Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Gawker has weighed in on the whole “is Marisha Pessl hawt” thing, and we couldn’t let it pass without a mention.
Marisha, as you must know, grew up in Ashvegas, moved to New Yawk and now has a novel, “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” that is getting all kinds of great buzz. Marisha came to Ashvegas for a reading a couple of weeks ago. We told you about it here. We also told you that you should go because Marisha’s book was hot, and that she was totally hawt.
Marisha’s looks have been been bandied about before, with some people questioning why the book publishing world only seems to give fat advances to the best looking writers. Also, Edgy Mama tells us that has been a bookworld debate that goes something like this: only ugly people can write the great American novel, because if you’re good looking, you don’t have the same angst-filled experiences of the ugly to fuel your writing (or something like that).
So the uppity Gawker folks saw a rather bad photo of Marisha and wrote a post about how Marisha’s not so hawt after all. She’s only “book hot,” they said, and came up with a clever little industry hotness scale. (Bloggers, by the way, don’t even rate.)
The Gawker folks must have gotten some feedback, because they posted an apology and upgraded Marisha from book hot to TV hot.
They’re still wrong. Marisha is Ashvegas hawt. But those Yankees will never understand that.
NOTE: In one other bit of Marisha Pessl news that Gawker failed to uncover: Marisha and Ashvegas performed together back in the day in a great Tanglewood Theater production of “The Wizard of Oz” at UNCA. Small world, isn’t it?
In the spirit of fairness, I should probably hold off on commenting about Marisha Pessl’s work until actually reading the entire book. That being said, I found her reading last night at Skylight to be somewhat disappointing.
As an aspiring twentysomething novelist, I had every reason to be excited for a glimpse at the newly crowned wunderkind. Beyond that, as an avid consumer of literary fiction, I really hoped to be awed by her talents. (What’s better, after all, than adding a new author to the rolodex?) Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.
To begin with, the sections from which Pessl read were freighted with similes to the point of distraction. Some, of course, were clever and well-placed, but the majority seemed superfluous and detracted from the overall descriptive flow. Additionally, and I know this is perhaps unfair–and I really do hate to make a tired structuralist critique–the notable similarities to Donna Tartt’s "The Secret History," if only from a superficial armature standpoint, were a bit off-putting for me.
Lastly–and, again, I don’t mean to pick nits–during the Q&A Pessl made several borderline embarrassing grammar mistakes; e.g., failing to distinguish between subject and object ("She returned the draft to my mother and I"), mis-using the subjunctive, etc. Admittedly, anyone can get nervous during a Q&A, and I’m not trying to suggest that Marisha Pessl doesn’t know basic grammar. Nonetheless, it seems somewhat inconsistent for the author of a "pitch-perfect," sprawling pomo tome to be making simple grammar errors. One questions, for instance, whether a Moody, DFW, or JCO would fall prey to said pitfalls.
Again, to be fair, one can’t really blame Pessl for a case of nerves (if that is, in fact, what it was) during her first reading tour. But she didn’t really help her case any when she later admitted that, as an undergrad at Barnard, she simply "made up" footnotes for academic papers b/c she was "too lazy" to actually do the required research. That is, in the wake of such recent literary hoaxes as JT Leroy, James Frey, and Kavvya Viswanathan, a rising-star young author would be well-advised to avoid elucidating instances in which (s)he cut corners.
Again, I can’t stress enough that I’m not putting Pessl in the fraud category; rather, I intend only to point ways in which she might lend herself more literary credibility, which is sure to be a concern going forward, given that she’s already suffering something of a minor (if ineluctable) backlash against her "glamorous young author" status. In a nutshell, I guess I’d suggest that her handlers advise her to skip a few sessions of cardio and instead cozy up with Strunk & White.
That is, the best way, perhaps, to stifle the criticism that Pessl is primarily being championed b/c she’s such an obviously saleable commodity (and no, she’s not as hot in person) would be to have her give truly erudite interveiews and readings. Last night, at least, she failed to deliver.
I was relegated to ‘flying monkey’ status in my appearance in the Wiz. What/who did you play?
A blog post by Whitney at USA Today (http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/2006/08/the_next_big_bo.html) links to several reviews, the official book website and an excerpt of the book.
typo, second sentence–new instead of know.
Here’s a writer’s digest article about author photos that got Gawker play as well:
http://www.writersdigest.com/articles/hogan_bookjacket.asp
She was on the front of the art section of Monday’s NYT.
they basically said she could be as ugly as Catnap and her book would still be good.