Novel Issues

I just finished the novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics.  It was quite good overall.  I've actually started it and put it aside a couple times, but like many novels, once I got significantly into it, finishing was not a problem.

There was, however, a different problem.

For those who haven't read it, the narrator is a young woman telling the story of her final year in high school, which was a year before the novel's voice.  It is liberally peppered with references to various books and other literary works.  Some of the references are quotations, others are simple analogies.

Anyway, at one point the main character's father, a professor who moves around each year or semester, threatens to move their little family (it's just the two of them) to the University of Wyoming.  This would be fine, except that he identifies it as being in "[a] town called Fort Peck."

Now, there's apparently a Fort Peck area in eastern Montana, but that's nowhere near the University of Wyoming.  It's not even in the same state.

I have to admit, the novel lost a certain edge for me.  Granted, I didn't know too many of the references anyway, other than the most obvious (e.g., I know who wrote the novel Lolita).  But the error certainly did affect my ability to suspend my disbelief.

Of course, I've considered the idea that the father character deliberately misstated the location of UW in the novel, but that just doesn't ring true.  First of all, the location of the university is really immaterial to the purpose for which it was being referred.  Second, the lead character is meant to be at or near genius.  And the father was at least her equal.  So I can't see the benefit of being untruthful about something that she could easily already know or find out without a little bit of research.

No, I think it was a mistake.

Not, of course, that the novel didn't have other problems--I had issues with the dramatic plot turns in the last third of the book--but this was a big something to jolt me out of the immersiveness of reading.  It was unfortunate. 

But in any case, I still recommend reading the book.  It's worth it.