For all those crying that it would have been *okay* if Champion had gone ahead and sincerely tore Ms. Pessl a new one: what planet do you wise citizens live on? One can only imagine the ensuing double-shitstorm if he’d done so…not to mention the blowback on Segundo as an institution. Champion had a point to make that he wasn’t permitted (by common sense) to make directly. We were offered the opportunity to read between the lines with wry smirks and move on. Being too literal-minded to accept this offer, of course, the finger-wagging pooh-pooh brigade (and so soon after the anti-Sarvas n+1-eMail Sanctimonathon, too!) went to work.

What I for one enjoy about the frontier decorum of online bookchat is the personality on display, richly saturating the product. When I read lofty print reviews of Ms. Pessl’s book claiming it a masterpiece and a triumph (with the minor mitigation that it takes 300 pages…300 pages!… to “take off”), I knew the fix was in. Pessl was going to be the Next Big Thingy, regardless (irrespective?) of the actual merits of her book. I would have appreciated a gut reaction or two.

It was refreshing to read Champion’s very human take on things; reassuring that *everyone* wasn’t in on the ruse. If Pessl is being promoted as an ueber-erudite writer (based on the fact that she, what, peppered the text with references both real and imagined?), and Champion reveals the middling intellect (with a modicum of verbal facility, and TV-bred plot savvy) behind the PR facade…I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful because I suspect that the bullshit facade rankled him, too, and he set out to do a little debunking. It was Quixotic on his part, of course. Pessl has been outflanking debunking attempts by guys like Ed since junior high school prep. One eye-roll and a flip of the hair and Ed’s toast.

Would Special Topics… have been purchased and published and hyped if Pessl had been a fat, balding fifty-ish dude named Wilbur with a day job requiring a paper hat? As if.

I’d like to think that Champion was thinking of Wilbur when he hit Pessl with that herringbone riff.

Or will you not recognize that the vast majority of people who read your post think think this is just lame. Come on buddy. Get some balls. Or least talk about the crying again.

(quoting from the sophomoric work in question:)

“There was Mona Letrovski, the actress from Chicago with wide-set eyes and dark hair on her arms who liked to shout, “Gareth, you’re a fool,” with her back to him, Dad’s cue to run over to her, turn her around and see the Look of Bitter Longing on her face. Only Dad never turned her around to see the Bitter Longing. Instead, he stared at her back as if it was an abstract painting.”

or

“Some of the sweeter, more docile ones like poor, droopy-eyed Tally Meyerson, I actually felt sorry for, because even though Dad made no attempt to hide the fact they were as temporary as Scotch tape, most were blind to his indifference (see “Basset Hound,” Dictionary of Dogs, Vol. 1).”

Reading such thuddingly unwitty juvenilia, methinks the morally outraged posters in this comment thread doth glow with a richly comedic light. The only question that remains is why Mr. Champion, who recently interviewed Martin Amis ferchrissakes, felt compelled to interview this bulge-in-the-bell-curve-type “writer” in the first place.

The End Times are nigh, chillen…

And I’m supposed to believe that an *editor* of some sort generated this depthful verbiage.

Yes, I’m sure Ms. Pessl’s ms languished in a Laker-tall slushpile until a red-eyed intern plucked it by chance from ignominy and was stunned…stunned…after hours of breathless page-turning to realise that he/she had struck that rarest of nuggets: pure literary gold! (cue: montage of faux naive cinematic rags-to-riches type “success” imagery, c. 1935)

“Anyone can say what they want about Calamity Physics, and their problems with Ms Pessl and their views on her hair or her lack of failure, or whatever, but the novel was a best-seller, and one of the Times top ten books of the year.”

Success, I find, is *without fail* the most accurate index of artistic seriousness. If only a few people buy it, it is a poor effort, lacking in merit. If many buy it, it is a brilliant example of what the finest and healthiest literary minds are capable of!

Yo, Bellow, make room in The Canon, we’ve got a hot one here…and I mean that in both senses of the word! Va-va-va voooom!

Thank all beneficent gods that in my 50s, now, only about half the men I end up in conversation with react first to my appearance and now and then one or two actually listen to what I say. She’s young, she’ll deal with it – what about you? Haven’t you got better things to do? No one reading this ought to be in the least deluded that feminism has actually gotten US much further in the past 40 years.

I can, at best, call up random information on the most irrelevant topic at the least opportune moments. This qualifies me as A.) Perry Ferrell’s apt rival in a heated game of “Boggle” or B.) the ideal drone for one of those religious cult compounds — the one that hands out the guns during a siege.

By the way, as a personal favor to me, Ed, could… well, could you please stop using the word “irrespective”?

Trust me, you’ll be doing the world a service.

Anyone can say what they want about Calamity Physics, and their problems with Ms Pessl and their views on her hair or her lack of failure, or whatever, but the novel was a best-seller, and one of the Times top ten books of the year. It’s been optioned for a film. If it hasn’t earned its advance back yet, it certainly will in paperback. It’s a total success, critically, financially, what have you; there are arguments about just how good it may be, but it’s obviously been a smash. We all know that, we all have opinions on whether this is just or not. But the book and its author have made their mark. To this end, I am sure that Mrs. Pessl can more than handle having a bad post or five made about her. I don’t think that is really here or there.

Each person gets to decide how they want to move through the world and what kind of person they will be to others. My own feeling is that Ed made a mistake on this one, and while I do wish he’d own up to it, I also hope he’ll come away from it having learned something.

If you’re going to spend all this energy talking about the merits of literary blogs and their place in the conversation and all that, then, well, you know …

Anyway.

So what is it about Pessl that gets under the collective skin so much? What was it about her that prompted me to write my initial post about her book deal two years ago, thereby fanning the flames in post-modern fashion?

Now that I’ve read her book – well actually, attempted to read, as I quit about 70 pages in because I couldn’t summon the urge to care about any of the characters – and granted, I’m basing this solely on an incomplete read of one novel plus what I’ve read in interviews, plus this post, plus a boatload of conjecture, but I think I know what the issue is:

Lack of failure.

Pessl is young, but she’s roughly around the same age as I am, twenty-eight. She’s benefited from a nice life, a wealthy husband whose financial success afforded her the ability to write full-time, a charmed path to publication, bestseller-dom and an incredible amount of buzz. Everything’s gone right, so why should she listen to critics or subject herself to questions that don’t conform to the Q&A 101 format? Why bother with any criticism from blogs when most of it has, up till now, largely centered around appearance and entitlement? They got it all wrong, and hey, the book sold, didn’t it? Voila, validation!

And that’s fine, but it’s also creative death. I can only speak from my own experience but I led a similarly charmed experience up until my mid-20s. My first college choices, good grades, living the dream, all of that jazz, and not a single word of good writing whatsoever. Along came a few hard knocks that seemed terrible at the time but utterly necessary now and while there’s still plenty of room for improvement – thank god – having to rely on my own wits, triumph over adversity and generally grow the fuck up has made me appreciate what I have while still understanding there’s so much more I need to do.

It’s not seemly to wish failure upon a person, of course, but failing means coming to grips with humanity. It means recognizing emotional honesty and a kernel of reality. Even among those who enjoyed the novel, the consensus I’m finding is that SPECIAL TOPICS lacked some sense of emotional center. And if Pessl can find a way to that center, then and only then will she live up to the hype and to the obvious talent on display.

All this reminds me of Zadie Smith, another supremely young, supremely hyped author afforded heaps of praise and scorn when WHITE TEETH was published in 2000. Then came THE AUTOGRAPH MAN which even she kind of turns her back. And what happened? She grew up, got some life experience, wrote ON BEAUTY and no matter where one stands on her work, there’s little doubt she proved herself and has something to say and will probably be around for the foreseeable future. I don’t think it’s an accident Smith wrote a well-regarded two-part essay on the theme of “failing better.” If Pessl is smart, she’ll heed both Beckett’s original quote and Smith’s resulting essay.

This post displays all the sincerity of a “It’s me, baby, not you” break-up call.

I don’t think anyone in the entire thread implied such a thing. I think Ed is entitled to portray Pessl in any light he wishes. What I found troubling is how he decided to paint her in extreme unflattering terms while trying to deny he was doing so. I think Ed should say whatever he wants, but to just own up to what it is he’s saying.

If you don’t want to be interviewed then just don’t agree to do it. It’s not rocket science to say the words, “No, thank you.”

And as for the things Ed said about the interview, well he had a failed interview with her and he gets to post about it. She should be happy the whole thing didn’t happen on David Letterman – then it would be on you tube forever.

Come on, Ed. Are you seriously trying to convince us that you were just presenting the facts without infusing your post with your own judgment? Are you really convinced that your humility is sincere and that your only agenda is to show us that “some of us out here trying to innovate are highly fallible”? (By the way, what made you suspect we didn’t already know that you and others are fallible? Sounds like a pretty basic assumption to me.)

I agree with others: If you think Pessl was a dud, just say so. If you don’t, reread the quotes DW pulled from your post and think about how those words come across to your audience. Can you say, with all sincerity, that there’s nothing back-handed going on here?

But I read this post as pure revenge on Pessl while hiding under the guise of “self-examination.” Like DW, I’d be cool with a Pessl was a self-important, unengaging prima donna straight ahead analysis, but carving her up while claiming he’s not trying to carve her up seems beneath him.

If you went into an interview in good faith and you feel that the author didn’t do the same and you’re pissed off and you want to call her on it, fine. Do it. But don’t couch it in bullshit about “just being honest and trying to learn from this” and pretend to be holding the moral high ground.

If you want to make implications about her mindset or whatever, fine. Do it. But if you’re going to make those implications, STAND BY THEM for God’s sake. Don’t make them and then spread your arms innocently & claim that people are inferring things out of thin air. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.