Like Rachel Kushner earlier this year, Marisha Pessl faced a nightmare known to only the luckiest novelists. Pessl’s debut, 2006’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a smash critical and popular success that fetched a six-figure advance, and now she needed to produce a follow-up that somehow topped it. Like Kushner before her, Pessl resisted the temptation to stick with a winning formula; instead she used a broad canvas to produce a novel that is in every way bigger, more ambitious, and more satisfying than her splashy debut.
Pessl’s new novel is called Night Film. People who require categories for their fiction should probably shelve it in the “literary thriller” section, though a genre label is as pointless as a plot summary for a novel as ectoplasmic and slippery as this one. On its base level, Night Film is an exoneration quest by Scott McGrath, the book’s narrator, a disgraced investigative journalist who once tried to penetrate the shell of a reclusive filmmaker named Stanislav Cordova — only to get sued by Cordova and lose everything, including job, wife, daughter, and a fair chunk of his life’s savings and self-esteem. Cordova’s disturbing films, which give the novel its title, have developed a cult following that is literally underground: the movies are so shocking that they’re shown only at secret screenings in tunnels under cities. McGrath describes Cordova as “a crevice, a black hole, an unspecified danger, a relentless outbreak of the unknown in our overexposed world…He’s down under the railway bridge in the river with all the missing evidence, and the answers that will never see the light of day.”
When Cordova’s brilliant daughter, Ashley, dies of an apparent suicide in a shabby warehouse in downtown Manhattan, McGrath feels the old tug: “I could feel it starting again — the dark undertow toward Cordova. Forget my fury toward him, which still simmered — this was a chance for absolution. If I went for him again and proved he was a predator — what I’d believed in my gut — all I’d lost might come back.”
McGrath enlists two young assistants for his investigation — Hopper Cole, a scruffy drug dealer and one-time boyfriend of Ashley’s, and Nora Halliday, a coat check girl/actress who was one of the last people to see Ashley alive. So, on the face of it, we have a good old-fashioned journalistic investigation. That’s like saying Moby-Dick was a fish story.
What sets Night Film apart is that the telling of the story — the quest for an elusive truth — becomes the story. It’s a deft act of authorial legerdemain that could have backfired, but in Pessl’s hands the story whips along even as it becomes increasingly unclear what the story is, or where it’s heading. As the investigation unfolds, we meet a string of Cordova’s assistants, neighbors, actors, and ex-wives, as well as security guards, tattoo artists, hotel maids, and clerks, shopkeepers, landladies, anyone who had contact with the family. There are intimations of black magic, secret rituals, child sacrifice. The more McGrath and his cohorts learn about Ashley’s life, the less certain they are about the circumstances of her death. It doesn’t help that her invisible father appears to be pulling strings to thwart their investigation.
Pessl embroiders her prose with a grab bag of visual effects that attempt to give the novel documentary heft, including police reports, typed transcripts of telephone calls, photographs, newspaper clippings, text messages, e-mails, online news articles, psychiatric evaluations, and postings from a highly secretive fan website known as The Blackboards. For me, these visuals feel gimmicky and rote, more meta-smoke than actual fire.
But Pessl’s writing has done a lot of growing up in the seven years since Calamity Physics was published. That novel, the story of a precocious teenage girl and her peripatetic professor dad, had a hyperventilated prose style that struck me as too cute by at least half. At 600 pages, it was also way too long. The book’s privileged teenagers, known as the Bluebloods, exuded none of the anomie of the young things in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, none of the darkness of Donna Tartt’s undergrads in The Secret History. Now Pessl’s cleverness and bloat have given way to assurance. Her writing is frequently deft and insightful. Here’s a bombastic Cordova scholar: “There were two things Beckman truly loathed in life: sitting in the first three rows of a movie theater and the Catholic Church.” And here’s a mousy piano salesman: “You could spot these Mahler-loving men within a ten-block radius of Carnegie Hall. They tended to wear earth tones, have on DVD all of public television’s Great Performances series, live alone in apartments on the Upper West Side, and have potted plants they spoke to daily.”
Marlowe Hughes, a faded actress, delivers a delicious evisceration of McGrath and his two assistants when they show up to interview her, beginning with Hopper:
“This must be Tarzan, Greystoke, Lord of the Apes. You’re missing a grunt and a club. Can’t wait to see you in your loincloth. Now, who else do we have here?” Enunciating this acidly, she leaned forward to survey Nora. “A chorus girl. You won’t be able to fuck your way to the middle, Debbie. And you.” She turned to me. “A wannabe Warren, straight from Reds. Every one of you, the farting demeanor of the artfully clueless. You people demand to know about Cordova?” She scoffed dramatically, though it sounded like a handful of pebbles rasping in her throat. “And so fleas look up at the sky and wonder why stars.”
As good as such passages are, the writing is not flawless. Pessl has a lazy way with adverbs. People sweat “profusely,” winds howl “punitively,” matches blow out “abruptly,” hair is cropped “hastily.” After a while I found myself wishing Pessl had read Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writing, including Rule #3: Avoid adverbs. Her heavy use of italics is also unsettling, especially in the trite koans sprinkled throughout the text: Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth…Astonishing how quickly money jogged a man’s memory… Everyone smiles for a photograph… Even worse are passages like this dubious bit of social analysis:
In the age of the Internet, pianos, like physical books, were fast becoming culturally extinct. They’d probably stay that way unless Apple invented the iPiano, which fit inside your pocket and could be mastered via text message. With the iPiano you can be an iMozart. Then, you could compose your own iRequiem for your own iFuneral attended by millions of your iFriends who iLoved you.
At first I took such italics as a form of shorthand, a clumsy way of telegraphing meaning. But by the end of the book I had come to see the italics as an effective way of revealing McGrath as a relentless pile-driver, pounding away at his quest for the truth. The italics contribute to McGrath’s portrayal as a driven and annoying character. Which is to say he’s just like most journalists.
To return to the comparison with Rachel Kushner, I would argue that Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was an even tougher act to follow than Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Telex was a first novel that didn’t behave like one. It had nothing to do with its young creator’s erudition or deft wordplay; it had everything to do with history, politics, and social hierarchies in the lost world of an American enclave in pre-Castro Cuba. There was nothing solipsistic about it. Unlike Special Topics, it felt like the work of a fully formed talent.
But that’s not to diminish Pessl’s achievement in Night Film. For me, the book’s finest passage is when the trio penetrates Cordova’s remote estate, The Peak, and then get separated. Chased by dogs and guards, McGrath eludes them by submerging himself in a muck-filled swimming pool, hiding in a greenhouse full of hallucinogenic plants, and wandering through Cordova’s elaborate soundstage. The episode plays out like an extended drug trip — McGrath believes he has become part of a Cordova film — and it leaves him shaken and baffled.
That, to Pessl’s credit, is how McGrath — and the reader — wind up at the end of the book. The mystery is not tied up with a tidy bow, the big questions remain unanswered. But when McGrath finally comes face-to-face with his prey, he has the good sense to be willing to shut up, for once, and listen to Cordova’s version of the truth. It’s the smartest move he makes.
The more I learn about World War II, the more it fascinates me. I feel like most people have a vague, middle-ground understanding of the war. Two generations removed from the war, I have trouble fathoming both the global scale of the conflict and the impact it had on hundreds of millions of individuals. I had a child’s school-taught understanding of the war until I read a novel, actually. The second part of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement tells of the British evacuation from France at Dunkirk after the Germans overran the country. It was an important event in the war, but one that I had never really learned much about, and McEwan’s rich storytelling made me want to learn more. I also realized that I ought to know more about the war that both of my grandfathers fought in, one in Europe and one in the Pacific.
Hi,
I have three recommendations. They cover different sides of the war and require no special knowledge of the military in order to enjoy them. They are wonderfully written.
The first is a novel, the Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. It's about a crew of an anti-submarine corvette in the North Atlantic. I like it because you see how wearing it was. The crew gets on board in 1939 and those that live get off in 1945. The drudgery and terror are nicely described.
Eric Bergerud's Touched With Fire is great. It concerns the land war in New Guinea and the Solomons. The fighting differed from Europe in a number of ways. For one it is tropical, making the fight somewhat similar to Vietnam. For another the two sides were more closely matched in air and sea power which forced the US to fight differently. It's an excellent read.
Antony Beevor's Fall of Berlin 1945 is great, but is also terribly depressing. The end of the catastrophic Russo-German conflict is described in all its brutal horror.
Tripp
Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres is the story of a Greek island that comes under the control of the Italians and then the Germans in WWII. It's a fantastic read and one of those relatively untold stories of the war you were mentioning above. I highly recommend it.
I second anonymous' recommendation of Corelli. Just a great book.
A few nonfiction choices. In my opinion, Beevor's "Stalingrad" is the better of his two books on the war. Stalingrad was the true turning point in the European war (although you will see many smart folks argue that the turning point was Pearl Harbor, the Russian Front broke the Wehrmacht and Stalingrad, with Kursk following, was the breaking point). The scale of the battle is just amazing. I loved Atkinson's book, but reading about Stalingrad makes you wonder whether we could have won a battle like that and thankful we did not have to find out. Richard Overy wrote a very good overview of the Russian Front as well, in "Russia's War". William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" sets the standard and rightly so. For a thousand page tome it is incredibly readable and never less than fascinating. John Lukacs wrote a great book about the period immediately following Dunkirk, when any sane nation would have sued for peace and the British decided to fight on alone ("Five Days in May").
Oddly, or perhaps not, there is a lot of good detective fiction set in Europe immediately prior to and during the war. Robert Janes and Alan Furst are both good, as is Eric Ambler (the latter two are probably better described as spy novelists). If you get nothing else from this long entry (apologies), put this one in the queue: Philip Kerr wrote three detective novels that have been anthologized under the title "Berlin Noir". They are set in Berlin in 1933, 1938 or so (just prior to Kristallnacht) and in post-war Berlin around 1946. Spectacular – Kerr hasn't written anything close to this good since, but these are just fantastic. The changes in German society over the course of the three books are worth the price of admission by themselves, and the stories are quite good.
Wow. Great suggestions. I'd love to hear more if anyone else has ideas.
I second the Beevor recommendations. Both are excellent.
For a more personal look at the war, I recommend Studs Terkel's oral history of the war: The Good War. I'm a sucker for almost any Terkel book, but this one stands out even that body of excellent works.
Great post. A guy like me doesn't find many readers interested in the warrior condition much these days. I recomend Flag of Our Fathers by James Bradley. Clint Eastwood is working on making it into a movie. I could make recommendations all day long, but I think you have a good start with the books already suggested.
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich-Shier
Patton-Ladilas Farago
Macarther-Manchester
In Harms Way-Stanton
Citizen Soldiers – Ambrose
http://www.historynet.com/wwii/reviews/
The war produced a lot of good fiction. I’d say all the famous books are still worth reading: The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny, Catch-22, even A Bell for Adano and Tales of the South Pacific. A couple others I remember liking are Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens and A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown. For contemporary non-fiction you won’t do much better than Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles.
I'm just a few chapters into Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. His The Great War and Modern Memory is one of the best WWI books I've ever read, and so far in Wartime he is proving just as insightful on WWII. He served in WWII himself as an infantry officer and that firsthand experience adds another layer to the analysis.
"Articles of War" by Nick Arvin–this new novel was inspired by Arvin's grandfather's service in WWll. I've heard it compared to Red Badge of Courage. There was lobbying here to have it as the "one book" selection for in our city–it may be set in WWll but it's certainly timely today.
See you at the party! Wendi
The Beevor book on the Battle of Stalingrad is indeed good, but here's a couple of other suggestions on the eastern front, a side of the war which Americans tend to not know much about. Years ago I read a book by a German war correspondent: it's just called Stalingrad by Heinz Schroter. It's doubtless out of print and it's journalism more than history and only from the German side. But still, it's worth reading. The author was at the battle and the horrific stories and sheer immediacy conveyed by the book gives you a real sense of what it was like to endure this military disaster from the German side. I recently also read Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army by Vasily Grossman. Grossman was a Russian writer who worked as a war correspondent; most of the book is excerpts from his journals and reporting. Again, there's some vivid writing about the unbelievably horrible eastern front, and the entire book gives you a sense of the mixture of idealism and brutality which characterized the Soviet side of that monumental conflict.
I keep coming back to this thread to note down the various recommendations that are being posted. Chatten's recommendation re: German perspectives and the Eastern front reminded me of a couple more books that I wanted to mention. One of the best books that I read last year was Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS. It's an extraordinarily powerful memoir that has to do more with the aftermath in Germany than with the war itself. I posted a mini-review of it on my blog in connection with my top ten reads from last year here. Another excellent book which covers similar territory in fiction is Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader. It's been a while since I read that one but I remember finding it deeply disturbing and very thought provoking.
"The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer (Engrossing memoirs written by a German soldier); Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler is excellent — though there are other good ones, his is bifurcated and the second volume deals with the 1936-1945 time period, which fits your bill nicely; "A World at Arms" by Weinberg (massive and slow-going, but comprehensive); "Ordinary Men" by Browning (the banality of evil — a look at the killing squads that moved through Poland in the wake of the fighting); I agree with previous posters that Beevor's books are worth your time, and also that "Fall of Berlin" is incredibly bleak; don't waste your time with "The Rise and Fall" by Shirer — it was poor history by the time it was published; also suggest you steer clear of Ambrose. One final suggestion: "The Book Thief" by Zusak (marketed as teen-lit, but a well-written).
I don't know if you're still checking this, it's been a while since anyone posted but the book that got me started reading WWII stuff, that also does a great job of conveying the emotion tied to the war is "Ghost Soldiers" by Hampton Sides. It focuses on one event in the war, in the Pacific, but is a great read, also very well researched. I'll also differ from the previous poster and suggest reading at least the first third of Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." It was very helpful in understanding how it all came about, although it is very dry and you have to be really interested to get through it.