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Novels are low-tech objects. They can't be plugged in, they've got no buttons or knobs, and they don't make your eyes pop out of your head as you watch creatures or asteroids zigzag across a screen. Usually, novels have no visual aids at all. So if you want to know what Anna Karenina looks like, well, you just have to read the book.

But Marisha Pessl's Night Film is eager to bust out of that old-fashioned, "he had blue eyes and she fell to her death" kind of storytelling. This sprawling book uses made-up documents of all kinds: newspaper clippings, photographs, police reports, magazine articles supposedly taken from publications like Time and Rolling Stone, and transcripts of chatter on an ultra-culty, closed online community called "The Blackboards," to tell its thriller of a story.

The narrator, Scott McGrath, is an investigative journalist who's long had his eye on a creepy filmmaker. Stanislas Cordova makes movies supposedly so terrifying that at so-called "red-band screenings," held in condemned buildings or tunnels under the city, some people faint in fear. This might remind you a little of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, in which there's a video that's supposed to be so incredibly entertaining that people who see it simply get totally absorbed in it and eventually die. Actually, readers have compared Pessl with Wallace before; her first novel was also brainy and fat and full of ideas. Night Film is brainy and fat and full of ideas, too, but instead of comparing it with other novels, like most book reviews, I'm tempted to compare it with movies. And that's the point.

In its best moments, reading this book is like sitting in a movie theater in wraparound darkness, feeling a deep chill that's part air conditioning, part anticipation. A lovely, granular black-and-white quality haunts the novel. Pessl has created Cordova's body of work down to the titles and plots and tiny details, as if in some deep part of herself, she really believes these movies, with names like Thumbscrew and At Night All Birds Are Black exist. But that's what novelists do: They believe their own details, and this book is obsessive in the things it describes and catalogs.

What's less obsessive, though, are the descriptions of characters. Scott McGrath, while a lively enough narrator, feels as if he's come from Central Casting, and so does Ashley Cordova, the movie director's beautiful, troubled 24-year-old former piano prodigy of a daughter, who's found dead — probably a suicide — at the bottom of an elevator shaft in Chinatown, a discovery that sets the novel in motion. McGrath, who slandered Stanislas Cordova during a TV interview years earlier, is drawn back toward the story of this man and his daughter, even though it naturally puts him in peril.

Pessl channels hard-boiled movies and pulpy paperbacks here, and as a result, everyone feels a bit like a B-movie character; even their names sound phony. They sound a little like names of characters on the TV show Dark Shadows — Barnabas Collins — which I watched every day after school with Yodels and milk, when I was 9.

But most readers of this novel will not be 9. And maybe, like me, they'll be used to reading about characters who are as fleshed out as their surroundings. Granted, that would be a challenge in this case because Pessl has created surroundings that are uncommonly full and complicated, and a story that takes you down many paths and into various subcultures, such as an S+M club and a lawless and cruel wilderness program for problem teenagers. All of it is dark, dark stuff.

Or is it?

I realized, when I finished the book, that even though it dips into the unsavory and the scary, and even though while you read it you think, ooh, this is weird, heavy stuff, there's a surprisingly good-natured quality to all of it that keeps it mostly pretty PG. As for those terrifying Cordova movies, I guess I'll have to take Pessl's word for it. I never felt any fear when I imagined watching them. I can't say I minded, actually; I'm someone who was scared to death by the original version of The Fly, especially the part where the fly has the head of a white-haired old man, and in this tiny little voice, he says "Helllllp ... meeeeee ..." Just thinking about it still creeps me out. But thinking about Night Film, does not creep me out. It gives me a sort of pleasurable feeling as I recall its highly imagined world.

There's a very nifty ending — but then there's sort of another ending, and another. It was almost as if the author didn't want to let go, and I don't blame her. It must have been a fun and exhausting book to write, a total-immersion experience. Reading it isn't exhausting at all; it's easy and enjoyable.

This book is like a big fun-house — Pessl lets you decide if you want to believe its magic. I probably won't remember all that much of the plot a few weeks from now and the characters are basically vehicles for an overarching idea more than anything else. But Marisha Pessl had an extremely cool and intricate idea for a novel, and ultimately it works. I was totally happy to sit in the darkness until the very last page, and I didn't move a muscle until the lights came up.

Meg Wolitzer's latest novel is The Interestings.

Novels are low-tech objects. They can't be plugged in, they've got no buttons or knobs, and they don't make your eyes pop out of your head as you watch creatures or asteroids zigzag across a screen. Usually, novels have no visual aids at all. So if you want to know what Anna Karenina looks like, well, you just have to read the book.

But Marisha Pessl's Night Film is eager to bust out of that old-fashioned, "he had blue eyes and she fell to her death" kind of storytelling. This sprawling book uses made-up documents of all kinds: newspaper clippings, photographs, police reports, magazine articles supposedly taken from publications like Time and Rolling Stone, and transcripts of chatter on an ultra-culty, closed online community called "The Blackboards," to tell its thriller of a story.

The narrator, Scott McGrath, is an investigative journalist who's long had his eye on a creepy filmmaker. Stanislas Cordova makes movies supposedly so terrifying that at so-called "red-band screenings," held in condemned buildings or tunnels under the city, some people faint in fear. This might remind you a little of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, in which there's a video that's supposed to be so incredibly entertaining that people who see it simply get totally absorbed in it and eventually die. Actually, readers have compared Pessl with Wallace before; her first novel was also brainy and fat and full of ideas. Night Film is brainy and fat and full of ideas, too, but instead of comparing it with other novels, like most book reviews, I'm tempted to compare it with movies. And that's the point.

In its best moments, reading this book is like sitting in a movie theater in wraparound darkness, feeling a deep chill that's part air conditioning, part anticipation. A lovely, granular black-and-white quality haunts the novel. Pessl has created Cordova's body of work down to the titles and plots and tiny details, as if in some deep part of herself, she really believes these movies, with names like Thumbscrew and At Night All Birds Are Black exist. But that's what novelists do: They believe their own details, and this book is obsessive in the things it describes and catalogs.

What's less obsessive, though, are the descriptions of characters. Scott McGrath, while a lively enough narrator, feels as if he's come from Central Casting, and so does Ashley Cordova, the movie director's beautiful, troubled 24-year-old former piano prodigy of a daughter, who's found dead — probably a suicide — at the bottom of an elevator shaft in Chinatown, a discovery that sets the novel in motion. McGrath, who slandered Stanislas Cordova during a TV interview years earlier, is drawn back toward the story of this man and his daughter, even though it naturally puts him in peril.

Pessl channels hard-boiled movies and pulpy paperbacks here, and as a result, everyone feels a bit like a B-movie character; even their names sound phony. They sound a little like names of characters on the TV show Dark Shadows — Barnabas Collins — which I watched every day after school with Yodels and milk, when I was 9.

But most readers of this novel will not be 9. And maybe, like me, they'll be used to reading about characters who are as fleshed out as their surroundings. Granted, that would be a challenge in this case because Pessl has created surroundings that are uncommonly full and complicated, and a story that takes you down many paths and into various subcultures, such as an S+M club and a lawless and cruel wilderness program for problem teenagers. All of it is dark, dark stuff.

Or is it?

I realized, when I finished the book, that even though it dips into the unsavory and the scary, and even though while you read it you think, ooh, this is weird, heavy stuff, there's a surprisingly good-natured quality to all of it that keeps it mostly pretty PG. As for those terrifying Cordova movies, I guess I'll have to take Pessl's word for it. I never felt any fear when I imagined watching them. I can't say I minded, actually; I'm someone who was scared to death by the original version of The Fly, especially the part where the fly has the head of a white-haired old man, and in this tiny little voice, he says "Helllllp ... meeeeee ..." Just thinking about it still creeps me out. But thinking about Night Film, does not creep me out. It gives me a sort of pleasurable feeling as I recall its highly imagined world.

There's a very nifty ending — but then there's sort of another ending, and another. It was almost as if the author didn't want to let go, and I don't blame her. It must have been a fun and exhausting book to write, a total-immersion experience. Reading it isn't exhausting at all; it's easy and enjoyable.

This book is like a big fun-house — Pessl lets you decide if you want to believe its magic. I probably won't remember all that much of the plot a few weeks from now and the characters are basically vehicles for an overarching idea more than anything else. But Marisha Pessl had an extremely cool and intricate idea for a novel, and ultimately it works. I was totally happy to sit in the darkness until the very last page, and I didn't move a muscle until the lights came up.

Meg Wolitzer's latest novel is The Interestings.

High food prices, a currency in free fall, battered investors and slowing growth: India is facing a host of problems that have taken away the sheen from an economy that's had a decade of mostly strong growth.

Some of those problems are also hitting other key emerging markets, including Brazil, China and Russia. These so-called BRIC countries have been critical to driving the global economy in recent years, and they generally fared better than most other nations during the global economic downturn that hit in 2008.

They are all still growing, but not at rates they have been accustomed to.

Meanwhile, some of the world's developed countries, which were hard hit in recent years, are showing signs of life. The U.S. is growing, and the European Union and Japan are doing a bit better as well.

Here's a look at the shifting economic fortunes:

India

India, Bloomberg noted in an opinion piece, faces "a crisis of credibility." The process of economic reform that began in the 1990s, it said, "has ground to a halt." Corruption, red tape and subsidies are only one part of the problem.

India faces serious structural problems: As Mark Mobius of the investment firm Franklin Templeton told GlobalPost: "The surprising thing is the government doesn't seem to be acting with any degree of urgency."

Brazil

Recent protests reflected the frustrations many felt at rising prices and a slowing economy. The Wall Street Journal reported that Brazil would "remain a drag on the rest of the world for the next few years."

"The economy remains reliant on consumption, mainly fueled by credit, both of which are showing signs of exhaustion. Industry remains stagnant, and, for the last four months, unemployment has crept up from historical lows. Most worryingly, the hefty investments needed to overhaul Brazil's ramshackle infrastructure aren't coming through," the Journal said.

The College Kid

Rico Saccoccio is a junior at Fordham University in the Bronx. He's from a middle-class family in Connecticut and he spent the summer living at home with his parents, who cover about $15,000 a year in his college costs.

According to the U.S. government, Saccoccio is living in poverty. The $8,000 he earns doing odd jobs puts him well below the $11,945 poverty threshold for an individual. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that more than half of all college students who are living off campus and not at home are poor.

Saccoccio has lots of student loans and lives off campus in a Bronx apartment where the elevator, heat and hot water don't always work. Sometimes, he microwaves water in Tupperware to wash his hair.

Still, he says, "I really don't think of the 'poor college' kid as actually somebody who is in poverty. ... It's a temporary investment, and you don't have to live like you do in college after you leave school."

The Single Mom

Marion Matthew, a home health aide and single mom, also lives in the Bronx. She relies on a local food pantry and government benefits like food stamps and housing assistance to support herself and her 17-year-old son.

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