Reading, Writing, Thinking

When Special Topics in Calamity Physics first came out, I read some of the reviews, and they made the book sound interesting. When I could get a copy from Audible.com, therefore, I invested a credit (and the very long time it takes to download a book on my dialup service.

As it happens, I was in Borders Books the other day (it's right next door to the Vanderbilt benefits office, and I'm a new Vanderbilt employee), and saw a copy on the rack, and took a look at the flap copy. It says the book is a satire. I like satire, so I went ahead and listened to it.

(All right, that's not exactly true. I had already started listening, and was wondering when the story was going to start developing. But I decided to think of it as a satire and give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, satire doesn't operate by the same rules as, say, Robertson Davies. We don't necessarily expect complexities of story and characterization from satire.)

So I kept on listening, while feeding the dogs and driving around in the MG (and it isn't so easy to listen to a book in the MG) and so on, and I tried to get involved in this young woman, Blue, and her tribulations. And it was all tribulations. Aside from possibly developing a crush on one of the teachers at her new school, everything was unpleasant for her. She had no friends, and the group at school into which she was drawn didn't seem to like her very much; well, she wasn't very likable, so who can blame them?

Blue is pretty sure she is smarter than everyone else she knows, except possibly her father, who is just as obnoxious and has raised her to be just what she is. She doesn't seem to hide this attitude, except amid the aforementioned group, when she is almost totally silent. So what's to like?

And of what is it supposed to be a satire? Wealthy, over-achieving high school students? They aren't important enough to me for me to be interested in a satire of them. Besides, I didn't get a laugh out of the first half of the book.

Which is about as far as I got.

But it did get me interested in the nature of satire. After all, one of the qualities of Jane Austen, whose Northanger Abbey I will be teaching this semester, is her satire on her own (small, defunct) society and its attitudes toward fiction. Those are hardly current concerns for me. But Austen makes them imminent for me, in large part because she makes me care about her people. (You can't worry too much about her plots; usually the resolutions have no surprises.)

Similarly, Wodehouse can be read as a satire of upper-class life (or a certain strain of it) in an England that was dead long before he stopped writing about it. (I'm currently listening to Jeeves and the Mating Season.) But Wodehouse is a hoot, and Bertie is so naive that we can't help a certain fondness for him. (This can be dangerous; I had to stifle a laugh in the dentist's chair today.)

Pessl, although her writing is lively (she's very good at verbing), never got me to care about anyone in the story. Now, I know people of about that age, if not of the same social class (I may meet some this semester at Vandy, but they don't come my way outside the classroom, and I didn't run into any at TSU). They don't seem to have the same problems as Pessl's characters, and they surely don't have the same flat personalities.

I think you can get away with flat characters if the satire is broad enough or funny enough or topical enough. But while "no one appreciates just how wonderful I am" is a pretty universal adolescent problem, and one that is fairly easy to make fun of, but it doesn't sustain a novel very well.

I get the feeling that I'm missing something, but it may just be that, like most television today, I'm just not supposed to get it. It's for younger people, and I can go suck eggs.