Not that it praises the book as terrific (though it certainly has mostly positive things to say). It's just that, qua review, this writing by Laura Miller is terrific.

Thank you, Salon. (If only all your departments could hold themselves to the high standards of this kind of intelligent and informed writing!)

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 just finished this book and enjoyed it very much, but I have to say I was put off by the quantity of small, stupid typographical, grammatical, and punctuation errors. For example, the author confuses "reign" and "rein," a mistake a good proofreader would surely have caught. I suspect the publisher cut corners on this book and didn’t hire a proofreader--or, at least, didn’t hire a good one. I also spotted numerous missing words (conjunctions, prepositions). A book that grounds itself so heavily in the literary tradition and posits an overeducated and erudite narrator should be scrupulously copyedited and proofread before it is printed. Really, any book should--but that is probably too much to ask.

I have to agree with Cloe about the poor proofreading in this book. The grammatical errors and typos were so annoying-- they leapt off the page at me. Using "poured" for "pored" or referring to Jimmy Stewart as Jimmy Stuart is inexcusable. Pessl's mistakes seem typical of a student who is a product of mediocre teaching. She must have passed her exams by feeding back what she felt the instructors wanted, rather than learning the material. These flaws mar an otherwise gripping and well plotted story.

I have been reading several of Ms. Miller's reviews and what I'm struck by is constantly going on and on about the "realness" of "character" and her weird dismissal of style as frippery or natty bookishness. Since cleverness annoys her she takes on the usual persecution complex style of denunciation claiming that these days people claim great writing is a bunch of metaphorizing pyrotechnics, as if every critic in the world weren't always claiming what they liked were genuinely felt, sincere pieces of genuine sincere people, which is not literary criticism. And she's wrong as well about Mary Mccarthy's exuberant essay on Pale Fire, "A bolt from the blue" it's a lot more than a self congratulatory trumpet call for being well read, but a genuinely felt, to use her favorite expression, of what she took to be a fascinating work of art about the mystery of existence.