Marisha Pessl
Continued from issue No. 29
By Ling Ma
Published: September 19th, 2006 | 1:14pm
On a Wednesday night, Marisha Pessl is signing copies of her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, at the half-filled, fluorescently lit Chicago bookstore Women and Children First. As Pessl routinely attacks the next book with a pen, the book’s owner, a young female fan in her 20s, mentions how she recently quit her job to devote herself to writing.
Suddenly, the polite and — yes, let’s get this out of the way first — gorgeous novelist, who has been fielding run-of-the-mill audience questions all evening (“What do you think of the media attention to your looks?”) instantaneously puffs up with sympathy and encouragement. “You are?!” she exclaims, before launching into the story of how, not too long ago, she quit her job to write as well.
The story goes like this: After graduating with an English degree from Barnard College, Pessl went on to a job in finance, spending her days as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and her fatigued nights working on Calamity Physics. Halfway through, she moved to London with her boyfriend, who she later married, and finished the rest of the piece there.
So more than any other young practicing writer, the now 28-year-old Pessl is in the best position to extol the positive benefits of sticking to your craft. Of course, success stories like Pessl’s don’t come along every day. For a debut novel, Calamity Physics (Viking) not only secured a hefty advance after a frenzied bidding war, but also a flurry of critical acclaim and, by the evening of her Chicago reading, status as a bona fide best-seller.
What’s all the fuss about? The story follows bookish teenager Blue van Meer and her professor father Gareth as they travel from college town to college town on his visiting professorships, eventually settling down in Stockton, North Carolina. Mysterious occurrences develop, clues are dropped, and intrigue ensues.
The standout feature, however, may be Blue’s first-person narrative, filled with dizzyingly elaborate sentences jovially overloaded with literary and cinematic references. In effect, they are sprawling spiral staircases of sentences, occasionally cumbersome with their asides and dashes and parentheses, but exuberantly surmountable. Blue, on two gossipy classmates: “With curly auburn hair, stout frames, shepherd’s-pie potbellies, and alehouse complexions, they resembled two oily portraits of King Henry VIII, each painted by a different artist (see The Faces of Tyranny, Clare, 1922, p. 322).” If you can stomach the stamina involved to scale all 500-something pages (the trick is to read it fast the first time, then reread later), it’s a deliciously crafty read in which the witty, mischievous turns of phrase are only archly matched by every twist of plot.
On a Sunday afternoon following her Chicago reading, Pessl spoke by phone from her New York apartment.
I heard you attended Northwestern University but left for Barnard in New York. When you lived in Chicago, where did you hang out?
My friends and I were always escaping Evanston and going downtown. You can bike along the bike paths, so we often did that along the lake on Saturdays. But then sometimes during the week my — [aside] Honey, I’m actually … Can you keep it down? I’m doing an interview. [returns] He’s talking to our cat. [laughs] We would go karaoke-ing and downtown during the week. We also loved Wicker Park and some of the cigar bars — actually that was when we were underage, so I don’t know if you should put that in the article [laughs]. But we were always having fun and always leaving campus, unlike all the other freshmen and sophomores who were always on campus.
How is your first big book tour going so far?
Often when you’re signing books, people tell you about themselves, and that has been the most interesting. Some people really focused on the father-daughter dynamic, and other people just loved reading the references and all the different books. A lot of people told me they looked up some of the titles on Amazon. I had to break the news to them that they don’t exist.
I remember during your reading, you mentioned that you wrote two other novels before you started Calamity Physics. One was a mystery and the other was a Southern story …
I think I started out attempting to write a short story. It just kept getting longer and longer and there were more characters, and the plot twisted and turned. The first novel that I wrote was a mystery … it actually wasn’t very long. The Southern novel was the one that mushroomed to the point of a large plant that never stops growing. I couldn’t really control it.
But the first one was a 300-page mystery where it was obvious who was the murderer from the first few pages. As soon as I finished that, I realized it was unrevisable because it was some of the characters. The characterization — I think it always shows when you’re a novice because the characters are sort of tinlike and don’t really speak like human beings. They’re not exactly complex.
I started the Southern novel because when I grew up in North Carolina, there were so many prominent Southern writers, like Kaye Gibbons or Charles Frazier — a lot of writers who lived in the Chapel Hill area. I think I went through a phase of reading all their books and I decided, “Oh, I have a story in mind.” So I wrote that. When I had transferred to Barnard, I was working on that in my spare time. I did send it off to a few agents and they said, “Well, you know, it’s too long.” A lot of the agents that I sent it to gave great feedback, but by the time I received the feedback, I’d already moved to something else. And the third novel of course was Special Topics.
What were the plotlines of the first two?
The first one was — I’m trying to think how to encapsulate it. It was basically an ad executive who comes home and his wife is dead and how he tries to figure out how she came to be dead. And the second one was a story of a beauty-pageant queen who’s aged and how she comes to terms with the town in which she grew up, because she left it and then she decided to come back.
What did you learn about writing from both of those pieces and how did they lead you to Calamity Physics?
The major thing I took away from both of those exercises was that I have to have a map, an outline of where I’m going. And the idea that you have to think of the story and envision it prior to the actual writing. Often you get very anxious when you have an idea and you want to sit down and immediately put it on paper, but now I refrain from jumping the gun. Before I sit down at the computer and start writing it on a sentence-by-sentence level, I really have an idea of the entire arch of the story. So it’s just about preparation.
And then there’s just the pure mechanics of writing every day. Like any job or trade, if you do it every day you inevitably get better at it. And I also believe in reading as much as one possibly can. Those published books are really your best teachers because if you break a novel down, you can see how it’s put together. Published books are really my teachers.
You’ve mentioned that one of the primary influences of this book was Lolita.
Oh yes, absolutely. That’s my favorite novel of all time. I mean [Vladimir] Nabokov, I love his work probably above any other writer. Simply for the fact that he does have a plot and he also loves intellectualized thrillers and yet on a sentence-by-sentence level, he loves wordplay and imagery. The best writers for me are the ones that you can read very quickly and get a sense of the story. Yet if you slow down and read on the page and start digging you can find entire civilizations in each sentence, so Nabokov really suggests that.
You’ve spoken about how personal memories are often associated with what you’re reading at the time. What are your personal memories associated with Lolita and how old were you when you read it?
I’ve never been asked that. That’s a great question. Inevitably you hear about Lolita growing up and you always think it’s some sort of risqué book that cannot be taught in high school because of its subject matter. So you think it’s some sort of risqué, X-rated sordid novel like Anaïs Nin or Marquis de Sade. When you’re growing up, you sort of lump [certain writers] into this sense that you’ll be able to read them when you grow older, but it’s awful when it’s right now.
So that was my first connotation, and then of course, there was the movie. Growing up, I wasn’t even aware of the Stanley Kubrick version. It was that Jeremy Irons version that was rated X and then it had to be cut and it was NC-17, so I was already getting a basic instinct or vibe from the whole story. I had been meaning to read it once I was in college and I finally took an American literature course, which was phenomenal. … That was when I first read Lolita. I think [the professor] lectured on it at least three times over the course of a single week. And that was the book I found utterly so amazing, and I had never read anything quite like it before.
And then simultaneously I had also been doing a lot of off-off-Broadway theater in New York, and I was doing children’s theater. I was playing Rapunzel at the George Street Playhouse. A director had taken his daughter to see Rapunzel and he stayed afterward and said, “I am a director and I’m directing this stage production of Edward Albee’s Lolita and I would love for you to audition for this play.” So inevitably I auditioned and I wasn’t Lolita because I was too tall and he got this perfect looking — she was actually Russian but she had that look that was very 12-year-old and adolescent, sort of a tomboy as well. She was really petite and she was perfect for the part. I played this mechanical doll who was sort of — I think they said I was Humbert’s subconsciousness. [laughs] I was wearing this costume and I had done a lot of dance growing up, so I did these interesting routines. It was a beautiful production. It was one of the most memorable plays I’d ever been a part of.
However, on opening night, the director — and we had rehearsed for three months on this play, and simultaneously I was reading the book, so everything was infused with Nabokov and Lolita in my life. I was seeing the world through that perspective. The director sits us down on opening night before the audience gets there, and he says that he never got the permission from Edward Albee …
Ohhhhh no.
… to be able to produce the play. We were only able to do two performances of this play. It was so beautiful the way it was done. The director was Russian and there was this incredible music between the scenes and it was just a very moving play. Though I think when Albee first released it and it was produced — I think it was in the ‘70s or so — it was panned and everyone put it down. But this version of it was so beautiful, so it was sort of sad when after the second performance, we felt like we could have gone on forever. We had to shut it down. It was awful.
I always return to Lolita, and when I read it again it feels like a different novel.
In developing this novel, you started out from the character of Blue. She kind of came into focus for you first. Could you describe the process of how she came into focus for you?
I started with this dynamic of father and daughter. In Ashville, I did a lot of children’s theater growing up. And I remember some of my peers — the other kids who were in these plays — were home-schooled. I always found that so interesting and mysterious: the idea of your parent quite literally being your teacher and how attentive and potentially isolating that would be.
On one hand, you’d have a professor at your beck and call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In Blue’s case, it is a literal professor. And she is really his primary focus. She is his number-one student. She is his pupil just as much as she’s his daughter.
On the other hand, being home-schooled, you’d miss out on that very American experience of high school dances and running for president and being part of the in-crowd or out-crowd or that entire socialization which we take for granted if we attend any sort of public or private schools.
But Blue and these peers that I knew in my childhood, they didn’t have that. … Because just the nature of her itinerant existence, [Blue] really hasn’t had any socialization. I mean, she attends these schools but it’s really her father. And being on the road, that’s her classroom. It’s interesting in terms of how such a person would interpret the world. That’s really where Blue’s characterization came from because she interprets the world through her father, her teacher. And then these other textbooks — those are her peers in a certain sense. Those books are her socialization and she filters every experience through some book she’s read, particularly in the beginning of the book.
Aside from maintaining Blue’s voice, what kind of value did you intend for all of these references to impart to the story?
On one hand it was just my own desire to play God. I believe the writer is an enchanter and has to create — I mean this is one of the things I love about writing. You can create the wallpaper of your entire world, and in the book sense, I just wanted to specify what my characters were reading. And just the idea that these so-called academic opinions or self-help books that everyone is constantly reading to inform their lives, I was satirizing it in the sense that why are those perspectives more informed than our own life experiences? And eventually Blue does become more of an expert than all those books that she reads.
And then it was just also fun for me, in terms of just [listing] all of those titles that are becoming more and more emphatic, all these nonfiction titles and those diet books, those titles go on forever and they’re just begging you to pick them up and solve all the problems of your life. They never do. They tend to complicate things. [Laughs].
Venus Zine Reads Editor Ling Ma has lived all over the United States, none of them places in which she has come of age. Her days are spent working in a book productions company, and her nights are filled with reading and writing. Somewhere in between, she has cultivated the art of many leisure activities: feigning disinterest, loitering the streets, connoisseuring films, self-grooming, and indexing cultural details. To apprehend her writing habits, to start a dialogue about fiction, to pitch stories for the Reads section, or to submit fiction for both the print issue and Web site, please e-mail ling@venuszine.com.
Issue #35
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