Marisha Pessl Returns, and We're Glad She's Back: "Night Film"

Scott McGrath blew it. Big time.

Five years ago, the investigative reporter announced that his next subject would be an exposé of uber-reclusive film director Stanislas Cordova. After an anonymous source claiming to be Cordova’s chauffeur whispered, “There’s something he does to the children,” McGrath went all Tom-Cruise-on-Oprah’s-sofa on an episode of Nightline. Within days, he’d been served by Cordova’s lawyers and fired from his job; all that against the backdrop of a messy divorce and a highly unfavorable custody arrangement for his daughter Sam. Blew it. Big time.

Just last week Cordova’s 24-year-old daughter Ashley committed suicide. What better reason could there be to re-open his aborted investigation based on notes a half-decade old? Drawing heavily on a purloined case file (a cool three grand paid to his source at the cop shop), McGrath picked up the young woman’s trail through NYC. On his first two stops he collected his investigative team, much in the same sense that a dog collects burrs when running through tall grass. To his Woodward there came a Bernstein in the form of Nora, all of nineteen and freshly arrived in Manhattan from sunny Florida. Next, he added the Columbo-like Hopper, eternally clad in that gray overcoat and those dirty Converse sneakers. Hopper, he would discover, had his own secrets…

Through subterfuge, the unlikely trio penetrated the clandestine world of the Cordovites; disciples of the great man… no, more than just “disciples of”; “obsessed with” a man who is M. Night Shyamalan, Howard Hughes and Roman Polanski all rolled into one. We’re talking the sort of people who have a darknet website, arrange underground (literally) screenings of their master’s movies, and might as well have a secret handshake: weirdos, in other words. But the Cordovites had the information, as long as McGrath and team could separate the wheat from the chaff.

The trail led them through a tenement squat, an upscale purveyor of fine pianos, a high-end sex club with transvestite doms, and finally to the seat of Cordova’s power: the family compound in upstate New York, The Peak. Along the way the three found themselves cursed with black magic and stalked by mysterious assailants, following clues provided by an unfrocked priest turned antiques dealer and an NYU “film” professor with eight or is it nine?) cats. And you thought the Cordovites were weird…

The truth will out… but whose truth? Scott McGrath and his merry little band will soon find out that in the world of Stanislas Cordova, nothing is what it seems to seem to be. 

Night Film, the second novel from the keyboard of Marisha Pessl, has been hailed as one of the first novels of the multimedia age. Not only is the text liberally sprinkled with “screen-grabs” from websites, especially the Cordovite darknet (The Blackboards), but there are also images created to look like stories from Vanity Fair and well-known newspapers, although they don’t look all that much like newspaper websites, because they aren’t awash in pop-up advertisements and video come-ons. Most of the images of the late Ashley (and other women, for that matter), appear to be photographs of Pessl herself in varying wigs and makeup.

More to the point, readers can download a free app from Google Play or the iTunes store that lets them scan a sort of Night Film QR Code to see and hear related easter eggs – the “voices” of the characters, a short story, more files. The app, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem to work particularly well and is rather slow, but who cares? your correspondent is old-school, anyway, and more concerned with the story line than gratuitous multimedia stimulation. So sue me. 

When it comes to that storyline, Pessl – who burst on the scene with her 2006 debut Special Topics in Calamity Physics – once again proves her mastery of the novel. For Night Film, Pessl has constructed a mélange of mystery and dark humor, cloaked in a cunningly satirical send-up of America’s obsession with celebrities. Although perhaps it’s only because I’m not obsessed with the Kardashians or Kanye and don't pore over the internet for every mention of Tim Tebow or Rihanna that I caught the satirical tone… the all-consuming thirst of the Cordovites for any tiny morsel of knowledge (and it doesn’t even have to be true!) is laughable – or it would be, if people like @MileyCyrus didn’t have sixteen million souls slavering for every random thought that dribbles from their iPhones. Maybe not so satirical…

As for that storyline: Pessl manages to toss off some nicely-done 19th-century Edgar Allan Poe moments and a Saki-esque twist or two while still riffing beautifully on 21st-century pop culture. For instance, here’s her take on apps and gadgets:  “It appeared in the Internet age, pianos, like physical books, were fast becoming culturally extinct. They’d probably stay that way unless Apple invented the iPiano, which fit inside your pocket and could be mastered via text message. With the iPiano, anyone can be an iMozart. Then, you could compose your own iRequiem for your own iFuneral attended by millions of your iFriends who iLoved you.” You must admit, though, that the publication of an app specifically dedicated to her novel seems to blunt the apparent scorn. One oddity is that, like the late Robert Ludlum, Pessl seems to have adopted a habit of italicizing words at seeming random. Feh.

Where Special Topics marked Pessl as a writer to watch, her second foray into the novel cements her reputation not only as a skilled wordsmith with a wry sense of humor, but also as an edgy personality who’s not afraid to play with her topic. In …Calamity Physics it was the seemingly endless footnotes, in Night Film it’s the intertubes (or perhaps the random italics…) In both novels, the liberal application of literary gingerbread doesn’t detract from the writing (it doesn’t add much, either), which is superb. Whether you have “a device with a rear-facing camera” or not, Night Film is definitely worth the read.

Pick up a copy of Night Film from eBay