, the death seems to be abandoned by the first-person narrator (Blue), and she seems far more interested in relating a sort of coming-of-age tale about her difficulties as a motherless child coping with her father’s eccentricities. Pessl opens the story with a gripping first sentence, telling us (in a way that mirrors Donna Tartt’s amazing “The Secret History” or even Irving’s “A Prayer For Owen Meany”) that the narrator will be haunted by a woman named Hannah’s death. The first aspect of this novel that showcases that chatty Millennial attitude is the plot itself. And maybe this kid (and this book) really is genius, but at some point you stop caring…because a true genius knows when it’s better to shut up than to keep rambling. In short, it is a Millennial Generation brat it is the kid who speaks too much, who writes a blog that he thinks is super-interesting, who constantly updates his facebook status, who constantly texts and calls, who won’t shut up because he thinks that his words and ideas are pure gold and someone should just notice him and realize his genius. Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” is all at once consuming, engaging, annoying, boring, fun, tiresome, fresh, predictable, clever, and over-clever. Perhaps I’ve found a new novel to best characterize the writers (and the readers?) of the Millennial Generation.

Calamity physics