Viking £16.99 pp514

The chapters of Marisha Pessl’s first novel are named after great works of literature, from Othello to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the course of 36 chapters, she namechecks authors as varied as Joseph Conrad, the Marquis de Sade and Agatha Christie, while hundreds of others are quoted in the text. The novel is structured like a reading list, complete with a final exam, and her protagonist, a 16-year-old girl called Blue van Meer, clearly aspires to be the best-read teenager in American fiction.

For all its references to the canon, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a homage to one particular author, Donna Tartt, and the influence of The Secret History lies heavy on its pages. Set in high school instead of university, Pessl’s characters predictably inhabit a milieu of crushes, intrigue, ambiguous identities and violent death.

When Blue arrives at St Gallway School in North Carolina, she has spent most of her life on the move, endlessly relocating at the whim of her father, a dashing and sardonic widower. Blue herself is an easily recognisable character, overeducated and too used to the company of her father to mix easily with kids of her own age. Nor does she have much time for his girlfriends, whom she dismisses as “June bugs”, not realising what this says about his character.

At St Gallway she is befriended by the Bluebloods, an elite group of students — spoilt, rich and a law unto themselves — who gather under the aegis of a bohemian teacher, Hannah Schneider. Blue herself is the archetypal misfit, a sharp observer who finds herself perpetually wrong-footed as she tries, admittedly not very hard, to be accepted. The Bluebloods encourage her to join them in spying on Hannah, exposing their teacher’s habit of picking up men and taking them back to a cheap motel.

When they gate-crash a fancy-dress party at Hannah’s house, the evening ends in tragedy as one of the guests, possibly her latest lover, is found dead in the swimming pool. Blue is mildly curious about the man’s death and Pessl’s novel certainly has elements of a murder mystery. Its catalyst, though, is not this death but that of Hannah, whose apparent suicide is revealed in chapter one and unleashes Blue’s lengthy reminiscence of her last year in school.

This is familiar teenage stuff: the anguish and pride of being the odd one out, the loner’s sense of superiority, the almost random cruelty of other kids. Blue’s voice is convincing in its self-obsession and irrepressible erudition, but it is also evidence that you can have far too much of a good thing.

Here, chosen almost at random, is a passage in which Blue reflects on her wayward friend Jade: “She was neither a flat nor a solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps.” And so Pessl goes on, roping in chaos theory, fractals and butterfly effects.

Despite this, Pessl can write, but she lacks both judgment and a decent editor, who would have slashed this windy novel to half or two-thirds of its inflated length. As it stands, it is an exhausting read, arch, whimsical and too pleased with its own effects. A plot that Pessl might just have got away with in a leaner text becomes baggier by the moment, with characters pulled in every direction by the demands of an ever more baroque conspiracy. What she needs to do, on the evidence of this messy novel, is find her own voice and get Donna Tartt out of her system.

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