Degrees of Reliability

Posted 22 June, 2007 in Book Reviews |

Works discussed: Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. Penguin Books, 516 pp., $18.50 tpb, ISBN: 978-0-14-311212-9.

Poppy Shakespeare, by Clare Allan. Anchor Canada, 344 pp., $19.95 tpb, ISBN: 978-0-385-66215-4.

It is instructive to read Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Clare Allan’s Poppy Shakespeare back-to-back, since they illuminate each other in a number of ways. Each is a first novel, each features a female protagonist, and each is told in the first person, employing that particular narrative device adored and misunderstood in roughly equal measure: the unreliable narrator.

In both books, the narrator — Blue van Meer in Pessl’s case, N. in Allan’s — is something of a naif, or at least someone from whom the complete story, in all its implications, is withheld. Blue is a sixteen-year-old high-school student desperately trying to gain acceptance from the Bluebloods, the ostentatiously in-crowd at the St. Gallway School, which she attends; N. is a psychiatric patient at the Dorothy Fish, a London day hospital. Especially for those who consider adolescence to be a kind of psychosis, it should be obvious that both of these characters have the deck of understanding stacked against them.

In capable hands the unreliable narrator can be used to subvert conventional tropes of genre storytelling (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), to create an ironic distance between the narrator and the reader (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), or to call into question the very process of storytelling itself (The Sound and the Fury). In less capable hands, this device becomes little more than a dodge, a trick, or a clever ploy on the part of the writer to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes for no greater purpose than the big reveal at the end when the writer can throw back the curtain and smugly say, “Gotcha.” (See, among numerous other examples, Gautam Malkani’s overpraised Londonstani, or pretty much anything by Chuck Palahniuk.)

While neither Pessl nor Allan is in the camp that includes Twain, Faulkner, and (for the purposes of this discussion) Christie, neither is as egregious in their misuse of narrative pyrotechnics as Malkani or Palahniuk, although Pessl comes closer to being too clever by half, but this ultimately might have to do with a surfeit of ambition rather than a deliberate attempt to be cute or to prove how smart she is.

Blue’s story begins as a coming-of-age tale. Following the death of her mother, Blue takes to the road with her father, Gareth, a once-esteemed political science professor who has more recently been relegated to a series of positions at bottom-tier schools, “the schools no one had ever heard of, sometimes not even the students enrolled in them.” The two travel from school to school, from city to city, Blue constantly attempting to integrate herself into a new environment while her father occupies himself by engaging in a succession of short-lived affairs with local women, whom Blue comes to refer to as “June Bugs”: “Dad’s romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).”

Following an incident in Howard, Louisiana, involving Blue and a gunshot Spanish gardener named Andreo Verduga, Gareth decides to settle with his daughter in the town of Stockton, North Carolina. There, Blue encounters Hannah Schneider, who teaches a film course at St. Gallway. Hannah takes an immediate shine to Blue and attempts to integrate her, over the objections of the other group members, into the Bluebloods, a snooty clique of five students that meets once a week at the teacher’s home for dinner.

So far, so good, and Pessl does a fairly decent job of melding a distaff Holden Caulfield with characters plucked from The O.C. Unfortunately, on page 311, the story takes a dramatic left turn, becoming a kind of ad-hoc whodunit, with Blue forced into the role of Nancy Drew. This is where her inability to comprehend events around her becomes significant, and significantly distressing for the reader. Several new plot points are introduced in the latter stages of the book, leading up to the big reveal at the end, but none of this is particularly effective, and feels totally at odds with what has gone before.

But the overwhelming problem with the book’s final section — which is impossible to discuss in any substantive way without giving away the key secret embedded in the plot — is that it ends up as little more than a fancy parlour trick: an instance of a clever author saying “Gotcha” to her reader. Nor is it entirely clear that any of the nettlesome questions in Pessl’s labyrinthine plot are resolved at the end. The book closes with a “Final Exam” that asks readers to answer questions based on the characters and situations in the preceding pages. Pessl has said in interviews that all of the information necessary to answer the Final Exam questions is in the book, but this, too, smacks of authorial coyness.

It is possible that Pessl was attempting to achieve what Henry James referred to as “gradations and suppositions of effect” in her narrative, but the result is too self-conscious, too precious to be entirely satisfying.

Poppy Shakespeare, by contrast, is less self-conscious in its approach, and the narrative pyrotechnics are more fully wedded to the story. As with Special Topics, there is a psychic distance between the narrator and the reader, but unlike Pessl’s book, this never feels artificial or show-offy; it is a natural product of N.’s character and her circumstances.

N. is a “dribbler” — her word for a patient at the Dorthy Fish day hospital, where she has spent the last thirteen years. In N.’s conception, the Dorothy Fish “was the best of both worlds: you was getting the help but you done what the fuck you wanted.” The patients in the Dorothy Fish survive under the aegis of The Ministry for the Advancement of the Deranged (MAD), which provides them with MAD money, offered in “twenty-seven rates, from High High High to Low Low Low” and allocated based on the severity of a patient’s illness: “the madder you was, the higher the rate they give you.”

MAD money was like religion ‘cept bigger. MAD money was every religion all added together and timesed by itself and bigger than that as well. Sniffs gone to college to study MAD money and come home knowing less than they did when they gone. People spent their whole lives studying just one single rate. I knew all about it ’cause years before, when I was still on the wards, this student come round doing research for a thesis he was writing on Middle High Middle. And not even all of Middle High Middle, he was focusing just on the second ‘Middle’ he said, ‘for reasons of space’.

When Poppy Shakespeare, a new patient, arrives on the ward, N. is asked to guide her around, to show her the ropes and familiarize her with the hospital’s procedures and rules. Poppy arrives in “this little black suit, a lacy white blouse, black tights and snakeskin heels,” and N. initially mistakes her for a nurse.

As for Poppy herself, she is resolute in her assertion that she is not mentally unstable: ” ‘Let’s just get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘I Am Not A Nutter. There Is Nothing Whatever Wrong With My Head! Alright?’ She spelled out the words like I was foreign or stupid, tapping her head to make sure I got the point.” But Poppy’s attempts to prove that she is sane are stymied at every turn:

[S]he gone to see the doctors, said she didn’t need to be there and the doctors said it weren’t for her to judge. So she asked them to tell her why she was there and doctors said it weren’t for them to say. And she had to be prepared to help herself and shit, and nobody couldn’t do it for her.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, Poppy Shakespeare reads like a conflation of Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but Allan complicates her narrative by forcing the reader to view everything through N.’s distorted eyes. The objective truth of her narrative, to the extent that such a thing exists, operates outside her own skewed perception, and readers must come to it through a combination of close reading and intuiting the shifting ironic distance between what N. tells us and what is actually the case.

This is a tricky line to walk, and for the most part Allan acquits herself admirably. There are passages that ring false, as when N. relates Rosetta, another patient at the Dorothy Fish, relating a conversation amongst various staff members at the hospital. The educated cadences of the staff members’ speech are presented too perfectly, particularly at two removes. But, it is possible that N. is simply a great mimic, and that she has sufficient perspicacity to fill in the gaps of memory or other people’s faulty recollections. Allan has a bit of a built-in “get out of jail free” card in this respect: nevertheless, passages such as the one mentioned above don’t feel entirely authentic to me.

As with Special Topics, Allan’s novel has a big reveal at the end, but in this case the surprise is earned, whereas with Pessl it comes off as something of a cheat. The reason for this has to do in part with the different modes of the two books: Allan’s novel is a satire, whereas Pessl for the most part plays her story straight. The twists of Allan’s plot have an organic quality to them; they are inevitable consequences of the story rather than authorial constructs imposed from without.

This, finally, is what makes Poppy Shakespeare a superior fiction. It is a true exit author piece, which is what every first-person narration aspires to. Pessl’s authorial fingerprints, by contrast, are all over Special Topics in Calamity Physics. The former displays a narrative voice that is bracing and vibrant, while the latter is too precious for its own good.

5 comments to “Degrees of Reliability”

Panic, June 26th, 2007 at 4:10 pm:

• I *loved* Special Topics. Having read this post, I will definitely check out Poppy. Thanks for the heads up!

Steven W. Beattie, June 26th, 2007 at 4:32 pm:

• Don’t thank me, thank Kerry Clare over at Pickle Me This, who pointed me in the direction of PS in the first place.

Panic, June 26th, 2007 at 4:33 pm:

• Ah, book roll. :)

Claire Cameron, June 26th, 2007 at 11:11 pm:

• I really enjoyed reading this.

  I read an interview with Clare Allan, where she spoke of her time in a North London hospital. She was institutionalized for longer as she spoke of wanting to be a writer. The nurse classified this as delusional.

Steven W. Beattie, June 27th, 2007 at 8:59 am:

• I have a friend who works in the nursing profession; whenever she describes what I do she says that I work in the “arts,” and always makes air quotes with her fingers around the word “arts.” I think she suspects I’m delusional, too.

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