Night Film

Yesterday I posted on Facebook that I was suffering from a "serious book hangover", because every strong emotion must be validated on a social media network, followed by a couple of memes, because memes explain how we feel better than we do and they are usually funnier and have pictures. Within minutes, notification of the first comment rang from my smartphone, always a boost for the self-esteem. Then another and another. Yay! The memes worked! And my friends have been well-selected and therefore shall never be cullled. (Don't get any ideas of starting a competing blog, you.)

In a ripple effect, I will now explain myself here and then post the link on Twitter, thereby closing the circle (get it?). The book is Night Film by Marisha Pessl. In my mind the release of this paperback is linked with that of Donna Tartt's Goldfinch, because they have both come out at the same time and I read the previous releases of both authors at about the same time (which may have been years apart, actually, because memory plays poker with distance and then doesn't bother to put the cards back in the correct order) and they are both very thick.

Which brings me to Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas, which also belongs in this card suite of time.

To make this brief (and leave more time for meandering during which I contemplate My Point), the original books I read were: Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Pessl), The Secret History (Tartt) and The End of Mr Y (Thomas). My memory deals me a three-of -a-kind, all queens, when reminiscing about these books. Even if they weren't actually dealt in the same hand, I am jealous (in the words of a friend) that someone else (you, maybe) gets to read them for the first time, because they demanded my attention and rewarded me with something like the feeling of wielding magic, from somewhere around or in my intestines.

Context explained, let's waddle back to Pessl, because she is starting to kick up a fuss. (She is very famous now and doesn't have time to waste playing poker. Also, I am kicking her ass.)

Topics was a pink trade paperback (that understudy for the new-release hardcover, which broke its spine falling through our wallets), the cover textured (I think? My memory needs to be de Bono-ed), with a rose bundled with branches of leaves on the cover. It was a bookclub (yes, you heard me!) book, so the cover was fraying into sheets of paper. This cover is almost everything the book isn't, except for a sentimental corner of the protagonist's personality.

Night Film is a Kindle ebook, black and white. The paperback cover is cascading squares of black and white anyway, with a portion of a face starting back at us from the middle. It doesn't do the book any justice, except in the way the plot of the book sounds when summarised in the blurb. The book is more multimedia than 'hard copy', except that the price of the paperback poked holes in my wallet looking for lose change. (Always justifying my choice to download a book - oh, I admit it, I am guilty! And thrifty.)

Both books are murder mysteries, but Night Film develops and rediverts the acrobatics with quantum physics that Topics performs (perhaps because Pessl was lectured by a professor who explained the laws of atoms and Newton, and the different mystery of the Grand Unifying Theory). No, I am not going to tell you where it rediverts it, because that will ruin half the fun.

Night Film is about a disgraced journalist, Scott McGrath (great Scott!), who investigates the suicide of a young woman, Ashley Cordova, the daughter of the same man disgraced himself to get near. Stanislas Cordorva is a film producer with a cult following, in more ways than one. Both this man and his daughter are like fairytale animals appearing before you: they would fascinate, scare and probably disgust you.

In a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys twist, McGrath teams up with two youngsters who have both had encounters with Ashley. All three are desperate to catch that fairytale animal, as if it would foretell their fates. As a young'un, I would angle my open Nancy Drew into the crack of light escaping from the door or lie on the carpet before the threshold, ready to run back to bed when the real world came to check I was asleep. Night Film is like that Nancy Drew paperbook: it demanded my attention and then... left me. Gutted.

It has more in common with Nancy Drew novels: the three unlikely sleuths follow a cooling trail, each lending some trait to the investigation, smelling out even the cold leads. The mystery comes to seem mysterious, as if some dark magic is involved. Shadows hitch on splinters, children's toys are desecrated and then replaced, entire buildings of people vanish. Their lives are threatened, again by people who seem to have supernatural powers. When the mystery seems solved, the solution so simple and the one lead they didn't smell out, it isn't.

Loose ends flail like live electric wires.

Occasionally, I have recommended someone read Topics, but only half-heartedly. The power it had over me seemed like an anomaly. Because, you see, these novels have a plot. A Nancy-Drew plot, with post-modern Nancy-Drew characters and leads. Everyone knows that a Substantive Novel has no plot. Plots are for sorbet reads, classics or pseudo-substantive novels. Not Literature. The heart of these books are what made me desperate to investigate alongside my single-minded, justice-bound sleuth as a child and the questions without answers I am interested in as an adult.

If you have not read a Nancy Drew novel (bringing tears to my eyes), find the children's section in the nearest shop or library, and pretend it is for a younger cousin. Or don't pretend. Hold your ignorance and your willingness to rectify it as an adult, high. (Tell them I sent you. They won't care. But tell them anyway.)

I miss Scott McGrath (platonically, trust me) as if he were a neighbour who had moved away. I feel separations between the other characters just as keenly. The mysterious of the mystery doesn't bother me, though I would prefer if its pieces were sorted in piles and catalogued. The ending feels... right, even as it feels like a betrayal. What doesn't feel in balance is that I have been left behind.