New school; Marisha Pessl's debut masquerades as a memoir while putting the novel in novel.

Byline: Elizabeth Schmidt

Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking) is a novel that defies categorization: Witty and exuberant, it is part coming-of-age story, part road-trip adventure, part idiosyncratic Great Books survey, with dashes of romantic comedy and murder mystery thrown in. Written in the voice of a precocious but intensely shy

nineteen-year-old named Blue van Meer, each chapter takes its title from a classic novel, providing signposts to the book's dizzying twists and turns.

The story begins with Blue's arrival in Stockton, North Carolina, with her charismatic, protective father, Gareth, a professor who has raised her in a series of university towns. Mourning Blue's mother, who died in a freak car accident, Gareth uses their long drives as tutorials. "It was Sonnet-a-thons. It was One Hundred Miles of Solitude: Attempting to Memorize The Waste Land." Only after she befriends a group of popular students under the sway of a glamorous film teacher does she begin to emerge from her father's shadow.

Pessl spent the three years it took to write Special Topics surrounded by encyclopedias, treatises on politics, math, and physics, and the classics she loves by Austen, Dickens, Fitzgerald, and Nabokov. While a student at Barnard College, she acted in Off-Broadway plays ...