Precocious preteen

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivettells the tale
of a map-making, train-hopping 12-year-old

by JULIET WATERS

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a book that’s a lot like its 12-year-old hero. Impressive, engaging, funny, overachieving, poignant, digressive, sometimes brilliant and sometimes a little disappointing.

To be fair, the book is burdened with some serious expectations. Its 28-year-old author Reif Larsen was featured in Vanity Fair after the first-time novelist scored a million-dollar advance. The last time I remember this level of hype for a debut novelist was, unfortunately, J.T. LeRoy.

Larsen is probably not like LeRoy—secretly a woman. There is no suspicious life story as a prepubescent truck stop prostitute. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be very much in common between T.S. and his creator. Larsen’s father was not a cowboy (he was a Harvard prof). Larsen didn’t jump a freight train when he was 12. He has no history as a science prodigy who posed as an adult while publishing articles in noteworthy journals. And he never won a prestigious award from the Smithsonian, for which he had to run away from his Montana family (ergo the freight train).

He seems to have earned this advance the old fashioned way, by writing an imaginative, interesting book. But anyone who didn’t know about the size of that advance before reading this would probably be surprised.

Not because it’s bad. It isn’t. But because it’s illustrated. And not just a few illustrations. T.S. maps and draws almost everything he sees and thinks. He’s brilliant, but he’s also hypergraphic. His highly sensitive curiosity invests even the most mundane things with heightened meaning, and it paralyzes him as surely as if he were intellectually underdeveloped.

Take for instance all the decisions that go into “The Five Steps of Packing.” Step One: Visualization involves playing and replaying the trip in his mind, mapping out all its hazards, all the specimens and all the images, sounds and smells he might want to capture. Step Two: Inventory means arranging all the devices and articles he might need in order of importance. Step Three: Assemblage #1 is wrapping the delicate instruments and apparatuses in bubble wrap. Step Four: The Great Doubt involves the inevitable moment just before zipping up the suitcase where he thinks of a scenario “such as a woodpecker soundscaping for which I would need the seismoscope and then I would rethink the entire trip and also my entire life.” Leading us finally to Assemblage #2.

And that’s just packing for school.

This tendency to overprize every moment, place and thing is especially problematic in Montana. T.S. is a source of mystery, and even pain for his father. The tone of the book is mostly whimsical, but there’s some pretty deep sadness running through it. When T.S. writes early on of his brother, Layton, and things they “used to say,” it’s easy to assume that this is an adult looking back on his childhood. It’s not. This is a 12-year-old looking back at a time when his brother was still alive before an accident for which he blames himself. Or at least by a narrator young enough to remember a childhood that includes iPods. (T.S. has a sister who is more what one would expect of a smart child bored by her life in Montana.)

Creating a narrator who is precocious but believable is a delicate craft. Most of the time, Larsen pulls it off. Sometimes he doesn’t. When T.S. describes someone as looking like one of those “young, hotshot outdoorsy geology graduate students,” he sounds more like his creator, a hotshot, outdoorsy former creative writing graduate student.

The journey T.S. narrates is mostly enjoyable, but there were some moments near the end where I felt gripped by The Great Doubt. I don’t think this book has a chance in hell of being a bestseller. But there’s enough charm and integrity to give it a reasonable shot at being a classic.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET
BY REIF LARSEN, HAMISH HAMILTON,
HC, 376 PP., $35