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Bloated and bloviating, despite its 500+ page runtime, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a colossal failure of a book. You would think that at one point or another (its sheer length provided ample opportunity) this ‘novel� would at least, however briefly, be able to convey some sort of meaning, or at least be able to elicit some sort of meaningful emotional response (beyond irritation) in the reader...but Special Topics in Calamity Physics failed to do so. That this book was written by the same person as Night Film (which i loved) makes it all the more boggling yet somehow despite its huge word count, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is Special Topics in Calamity Physics doesn’t even manage to deliver on style, as the academic setting and elements are entirely derivative of the academia genre. The novel is bogged down by verbose and densely self-referential language that is pretentiously self-indulgent and for all its aspirations of cleverness and uniqueness is lamentably lacklustre. It took me 3 months to bring myself to finish it, having come across several reviewers that made it seem like the latter half of the book would deliver on the mystery and the drama that was woefully absent in the former. But turns out they lied, Godot is a no-show.

Oozing with unearned self-satisfaction, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is the type of book that once completed makes me wonder: What was the point in any of it? I don’t always seek ‘meaningful� books but at least they should provide some sort of diversion. This book was the opposite of that. Reading felt like a chore, and maybe the only reason why I persevered in reading it is that I have masochistic tendencies. But jokes aside, this book was a waste of my time. Why does this exist? How is this a book?

The novel supposedly has a plot that goes something along the lines of: precocious Blue grows up all over the U.S. due to her father’s job. An obnoxious narcissistic professor, her father has very much informed and shaped her education, so that by her final year of high school Blue, unlike her peers, is endowed with vast literary, philosophical, scientific, and historical knowledge. Her father’s latest placement sees them taking residence in North Carolina where Blue is enrolled in the elite St. Gallway School. Of course, this being an academia novel, Blue begins spending her time with a clique of students who have been handpicked by the supposedly intriguing Hannah Schneider, a teacher at their school.

There is little if any character interaction so most of the novel consists of Blue’s gratingly self-congratulatory internal monologue which is mostly made of real and made-up references to real-life individuals, books, films, and so forth. There is an abundance of 'quirky' asides, to the point where we have asides within asides. Their purported quirkiness falls short of genuine wit. Footnotes also litter our girl's narration, but these too add little if anything to the overall narration, and they merely seem like a gimmick, an unnecessary way of underlining how witty and bright Blue is.
Everything and anything is described in this densely turgid language. This reliance on bombastic metaphors and labored asides weigh down the text of the novel. Getting through Blue’s narration was akin to wading through a quagmire made up of this pompously high-register yet ultimately empty language that achieves nothing when it comes to conveying the story’s atmosphere or the characters� personalities.

No one is interesting and the characters who get the most spoken lines, Blue’s father, and this annoying girl from the clique, are dull. No one is funny, clever, or fascinating. Blue is the worst offender. I read an interview where the author says that this dissonance between Blue’s internal and external self is intentional, but that means fuck all when in both instances she’s a one-note bore. No, she is not funny or clever. Her supposedly intricately Dickensian internal world is shallow. Her verbosity did not make her into a compelling or intelligent character. And this is coming from someone who can put up with a lot of navel-gazing and books that are very much vibes over plot. But here the vibes are stodgy, and the navel-gazing reveals nothing about Blue’s ‘rich� interiority. I wasn’t charmed nor outraged by any of the characters, finding their passive presence in the story as annoying as a buzzing mosquito.

The lofty and pretentiously self-referential prose, the puerile characters, the shallow exploration of any and all topics touched upon by the narrative, the bathetic 'mystery', the derivative nature of it all made Special Topics in Calamity Physics into a tortuously overwritten novel that seems to operate under the belief that it is doing so much while in actuality doing little if anything at all.

It was a painfully cliché yet drawn-out affair led by an infuriating main character whose convoluted narration incurred the risk of triggering dissociative states. I bought a copy of this book soon after reading Pessl's Night Film but I kept putting off reading it as I was 'saving' it for later...and I shouldn't have bothered really. Special Topics in Calamity Physics was such a let-down I have a hard time reconciling it with the author behind Night Film. If this book is on your radar, I recommend you proceed with caution. What you get in those first chapters will keep on happening, ad nauseam.