Off the Page: Marisha Pessl

Marisha Pessl's debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics , features a precocious narrator, a brilliant, narcissistic father, a mysterious suicide and allusions to literary classics ranging from Ovid to James Joyce to Agatha Christie. She joined Off the Page on Thursday, Oct. 26 at 1 p.m. ET to talk about her book.

Pessl's narrator, Blue van Meer, a freshman at Harvard, structures her first-person novel in the same way her professor father begins all her lectures: Curriculum, and then, Required Reading.

Then Blue goes about telling her life story: her mother's death when Blue was just five years old, her constant moves across the country, and then the suicide of a mentor/teacher, whom Blue tries to prove was actually murdered.

The Washington Post review compared Special Topics in Calamity Physics to Nabokov's Lolita , although it also found Pessl was ''hiding behind Nabokovian sentence structure'' rather than providing emotional depth. Yet many reviewers praise the book's exuberance and see Pessl as an author to watch.

Please join Off the Page to ask Pessl about her novel and other literary topics.

--Carole Burns

A book based on Off the Page interviews, edited by host and writer Carole Burns, will be published next fall by W.W. Norton. Twice a fellow at The MacDowell Colony, she's at work on a novel.

Read the transcript.

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Carole Burns: Hello booklovers, And welcome to Off the Page. Marisha Pessl is ready to answer questions, and so, we're off!

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Carole Burns: The structure of your book is remarkable--clever, but it also seems to fit the character, and be absolutely key to the book. So this seems like a good place for us to start. Can you talk about your ideas about the structure and how it came about?

Marisha Pessl: The structure really evolved around the main character, Blue. I always start my stories and novels with character, and in this particular case her voice began to emerge for me, this incredibly shy, bookish person. And due to the nomadic nature of her childhood, for 10 years she and her father Gareth have traveled around America, she has no friendships beyond that of her father and the books that she reads. And it's through these books that she interprets the world.

So the structure of the novel comes organically from her voice, the constant references and the way she decides to structure her life story through the chapter titles. And because she's so scientific and she loves clear and unambiguous labeling, then it would make sense to structure the novel itself through these books, which are really a part of her childhood.

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Bethesda, MD: I'm curious about your own academic background, and what inspired you to use works from the literary canon as your structure for your novel. Is there a chronolgical significance as well as symbolic in your choice of literature? How intricately did you design your structure, and did it ever threaten to drive you crazy?

Marisha Pessl: My own academic background, I was an English literature major in school, and like Blue, I spent my childhood reading the classics. My mother read out loud to my sister and I the classics, and that is how I first experienced Crime and Punishment, the Woman in White, etc.

In terms of Blue's voice and the structure, I was interested in how the books we read, those that are life-changing, stop relying on the author and become our own in a way that has nothing to do with the character or the plot. For example, when I think of the Catcher in the Rye, I think back to my circumstances in reading thay. I was visiting my uncle in Venezuela. I remember my personal experiences, and that almost eclipses the plot of that book.

Along these same lines, the chapter titles take on new and often humorous connotations based on the events in each chapter. Each chapter is, you could say, contains a tiny mystery as to why Blue names it what she did. Some obvious, others more obscure.

The structure was never intimidating or off-putting, simply because this was Blue's character, and the references are meant to be humorous as much as painful. To read about a character who at least initially sees the world purely through books is heartbreaking and funny. The references purposefully thin out through the novel as Blue leanrs to live life rather than read about it.

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Easton, MD: Please tell me about your experience publishing. Did you write short stories and publish them before you wrote your novel? How long did it take you to find a publisher for your novel? Have you always been a writer? Thank you.

Marisha Pessl: I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating. I worked as an actress while in university, and I enjoyed the collaborative aspects of other arts, working on play or film, which being a novelist is not about. I began writing in my spare time, though, when I was very young, starting when I was in fifth grade. I always had a problem with a short story--whenever I wrote a short story it ballooned into a novel, so I have two failed novels that I wrote in college under my belt.

I began Special Topics when I graduated from school in 2000 and took a financial consulting job at Price Waterhouse Coopers, sitting in my cubicle, which everyone at work called a Veal Fattening Pen. Sitting like that, I realized I had to get myself out of there and that was when I first conceptualized Blue and Gareth, the two main characters. The book took me three years to write, and I wrote probably two thirds of it while I was at PWC. I had no publishing contacts whatsoever, so when I had a relatively polished third draft of the novel, I found a site on the Internet called, Everyonewhosanyone.com, which lists some 3,000 literary agent email addresses. I resolved to work my way through the list until someone said yes and took me on as a client. Some of my favorite writers, I found out who their agents were, and those were my top choices. Fortunately, I approached 10 agents, and three offered me representation.

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Washington, DC: Wow! This is the first I've heard of your novel, but it sounds fabulous --- I'm going to go out and buy it today! I love academia, the format sounds fascinating, and I love Nabokov --- so what do you make of the critique that you are "hiding behind Nabokovian sentence structure" ? Is that good or bad? What exactly do you think it means?

Marisha Pessl: Certainly one of the suprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time. Certainly Nabokov is a great influence, one of my favorite authors. From a stylistic standpoint, I love writers whose books allow you to loiter, let you dig around on the page, if you so choose. The very best books for me are the ones that work on my mind on many layers. You can stroll through at a window shopping or browsing level, but if you wish, you can stop and start digging and discover entire civilizations under their surface.

For my own novel, this is something I hoped to achieve. In terms of the emotional elements of Blue, her story is affecting, but as a first-person narrator, she often attempts to hide her own feelings behind books.

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Carole Burns: The Washington Post review compared some aspects of your book to Lolita, and I have to say I agree. And yet I noticed that it was a book you didn't use to name one of your chapters. What's your thinking on that?

Marisha Pessl: Because it was something that was so obvious. I certainly didn't need to name it directly. I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. Lolita is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.

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London, UK: Have you ever tried writing with a male first person narrator, and how was it?

Marisha Pessl: I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on. I haven't done it, certainly not on the scale of a novel. Though in writing Gareth, he's a male point of view--making that particular character real, even though it's not first person.

As a novelist, my characters are not thinly veiled portraits of people in my personal life. I love to invent characters out of nothing and make them real, so people believe them to actually exist.

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Harrisburg, Pa.: What were some of the inspirations for your characters and your settings? How much of the emotion that you write with from personal experiences and how much haven't you experienced that you write about? What have you based any conjecture upon?

Marisha Pessl: Strangers that I encounter, that I observe in a waiting room or riding a bus, or have some srot of fleeting encounter with, whether it's a professor I had in the case of Gareth, or a very shy person that I once observed in terms of Blue, these kind of strangers inspire me to create characters rather than peopole in my own life. Not knowing them allows me to invent their histories, their joys and sorrows.

At the same time, writing is a sort of acting exercise. You have to bring yourself and your own sensibility to your charactger, and yet you much diminish or augment certain aspects of yourself, see the world through their eyes and judge the world according to their moral compass.

I took an acting class at a studio in New York called Stella Adler Studios, and one of the teachers was taught my Stella herself, who of course taught Marlon Brando. And this teacher said that Brando would go to Central Park and would watch people for hours, and this is how he would create his characters, including Vito Corleone. And I started doing that after taking this class. It's in tiny details, someone's bitten fingernails or in the way they stoop as they walk, it's in those details that human quality is revealed. And I used that with my own characterizations.

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Pittsburgh, PA: You say you had completed "a relatively polished third draft" of the novel before sending the manuscript off to potential agents. Once you were with an agent, how much more re-writing did you have to do to put the book into its published form?

Marisha Pessl: Because I'd been working on the book for three years, and hadn't showed it to anyone, because I don't like to show drafts to people as I work, I'm incredibly private that way, I was anxious to finish and get it off, and I wrote a very sloppy final two chapters, which required rewriting after I found an agent.

With my editor, we worked primarily on unburying certain clues--bringing the clues of the mystery to light. Because I didn't have someone reading it, I thought the ending of the book would be incredibly obvious and certain twists wouldn't have an impact. So it was a question of bringing the clues out so the reader would see them as warnings or elements of suspense.

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London: If you are planning to be in London in the next couple of years, would you like to give a reading to the MA Creative Writing Programme (Royal Holloway Uni) I'm enrolled on? We'd love to have you... this is an invitation to Carole as well!

Carole Burns: Why, thanks!

Marisha Pessl: I would be delighted to return to London. The last fourth of the novel I wrote while living by Tower Bridge. It was easy not to be distracted, because I didn't know anyone in London, and because the weather was so damp at times I didn't want to outside. It was easy to sit inside and finish my novel. I can see why England has such an incredible history of great novelists--no one wants to take on the elements. Everyone sits by the fire and writes.

But I very much enjoyed my time there, and would be delighted to come back, for perhaps for the release of the paperback next week.

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Carole Burns: So I'm wondering... did you ever, in working on this exuberant novel, temper the writing? I don't mean hold back--you can't when writing. But did you ever feel you needed to turn it down a notch?

Marisha Pessl: Yes, I temper everything through my character. So it's not Marisha tempering things, it's Blue. Particularly when she's writing about things that are painful to her, she would hide or circumvent raw emotions. It's simply a question of reamining true to her voice. Once I solidify her character and view the world through her eyes, it's simply a question of how Blue tells her story.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: Have you written anything since? Or have you begun another book? If so, what are you able to tell us to look forward to in your upcoming works?

Marisha Pessl: I started a second novel, and no, it doesn't feature Blue or Gareth. But I can't really talk about it, I don't like talking about a story before it's actually complete.

I actually love the writing process better than having written.

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Washington, DC: Who do you read?

Whose writing would you most like yours to be compared to ?(more than one answer is allowed).

Carole Burns: It's funny. Given the nature of the book, this might seem like an obvious question--just look at the chapter titles. But there's such a plethora of possibilities, it's almost harder to figure out.

Marisha Pessl: In terms of contemporary writers, I like Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ian McEwan. I like Charles D'Ambrosio--his Dead Fish Museum is great.

I don't want to be compared to anyone. I think every novelist wants to forge their own tiny path.

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Carole Burns: Thanks, Marisha, for visiting Off the Page today. And thanks, all you out there, for the fantastic questions! Look out for up-coming interviews, including December's Off the Page with Richard Ford. And remember, you can sign up to get regular emails about upcoming "Off the Page" guests. Email me at offthepagebook@yahoo.com .

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