Some people suspect Marisha Pessl's six-figure advance was based on her looks as much as it was on her first novel. But she just worked hard and wrote a good book, she tells Louise East
The first media mentions of Marisha Pessl were not exactly promising. One blog wondered whether the American author, who was then 27, would have got a six-figure advance had she not resembled a cross between a Botticelli angel and Lois Lane. Another was simply titled: "It's not about Marisha Pessl's looks and money - is it?" But when Pessl's novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, hit book stands in the US, earlier this year, the last laugh belonged to Pessl. "This skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more," crowed the notoriously snooty New York Times Book Review. "Hip, ambitious and imaginative," agreed the Los Angeles Times. Within two weeks the novel was on its fifth print run, with 80,000 copies sold.
The story of Blue van Meer, a precociously literate teenager, and her charismatic professor father, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is simultaneously a whodunnit, a coming-of-age epic and a postmodern campus novel. A compendium of pictures, footnotes and spurious quotations, it's all delivered with hugely energetic - at times, exhausting - comic panache.
Donna Tartt's The Secret History is its most obvious predecessor, but comparisons have also been drawn with the fiction of Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith; one reviewer even called it Nabokov's "Pnin meets The OC".
"Actually, I was really influenced by The Usual Suspects," says Pessl, who is now 29, and both very pretty and appealingly wry. "I grew up reading like Blue van Meer, and I love it where you close a book with a sense of closure but also epiphany. I wanted to deliver that."
True to her intent, the twist in Special Topics' tale is a humdinger, guaranteed to send the reader straight back to page one, surfing for clues. Pessl admits she is frequently pestered by fans wanting to discuss pet theories, but, she says with a smile: "I am absolutely impenetrable. It's all there in the book."
So how did she keep track of all the kinks in her plot? "I used Excel," she says, calmly. "I have a different spreadsheet for each of the characters, so I knew exactly what they were doing at any time." Literacy in financial-software packages is not particularly common among writers of fiction, but then Pessl pushes the description "overachiever" to its limits.
Growing up in a small town in the Appalachians, the child of divorced parents - her father returned to his native Austria when she was three - Pessl and her sister had schedules tighter than Kofi Annan's. "My mother packed our afternoons with lessons: ballet, tap, jazz, horse-riding, art, drawing, painting, French. I even played the harp. Someone said recently that it sounded like The Royal Tenenbaums, and that's pretty much true."
After graduating from high school, Pessl signed up to study film at Northwestern University, but after two years she transferred to Barnard, a liberal-arts college for women in New York, where she acted in off-off-Broadway shows (including a bit part in a musical about an Orthodox Jewish wrestler) and started writing fiction.
By the age of 24 she had two failed novels under her belt: one a whodunnit "when it was really obvious who had done it by page four", the other "800 pages of people talking with no plot whatsoever".
Momentarily disenchanted with writing, she breezed into a plum job as a financial consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers. "It just seemed like an easy way to support myself in New York," she says airily. "Back then it was very easy to get a job in consulting."
She had already started writing Special Topics when her boyfriend, Nick Caiano, who is now her husband, was transferred to the London office of the finance house JPMorgan. "We weren't engaged at that point, so I took a leap of faith and quit my job and went with him." By the time the pair returned to New York, a year and a half later, the novel was almost complete. Yet nobody, not even Caiano, had set eyes on it. "I guess I don't like criticism," Pessl says apologetically.
After letting her mother read the third draft, Pessl set about getting published with characteristic focus, sending 10 top agents an e-mail that stated: "It is a first novel unlike any one you will read this year." Six asked to read it and three immediately offered representation.
Pessl went with Susan Golomb, agent to one of her heroes, Jonathan Franzen. "He described her as the toughest, the brightest and the best agent in New York city. That was good enough for me." When Golomb visited Pessl's apartment and saw what Pessl describes as her "art hobby", she suggested Pessl illustrate the book herself. Within a week Pessl had 10 completed drawings, and the book was ready to send out.
Pessl won't reveal the sum, but she received a tidy advance after a fierce bidding war; she was, however, unprepared for the slightly vituperative reaction to news of the book. "It was a huge surprise," she says, pausing. "But now that I think of it, maybe it shouldn't have been. American culture is obsessed with celebrity. Everyone wants to look for the gimmick. No one wants to admit that maybe someone simply worked hard and wrote a good book."
Of the connection between her looks and her luck, she is comically dismissive. "I would like to see the writer who has made millions of dollars on a really horrible book that everyone has bought because she's good-looking," she says.
The next challenge facing Pessl is that of sitting down to write a new novel with the applause for Special Topics in Calamity Physics ringing in her ears - famously, Tartt took 10 years to write a second novel after the success of The Secret History; Jeffrey Eugenides took nine after The Virgin Suicides. With typical poise, Pessl just shrugs and smiles. "You know, I'm a lifer. Inevitably, any artist will rise and fall. People are going to like certain books over others. I'm just going to keep writing, regardless of what the response is." She laughs and attempts to look threatening. "You haven't seen the last of me, people."
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, is published by Viking, £16.99 in UK