Motherless from the age of 5, Blue is brought up by her father, Gareth van Meer, a political-science professor who intentionally stalls his career with single-semester teaching gigs at obscure colleges, the better to concentrate on his writing (e.g., “Steel-toe Stilettos: The Designer Fashions of American Foreign Aid”) and on the education of his only child. Gareth’s parenting is a cross between Auntie Mame and John Stuart Mill’s father. While other kids spend vacation cross-country drives shouting “Padiddle!” at cars with one burned-out headlamp, Blue joins her paternal unit in Sonnet-a-thons or The Van Meer Radio Theater Hour, featuring plays likely to appear on A.P. exams. “Dad could meticulously divide a state end to end,” she explains, “not into equal driving shifts but into rigid half-hour segments of Vocabulary Flash Cards (words every genius should know), Author Analogies (‘the analogy is The Citadel of thought: the toughest way to condition unruly relationships’), Essay Recitation (followed by a twenty-minute question-and-answer period), [and] War of the Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs).”

Good-looking in the rumpled way of fathers in novels--“he resembled an aged silent movie star”--Gareth attracts a colorful stream of determined women over 35. Blue (who was named after a butterfly, the Cassius Blue, her mother’s easiest meadow catch) calls these “June Bugs.” Each June Bug believes she’ll be the one to domesticate Gareth, but he gallantly claims Blue’s mother, who died in a car accident, as his one and only love. He ducks out of every lasso before it tightens, falling back on embarrassment, regret and caller ID.

From the beginning of the novel, we know that something terrible has happened, possibly a result of a conspiracy among gifted students of an elite school, and that Blue is now compelled to write about it. In this and other ways, Ms. Pessl’s debut recalls Donna Tartt’s Secret History (1992). (Ms. Pessl, like Ms. Tartt when she published her first novel, is 28 and photogenic.) But the tone is different.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a wordy, funny book, crowded with closely observed details and jokey literary references that veer into the kind of brainy silliness you could imagine from postgraduates huffing helium. Blue’s sexual education, for example, consists of a stack of books her father handed her when she was 12, including “C. Allen’s Shame Culture and the Shadow World [1993], Somewhere Between Puritans and Brazil: How to Have a Healthy Sexuality [Mier, 1990], also Paul D. Russell’s terrifying What You Don’t Know About White Slavery [1996].”

Blue is no stranger to new schools or cliques or infatuation with teachers. Her knowing quality, which--as it usually does--masks a lamb-like innocence about others, carries her through the first weeks at St. Gallway. She comments drolly on her dangerous new friends, known around school as the Bluebloods, and recognizes, from her extensive reading every stage of their evolving relationship--from their resentful inclusion of her (at the instigation of their mentor, the film-studies teacher, Hannah Schneider) to their alcoholic bonding to her shock and pain when they close ranks again near the end of the novel. Like a lot of literary bloggers, she uses capital letters to signal her ironic distance from events: “[T]hen I was in her killer whale of a Mercedes, all Disbelief, Awkwardness and Outright Panic as I compulsively glanced at the speedometer trembling toward 80 mph.”

Ms. Pessl, too, seems eager to assure us that she knows there’s nothing new about private-school thrillers or romans à clef featuring motherless girls watchful of their fathers’ love life. The difficulty with this kind of self-conscious satire is that the reader is held at a remove, enjoying the author’s performance but not risking belief. Most of the ominous action is undercut with giddy humor. While Blue and her friends spy from a parked car on Hannah Schneider, for instance, one of the girls is “stuffing her mouth with licorice now, chewing goatishly.” This works beautifully until the crucial twist, about 150 pages from the end of the book, when we’re expected to follow Blue through a mystery plot involving not only the dead film-studies teacher--who seems to have killed herself during a camping trip with Blue and her friends--but clandestine romance, double identities, underground revolutionaries and political assassinations. Suddenly, Blue knows nothing.

However exhilarating the story is after Hannah Schneider’s death, it’s hard to empathize with Blue as a grieving amateur sleuth, having the spent the novel smirking alongside her. Marisha Pessl’s special talent is for arresting similes (when getting drunk for the first time, Blue “found it impossible to focus on the conversation; it was like that cruel little blurry line at the bottom of an eye chart”) and fresh, merciless physical descriptions. These keep us hooked when the Implausible Plot Shifts threaten to shake us loose.

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

These days, pop-culture vultures are swiftly canonized. Mr. Kidd is barely past 40. Twenty years after he was hired as an assistant straight out of Penn State, his work has been collected (reluctantly, he maintains) into a monograph. For you, the common reader, that means “big, unwieldy, expensive coffee-table book, perhaps suitable for a Christmas present.” As I type this, the fatter of my two cats is curled up comfortably on its splayed spine.

The book’s design is gorgeous, as one might expect, but unfortunately somewhat difficult to read (nonlinear browsing is what’s indicated with this kind of thing, anyway). An OED-style magnifying glass would have come in handy for the text, which is tiny and mostly printed in an eye-straining white on a black background. The pages protrude rather awkwardly from a cover half their size. (Is that some sort of meta-comment about the limits of book-jacket design as an art form?)

Like my dear colleague Simon Doonan, the ne plus ultra of window dressers, Mr. Kidd’s talents and ambitions extend far beyond the fringe skill that’s made his name. In 2001, he published a novel, The Cheese Monkeys. He also plays the drums (as a child he idolized The Partridge Family’s youngest and mutest son, Chris).

“What I loved was to make stuff,” Mr. Kidd writes of his formative years, “whether it was music or comics or art (whatever that was) or some other media.” This is not just a monograph, it turns out, but a memoir, a personal scrapbook, a heavily inked, fumy collage in which family snapshots, corporate interoffice memos and press accolades—including some from this newspaper—are all frenetically jumbled. It’s not so much “work,” according to the frontispiece, as “things that happened.”

If it’s a vanity project, it’s the most modest one in history. Mr. Kidd is unfailingly generous with his collaborators—most of all with his authors, upon whose shoulders he built his reputation. And so the monograph contains reams of author tributes. “Purely gushing testimonials were discouraged,” Mr. Kidd stresses, but they’re probably unavoidable under the circumstances. “I like the austerity he reserves for me,” writes Martin Amis, for whom the designer prefers an elegantly distressed Bulmer Italic typeface.

(The book gets a bit wonky at times—a nitty-gritty grotto of graphic design, a fount of fonts, not to mention extra innings of insider-baseball: Look, there’s the cover he did for Marion Ettlinger’s monograph! And hey, there’s the proof sheet of author photos she did for The Cheese Monkeys!)

“In an edgy field, he is not only edgy but deep,” concludes fellow Pennsylvanian turned Knopf loyalist John Updike after his rather formal introduction. “I was a little worried,” confides Donna Tartt, whose first novel and blockbuster-to-be, The Secret History, Mr. Kidd wrapped in a translucent acetate overlay. She shouldn’t have worried, or maybe she should’ve: I read The Secret History in junior year of college, staying up all night with a bag of Ruffles Sour Cream and Cheddar potato chips (an accompaniment I hope Mr. Kidd, with his love of trashy Americana, would appreciate), and I remember the unusual cover vividly, the plot less so. “The following season acetate jackets sprang up in bookstores like mushrooms on a murdered tree,” writes the designer, whose modesty belies a fierce proprietary streak.

Far more valuable than freshly solicited testimonials is the correspondence plucked straight from belletristic history and reprinted on its original stationery. “What gets produced from any Kidd-ized planar occasion will knock them back on their heels or knock them out of their socks or anyhow do something knocklike to first their footy parts and then, a whipstitch thereafter, to their entire entirely alerted corpus,” wrote Gordon Lish in 1995. (He is weird.) “I’m fucking hopped up to get all the good production shit going on my magnum opus, The Cold Six Thousand,” panted the earthy James Ellroy (on “6/13/00 A.D.”). Meanwhile, the evidence confirms that Mr. Updike—himself a former student of drawing and typography—is endearingly and totally involved in the design of his books.

Mr. Kidd is especially generous about flinging open a window onto the process of making a dust jacket. (Maybe it’s not art, but it’s artful.) This isn’t just a museum exhibit of fabulous finished books; it’s an archive of missteps and dated flourishes (“those heavy initial caps on every word are the typographic equivalent of Joan Collins’ shoulder pads on Dynasty,” he groans about an early effort). He shares false starts, scotched pictures, bad concepts and, perhaps most touchingly, an album of long-forgotten would-be Next Big Literary Things—books not even the snazziest cover could save.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

Poe, po' or Pogrebin? Oh, the sweet, smoky agony of autumn continues, with guys squiring around their new "intellectual" October girlfriends (just wait till January,

fellas, when "intellectual" suddenly morphs into "crazy") and women wondering when, exactly, it's time to stop messin' around with wraps and vests and capes and break out

a real coat …. Pre-Halloween fuss proceeds apace with the Central Park Conservancy's gala, which is themed to Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" -think spray-painted tree branches, fog machines rumbling the floorboards, anatomically incorrect black papier-mâché "crows" swooping down on the tabletops, and actors Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore and their lesser-known showbiz paramours tapping, tapping, tapping at the chamber door …. What it'll cost ya: $1,000. ( Boo !) Poor man's benefit: the Affordable Art Fair preview in Chelsea, where fair manager Helen Allen promised "canapés and stuff-cheese and crackers and fruit and what have you" (a.k.a. dinner) and lots of cheap art . "There are so many people out there who decorate their walls with posters," she said, which hit where it hurts. "What's wrong with a poster? There's nothing wrong with posters per se …. If you want Monet's Waterlilies but you only have $25, then you're better off going to the Met and getting a poster ." Finally, on the Upper West Side, implacable StarTrek star turned controversial photographer and high-culture viscount Leonard Nimoy hosts a party celebrating Ms. co-founder andall-around

supermom Letty Cottin Pogrebin's first novel, Three Daughters . Bonus dirty excerpt from page 56 that uncannily echoes a scene playing out all over town right now : "She recoiled, grabbed the headboard, and pulled herself upright. 'You've had sex with a man!?'"

[Halloween Ball, Sorcerers' Tent at the Mall in Central Park, mid-park at 72nd Street,

7 p.m., 310-6619; Affordable Art Fair, Pier 92, 6 p.m., 800-594-TIXX; Three Daughters book party, Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater, Symphony Space, 95th Street west of Broadway, 6 p.m., by invitation only, 741-6900.]

Thursday 31st

Bartsch putsch: Is it just us, or is Halloween the new New Year's Eve, with all the attendant pressure to dress up, go out, be extra-boisterous, etc., plus a subtler, insidious pressure that this is somehow your civic duty, defying the real terror "out there" …? You've got the East Village commoners tarting themselves up in Gothic gear and eating couscous out of coffins, etc.; slightly waxen Victoria's Secret model

Heidi Klum at Capitale (a new nightclub in a former bank); and slightly-rusty-but-still-working nightlife fixture Susanne Bartsch at Copacabana (old nightclub transplanted to a former warehouse). "I'm going to be a delightful witch, a good witch- I'm going to wear a hat! " Ms. Bartsch said. "You know what? I'm going to be bewitching! It'll be a good mix of people, lots of things to look at, and very 'energy.'"

[Susanne Bartsch party, Copacabana,

11th Avenue at the corner of 34th Street,

10 p.m., 741-3120; Heidi Klum party,

Capitale, 130 Bowery Street, 11 p.m., by

invitation only, 420-9420.]

Friday 1st

Attack of the avant-garde! Up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art- O tempora! O mores! -punk poet Patti Smith (not to be confused with Patty Smyth, the long-suffering lady from Scandal who's married to tennis genius John McEnroe) is performing an All Saint's Day of poetry, reflections and song for aging boomers in crinkly leather jackets …. Later, downtown, 12 female dancers don black slip dresses and aprons and slink down a courthouse staircase in Descent , a Martha Graham–esque piece reflecting on women as objects of desire within the domestic realm . "We have a permit!" said dancer Camille Dieterle, from (of course) Williamsburg. "It's very intimate and interactive, a lot of gestural stuff, very sensual-at times, the audience is very physically close to the performers." What is she implying? And whatever happened to the quaint Friday-night pastime of going out and seeing a nice movie with your sweetie?

[Patti Smith, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, 8 p.m., 570-3949;

Descent , Stairwell B, 50 Lafayette Street,

10 p.m., 718-302-5024.]

Saturday 2nd

Hairy guy, naked girl: All your "alternative" friends with the lunchboxes, Betty Paige bangs and Arne Jacobsen furniture are lining up for a Har Mar Superstar get-together in lower Manhattan-Har Mar was Kelly Osbourne's date at the Video Music Awards. But who is Har Mar Superstar, really? "He rules!" said Jane music editor Jeff Johnson. "He's kind of a crazy, like, white R&B dude who looks like a young Ron Jeremy. He's always wearing underwear that are too small. He's really hairy, but he puts himself across as a smooth ladies'-man guy." Meanwhile, sedate Knopf staffers unbutton their blouses just a bit at a party for Elisabeth Eaves (see delicate-boned but determined photo), a former journalist for Reuters who has written a raw -therlong memoir about her stint as a stripper at the Lusty Lady -peppered with pensive asides from Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, etc . We wish her all the best, though we have to confess we are slightly weary of women writing "high art" books about discovering how empowering it is to be a stripper, escort, etc., not to mention the burgeoning body of man-lit about "unplugging" and really taking the time to get to know Dad, Tibet or a cabin in the woods ….

[Har Mar Superstar, John Street Bar & Grill, 17 John Street, 9 p.m., 349-3278; Elisabeth Eaves book party, Belly, 155

Rivington Street, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 572-2104.]

Sunday 3rd

D*mn, we forgot to train for the marathon … again … ! Some 30,000 haggard, hard-core runners huff and puff their way through the boroughs to the feeble cheers of their sex-deprived spouses …. Or you could snuggle on a bearskin rug at the Explorers Club, which is serving Bloody Marys at its first film festival! Highlights include a documentary on hippos, for Manhattan's many Discovery Channel fans. Lucky editors might enjoy Flip-Flotsam , a look at the life cycle of the thong sandal in Swahili culture. "It's a great little recycling story," said festival planner Jeannette Salfeety.

[Marathon, 6 a.m., somewhere on Staten Island, 423-2249; Explorers Club film festival, 46 East 70th Street, 9:30 a.m., 628-8383.]

Monday 4th

Donald helps Donna: Will tout New York please lay off Donna Tartt for taking, ooooh, 10 looong years to write her second novel ? God knows we wish some people would spend a little more time polishing up their fiction and a little less burnishing their media images …. Ms. Tartt braves a semi-hostile public tonight at Barnes & Noble; she refused an interview, but fashion designer Donald Deal , who's celebrating a decade in the fashion biz tonight, was all too happy to pause from pinching models' arm fat in Chelsea and tell us his hopes for spring: "Muted turquoise and corals and raspberry-I'm a color freak! This homage to black is, for me, really over. Color is happy, and we need happy." Yeah, get Donna Tartt out of those clunky oxfords! In other fashion-literary news, playwright Wendy Wasserstein told us she's wearing crinkly Issey Miyake to tonight's Artists for the Cure benefit at Carnegie Hall, honoring cartwheelin' designer Betsey Johnson, and also that she's workshopping a stage musical based on the movie version of An American in Paris , which has our big-cheese editor ready to break into cartwheels himself ….

[Donna Tartt reads, 33 East 17th Street,

7 p.m., 253-0810; Donald Deal shows,

336 West 37th Street, 11th floor, 6:30 p.m., by invitation only, 727-2220; Artists for the Cure, Carnegie Hall, Seventh Avenue and 57th Street, 7:30 p.m., 516-681-2037.]

Tuesday 5th

Madam, I'm Mamet: More proof that the whole city has gone mad for all things Victorian: Everyone'sfavorite terse playwright, David Mamet, has produced Boston Marriage , a drawing room comedy set in the early 1900's that stars Martha Plimpton, the thinking woman's Michelle Pfeiffer , and Kate Burton , whom non-theater buffs may remember from her wonderful work in the infidelity movies The Ice Storm and Unfaithful . Ms. Burton ( daughter of the late, poxy Richard ) called from rehearsal and said, "I play"-deep chuckle-"just this big ham- bone. No, I play a fairly well-to-do woman, a very funny, articulate, well-educated, very funny woman …. It's different from anything he's ever written before. It's very feminine, it's very female, it's very poetic, it's very florid, and it's really just a hoot . There are a lot of jibes at men and what idiots they all are , and it's sort of like he's finally letting that happen." Us, we're just worried our Precious is going to start sporting (and cooking) mutton chops …

[425 Lafayette Street, 8 p.m., 239-6200.]

Wednesday 6th

Poster children? If you failed to turn up anything at the Affordable Art Fair (see Oct. 30, above), ree -lax, because the city is Cheese Cube Central tonight …. You've got the discreet charm of nonagenarian Louise Bourgeois at the "Artworks for Merce" sale benefiting the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; a nearsighted little clump of international print dealers gathering at the Seventh Regiment Armory; and down near Nolita there's a party for The Art of Noir , a big coffee-table book about film noir, and a poster fair . An unframed copy of the Postman Always Rings Twice poster- unframed -will set one back $6,000. (We'll say it again: Boo !)

[Merce Cunningham Studio, 55 Bethune Street, 11th floor, 6 p.m., 344-8420; Print Fair, Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street, 5 p.m., 674-6095; Film Noir, Posteritati Movie Poster Gallery,

239 Centre Street, 6 p.m., 226-2207.]

Like two other youngish authors, JeffreyEugenidesandJonathan Franzen, who recently tossedmassivevolumes onto the literary playing field after remaining largely silent since the early 90's, Donna Tartt has her own big cleats to fill. The Secret History , published in 1992, was an international sensation: a sprawling neo-Gothic extravaganza that managed to be brainy, literary and impossible to put down. It's the only book I've ever been seriously tempted to read while driving.

So it was with anticipation verging on lust that I opened Ms. Tartt's new novel, The Little Friend , a sprawling Southern Gothic tale about a 12-year-old girl trying to solve her older brother's murder. The results are paradoxical: Though The Little Friend ratifies and even amplifies the range of Ms. Tartt's abilities; though it takes place in a fictional world that's far more complex than the cloistered confines of the small private college where The Secret History is set; and though it has emotional and sociopolitical dimensions that were completely absent from the earlier book, it's finally less satisfying.

The novel presents itself as a murder mystery: 9-year-old Robin Cleve Dusfresnes is found hanging from a tree in his yard in small-town Alexandria, Miss., on Mother's Day. The murder apparently happened in the presence of his two younger sisters, Allison, 4, and Harriet, 6 months, who were on the porch at the time. After describing the day of the murder in riveting detail ("The air smelled fresh and tight, like rain"), Ms. Tartt rejoins the family 12 years later, when we find Robin's mother still half-comatose with grief, rarely leaving her bedroom. Allison and Harriet, now 16 and 12, are being raised mostly by their beloved black housekeeper, along with their maternal grandmother and three quirky great-aunts.

In passages evocative of Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms , Ms. Tartt conjures up a sultry atmosphere of extravagant Southern decay. "The night air was warm, and the moth-pale gardenia blossoms by the porch had a rich, warm, boozy smell," she writes. In this moribund milieu, dead Robin remains a vital part of his family's collective imagination. "His old aunts recalled mountains of trivia: toys he'd had, clothes he'd worn, teachers he'd liked or hated, games he'd played …. Some of this was accurate; some of it was not … but when the Cleves chose to agree on some subjective matter it became-automatically and quite irrevocably-the truth, without any of them being aware of the collective alchemy which had made it so." But the family's myth-making apparatus is helpless to impose structure or meaning on Robin's unsolved murder. That job falls to Robin's youngest sister, Harriet, the sort of no-nonsense young female who's often described (though not by Ms. Tartt) as a spitfire. The Little Friend is the story of Harriet's compulsion to create a narrative, true or not, that can contain the vast mystery of her brother's death. It's also, in some loose sense, the literary artifact of her efforts.

Harriet's wish to avenge Robin's murder (which neither she nor her sister can remember) leads her immediately and rather arbitrarily to a suspect: Danny Ratliff, a onetime classmate of her brother's and now a member of Alexandria's demimonde. Recently released from prison, Danny is one of several scions of a poor and notoriously troubled family, and is presently helping his older brother make and sell (as well as consume, in increasing quantities) crystal methamphetamine. Harriet's pursuit of Danny and her attempts to punish him, carried out with the help of her admirer and sidekick, a boy named Hely, entangle her with the Ratliff clan, whose other members include an evangelical preacher with an interest in snake-handling, a retarded boy, and a long-suffering and marvelously rendered grandmother.

The sections describing the Ratliffs are some of the novel's strongest-far more engrossing than the sometimes tedious Hardy Boy machinations of Harriet and Hely. Ms. Tartt's descriptions of the ratcheting paranoia between the two crank-addled brothers are worthy of Robert Stone. Of Danny's older brother, Farish, she writes, "Sometimes he made sly insinuations, or got all crafty and confidential, pretending to let Danny in on nonexistent secrets; other times he sat back in his chair like he'd figured something out and-with a great big smile on his face-said, 'You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch .' … [Danny] endured Farish's accusations … answering slowly and with care, all politeness, nothing fancy, no sudden movements, the psychological equivalent of exiting his vehicle with his hands above his head." Later, when drug use has rendered both virtually psychotic, Ms. Tartt writes, "Sleep ceased to be sleep when you never had any; it rolled in at the last and crushed you senseless, a high, black wall that was more like death."

Harriet's pursuit of Danny plays directly into the brothers' paranoia, with disastrous results. In this sense, The Little Friend is the story of two families of opposing social ranks whose destinies become linked through a spate of blind, childish conviction. A thematically linked subplot concerns the relationship between Harriet's family and two devoted black servants, and contains some of the novel's most wrenching and socially conscious moments. Yet as the question of Robin's death recedes further into irrelevance, the reader can't help but feel cheated; The Little Friend has the feel of a shaggy dog story, a series of twists and turns and lateral moves that gets us further from-not closer to-the destination we've been so eagerly awaiting.

Some of this is due to the writing, which ranges from inspired and precise to blandly familiar. This is a book in which silence is deafening and hearts sink, over and over again. Ms. Tartt also has a habit of lavishing meticulous detail indiscriminately, rather than using it as a way of distinguishing important moments from incidental ones. A description of Harriet and Hely lugging a wagon from under a house to a railroad overpass lasts eight pages; at another point, Ms. Tartt tells us that Hely has drunk five Coca-Colas and then, parenthetically, specifies when and where he drank them. It's more than we need to know, and at times the pileup of qualifiers and digressions taxes the reader's attention.

There are disappointing books that make you lose faith in a writer. The Little Friend had the opposite effect on me; though it's an uneven performance, the novel displays such a big talent-for dialogue, for description, for quiet personal moments and broad, ambitious tableaux-that I find myself even more convinced than before that Donna Tartt is the real thing.

Jennifer Egan is the author of the novel Look at Me (Anchor) .