WHEN IT COMES to providing biographical detail for press releases, novelists tend to be a laconic bunch, but not Marisha Pessl.

Not only does she have possibly the snazziest author webpage in the world, along with profile pages for both herself and the fictional narrator of this much-hyped debut novel, on the MySpace internet community (owned by News International, parent company of The Times) but early copies of Special Topics in Calamity Physics came with a sheet of A4 paper on which she listed some of her favourite things.

This was an impeccable inventory of cultural references from Beardsley to Wharton, namechecking Hepburn and Hitchcock on the way, and could be seen as an understandable gesture from a first-time novelist keen to show off her spotless taste — or even from her publishers, keen that there should be no doubt (see also pouting author photograph and inner jacket promises of all-encompassing brilliance) as to precisely why they had shelled out a six- figure advance for the debut of a 28-year-old former actress.

But what is less clear is why Pessl or her paymasters would want to provide such a document alongside a book like Special Topics in Calamity Physics. For if there is one thing that Pessl’s book does not lack, it is evidence of the author’s aesthetic sophistication.

If it boasted any more culture, it would be dripping through the binding. Culture is present in the overeducated, desensitised voice of its teenage narrator, Blue Van Meer. It is also present in the text itself, where there is barely a page without some reference to a film, song or classic novel — usually of the doomed, romantic variety.

The whole thing is presented as an essay, giving Pessl the chance to use another neat device to cram her pages with the titles of even more books (usually not of the doomed, romantic variety). When she wants to inject some humour, she will allude to a passage from a work of reference in parentheses. For example (as Blue prepares to ask her dad about how much he paid for her new desk): “I had to confront him. Otherwise the lie would wear me away (see ‘Acid Rain on Gargoyles’, Conditions, Eliot, 1999, p.513).”

It’s fun for a while, and might have been even more fun if Pessl’s debut was merely a smart and sassy tale of preppy life, fit to stand alongside the early work of Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep) or Bret Easton Ellis.

But Special Topics in Calamity Physics has higher designs than that: while it undoubtedly wants to be smart and collegiate, it also wants to be the Great American Novel, a cute and cheeky comic book (illustrations, known here as “visual aids”, are provided every so often and, while they offer some opportunities for witty asides, the overall effect is to suggest a writer not confident of her descriptive powers) and a literary murder mystery.

When Blue’s itinerant childhood comes to rest in Stockton, North Carolina, and she enrols at the St Gallway School, she forms an attachment to an overeducated clique of students known as “the Bluebloods” and spends a lot of time hanging around with them and Hannah Schneider, a mysterious teacher who seems a little closer to her students than is healthy.

It works out well initially, giving Blue the chance to fine- tune a superiority complex and us the chance to take time out from her thoroughly annoying relationship with her intellectual snob of a father. But then, during a Blueblood camping trip, Hannah is found hanging lifeless from a tree.

At this point Special Topics gains some focus: Pessl gives the parentheses a rest and gets down to one of the four books that she is simultaneously trying to write, complete with clever denouement. But it is only brief respite. Her damaged and romantic characters seem damaged and romantic only because she tells us they are, and she seems incapable of describing human characteristics and emotions without comparing them to those of a famous person or those experienced in a film.

“I was experiencing a very severe lost Our Town (Wilder, 1938) feeling,” Blue says, mooning over a potential beau who has just “Timberlaked” in front of her. “The Jack Nicholson, Dad’s customary modus operandi, would henceforth be replaced by Paul Newman,” Pessl writes of Blue’s promiscuous father, and you wonder, does she actually believe that every one of her readers will know Newman’s reputation as the most loyal of Hollywood family men? She doesn’t only seem to expect too much of herself; she expects too much of her audience — certainly the large mainstream one that Special Topics has set its sights on, anyway.

Did Pessl look at other first-time novelists who had received large advances and feel under pressure to try to be this clever? Or was she simply unable to assimilate her ideas and ambitions? There is a precociously good writer in here somewhere — but if we are being honest, Special Topics reads more like the work of a highly precocious 21-year-old than a slightly precocious 28-year-old — and it is hard to see her through the self-conscious fog of advanced taste.

Before her second book, Pessl either needs to relax or to find a more brutal editor. Until then, the kind of book that one senses she dreams about writing (see The Secret History, Tartt, 1992) will remain elusive — within her reach perhaps, but just beyond her grasp.

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