Marisha Pessl’s first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, appeared in 2006. Pessl was in her early 20’s when she crafted her debut novel, a best-selling mystery set in academic backwaters of the American South (she grew up in Asheville, North Carolina.) Narrated by Blue Van Meer, a peripatetic teen-ager following her father through various teaching posts, Special Topics revels in its special knowledge. She finds herself as a senior, working hard to achieve their dream, a scholarship to the best Ivy League sinecure available, at the elite St Gallway Academy. there, she falls in with the Bluebloods, the legacy students who already have their lives mapped and out and paid for. Blue’s father encourages her precocious intellect and sentiment, and she responds by seeing the world through classic literature. Along the way, she discovers a murder mystery, which she and her father resolve, but not before a harrowing night in the Carolina forest, tracking the killer.
Pessl’s own academic background includes a jump from Film and Television at Northwestern, to Contemporary Lit at Barnard. Her novels have a very 21st century flavor, drawing on her broad inquisitiveness, a willingness to display her smarts, an acknowledgement that most readers prefer a plot which moves and titillates, and a bow towards the on-going development of our version of the Victorian serial, the cable TV series we see evolving from Buffy to Breaking Bad.
Her second effort, Night Film, is a little less pretentious. Instead of a narrator closer to her own reality, the story is told by Scott McGrath, a failing investigative journalist. Scott joined the great army of the unemployed, losing his newspaper job in the upheavals of 2009, when the twin neutron bombs of recession and the internet devastated print media, leaving the structures standing, but killing off the inhabitants. Scott didn’t help his cause when he was exposed as a possible fraud during his preliminary research into Stanislas Cordova, a secretive film maker famed as much for his inaccessibility as for his tortured explorations through the horror film genre of the torments of the human condition.
Scott, in his mid 40s, is living on the fringes of New York literary and hip society. One evening, at a party hosted by a friend of his his ex-wife, he receives a message stating Cordova’s daughter is dead.
Soon, calling on his contacts from that previous go-around into Cordova’s mysterious life, he is off on a rather bumbling trip deep into the reeds of what seems to be the supernatural world of black magic in which the deceased, Ashley, had fallen. He is joined in the investigation by two Millennials he encounters early on. Nora Halliday is an aspiring actress from the midwest, possibly homeless. Nora may have been the last person to see Ashley alive, in her job as a coat check girl at the Four Seasons. Ashley dropped by their a few hours before her death, and never picked up her distinctive red coat. Nora kept the coat, and developed a psychic bond with the intense young pianist.
McGrath next runs into Hopper Cole, who is prowling around the elevator shaft where Ashley’s body was found. In the ensuring chase, he drops his phone, allowing McGrath to track him down, Turns out Hopper knew Ashley from a camp for wayward youth both attended, and he has a vested interest in finding out just why that seemingly strong and willful young lady would take her own life.
Along the way, the characters of Cordovas Stanislas and Ashley become the main event, even though we never meet them in person. In one grand set piece towards the end, the trio sneak into The Peak, the sprawling Cordova compound far in the Adirondacks. There, McGrath discovers the sets for all of Cordova’s movies, allowing Pessl to more fully explain just why the film world held him in such high esteem. (He won an Oscar for Best Director around 1990, but was not present to accept the award himself, sending his loyal Pancho Sanza, Inez Gallo, to read a short statement.)
Pessl seems to enjoy adding little gimmicks to her novels. In Special Topics, each chapter receives the title of a book from what seems to be either young Blue’s favorite novels, or the required reading lists of the progressive academies she’s been attending. And the epilogue is actually a “Final Exam”, which seems to mock both collegiate English tests, and book club study questions. Night Film features an attempt at integrating the internet into the narrative, interspersing screen shots from various real or made up web sites to flesh out the back stories of the Cordovas. And, again at the end, Pessl lets up know she has included some web-based material germane to the book, which can be accessed by aiming your smart phone camera at Rohrshach-like “bird symbol”. I admit I have not done this, as it require s a free app, and I just never go around to it. I like my books and online life to remain somewhat separate at this stage of the Connected Era.
Unravelling the mystery of why Ashley died is really not the driving force in this novel. Rather, it is the intriguing on-again, off-again interplay among the odd little group of private investigators. Bogart, Bacall, and Lorre they are not. And, the vast range of characters we meet (Kindle X-Ray lists 105 named People) rivals anything we’d find with Philip Marlowe or Agatha Christie. It is the odd lives of the Cordovas, and the people surrounding them, who are the real attraction here.
3.5/5 stars.