When I saw the title Special Topics in Calamity Physics*, I immediately decided I wasn't interested, because I'm that kind of a judge-a-book-by-its-cover girl. The reviews didn't grab me either. A novel organized as a Great Books in Western Literature survey? Huh? Even when the Times named it one of the ten best books of the year, I shrugged.
Mea culpa. I was wrong.
I don't know what made me pick it up at the library a few weeks ago, but I'm glad I did. I thought Special Topics in Calamity Physics was just great, and now that I've read it, I'm even down with the title. I mean, this is a novel with high school, books, and politics--what more could I want? Throw in pretty much all of Western literature and then some (yeah, the Great Books are chapter titles, but it's not as didactic as all that), much pop culture (three mentions of Grease! three!), and a mystery that's actually complex and ambiguous, and I'm a page-turning happy reader--happy enough to keep the book till I finished all 500+ pages, even though it was a one-week library book, no renewals, with a quarter a day fine (at least $2.25 is a lot less than it would have cost to buy it, even paperback, which still would have meant waiting till the end of April).
Really, what I liked most about this book was that it was smart and complicated, but also had an engaging narrative and characters I wanted to read about. And though it reminded me of The Secret History (I gather I'm not alone in that association), I loved that it wasn't predictable. Loved, loved, loved that.
Postacademic, I think you'll like this one. You too, Jackie. Mom, you can skip it.
*Link to Amazon for the diverse reader responses which I'd say are reasonable and justified. The book definitely has some of the flaws people identify, but in this case they didn't bother me.
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2 comments:
i absolutely agreed with you on uses of enchantment (couldn't get past pg. 60) -- and i think you liked the emperor's children OK until the last 40 pages, when you *really* liked it? is that right? i've been skulking around this physics book, and now i think i'll give it a go...thanks!
I am a little behind the 8-ball, but I just saw this post and I have to say: I had meant to write about how much I hated Calamity Physics when I read it last summer (right when it came out). It's not that fresh in my mind right now, but what I particularly hated was the "daddy and me" arrogance of the narrator - and the whole meme about "June Bugs", aka, women in their late 30s and early 40s who hit on her father and are devastated by his rejection / neutrality. I really felt that there was this whole 20 something "I am the best, the smartest, the prettiest girl" tone, at the expense of these somewhat ridiculous old-maid figures.
I did enjoy _Emperor's Children_ however - those characters I thoroughly disliked, while simultaneously enjoying the author's narrative control of them. It's difficult and subtle to write about unpleasant people without being unpleasant yourself; Messud gets it in a way I don't think Franzen ever did.
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