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Summary
Summary
A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world
When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls.
T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself.
As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.
All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science's inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.
T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.
Now a major motion picture directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Kyle Catlett and Helena Bonham Carter.
Author Notes
Reif Larsen's first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into twenty-seven languages. A Montana Honor book, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet was a finalist for the IndieBound Award, was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was released as a film in France and the United States.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Fans of Wes Anderson will find much to love in the offbeat characters and small (and sometimes not so small) touches of magic thrown into the mix during the cross-country, train-hopping adventure of a 12-year-old mapmaking prodigy, T.S. Spivet. After the death of T.S.'s brother, Layton, T.S. receives a call from the Smithsonian informing him that he has won the prestigious Baird award, prompting him to hop a freight train to Washington, D.C., to accept the prize. Along the way, he meets a possibly sentient Winnebago, a homicidal preacher, a racist trucker and members of the secretive Megatherium Club, among many others. All this is interwoven with the journals of his mother and her effort to come to grips with the matriarchal line of scientists in the family. Dense notes, many dozens of illustrations and narrative elaborations connected to the main text via dotted lines are on nearly every page. For the most part, they work well, though sometimes the extra material confuses more than clarifies. Larsen is undeniably talented, though his unique vision and style make for a love-it or hate-it proposition. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The son of a laconic Montana rancher and a noted, if absentminded, coleopterist, 12-year-old prodigy Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet draws diagrammatic maps (e.g., zoological, geological, topographical) as well as maps of people shucking corn or chopping wood, drainage patterns, and a city's electricity grid usage. The Smithsonian has been accepting illustrations, schematics, charts, and maps from T. S. for some time when Mr. Jibsen calls him to say that T. S. has won the prestigious Baird Award for the popular advancement of science and is invited to D.C. to give a speech. Thus begins T. S.'s odyssey, and a surreal, mind-bending one it is, for sure. During his journey east, T. S. ruminates on many things: his curious ancestry and other family matters, the cultural impact of McDonald's, loneliness, Chicago litter, Newton's three laws of motion and their application to his trip, and much more. Toss into the mix a bit of quantum mechanics, Darwinism vs. creationism, and a commentary on human nature, as well as a touch of the fantastic. The writing style is mannered and old-fashioned in flavor, and the generous margins of the pages are full of explanatory notes and scientific minutiae, including T. S.'s drawings, all of which give the book the feel of an authentic journal. Intellectually provocative, this should be great grist for book-discussion groups, in particular.--Estes, Sally Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
This first novel's young cartography-obsessed narrator leaves Montana on a trek to the East Coast. A RELATIVELY short time ago, short time ago, in what was to some that heavenly stretch predating the fall 2008 financial quarter, people spent money on things - executives on gilded office renovations; uptown women on Restylane and luxury retail; and publishers, occasionally, on fiction by the young and unknown. Editors could still accommodate a degree of financial risk in their acquiring, and so it came to be that Reif Larsen, a 28-year-old graduate of Brown and Columbia, with his explorer's name and brief history promoting a Botswanan marimba band, ignited the spending impulses of the publishing world, producing such a fire that he extracted a reported $1 million for his first novel, "The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet," a book in which each page seems a vitrine constructed to exhibit the author's discursive, magpie imagination. T. S. Spivet - Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, and isn't there a Lemony Snicket quality to the name? - is our protagonist and narrator, the son of a Montana rancher whose C.V. would already gain him easy entry to any of the finer Eastern universities, though he is only 12. It speaks to Larsen's talents that he has finessed the character in such a way that his precociousness endears rather than obtrudes. Cartography is the child's primary gift and avocation, but his areas of subspecialty extend to entomology, anatomy, McDonald's, Native American folklore and astute readings of the adult mind, where he chiefly finds lament in the wear and tear of eroded ambitions. Spivet's mother - whom he refers to as Dr. Clair - is a researcher whose professional failures weigh on him. From his science teacher's name he makes a neologism, Stenpock, meant to refer to any narrow-thinking hack devoid of a hunger for the outré. "Mr. Stenpock always wore a noisy leather jacket while teaching, a fashion statement that tried (and yet failed) to say: 'Children, I probably do things after school that you are not ready to know about just yet.'" (Yes, the young Larsen is funny.) Spivet embodies the uneasy balance of innocence and insight prevalent in depictions of children, and he remains in some ways closest in the playground to Henry James's Maisie, in "What Maisie Knew," a young girl, enduring her parents' savage divorce, whose stepfather correctly assesses her psychological aptitude when he declares, "One would think you were about 60." Spivet is haunted both by the metaphoric death of his parents' marriage they are together but lifelessly so - and by the actual death of his older brother, killed in a shooting accident for which he feels partially responsible. The novel subscribes to the mangled but fashionable notion that genius and obsession are essentially the same thing. And here obsession is more than an attempt to exert control over quotidian uncertainties; it becomes a whole system of ordering a life against tragedy. Finding both comfort and a modest sense of adventure in precision, Spivet maps everything: the Washington, D.C., sewer system of 1959, speculative projections of the United States coastline in the aftermath of various global warming scenarios, birthplaces of the world's major religions, fiber-optic networks, the reach of urban loneliness. The range of his projects is without limit. As he explains: "There were the illustrations: schematics of industrious leafcutter ant colonies and numerous, multihued lepidoptera; exploding anatomical charts of horseshoe crab circulatory systems; electron microscope diagrammatics of the feathery sensilla in the antennae of the Anopheles gambiae - the malaria mosquito." With this novel, Reif Larsen seems to be announcing himself as a compassionate observer of prodigy incubated in emotional isolation and, at the same time, as a potentially eviscerating contestant on "Jeopardy!" It is not always entirely clear which of the two goals he is embracing. "The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet" is ultimately a novel to be appreciated rather than adored, devoured or even acutely analyzed, for it is not a narrative that brims with big ideas, and in fact, there is little narrative to speak of. The story is a kind of children's book version of "Roughing It," in geographical reverse (I say this not to compare Larsen favorably to Twain as a commentator, but to make a simple thematic analogy), with Spivet vagabonding it on his own to Washington to receive an award for which he is too young by decades, and to learn that the East he has mythologized as a great intellectual frontier is in many ways just a place of self-interested climbers and sound-bite hooey. The novel is full of these easy demystifications: that brilliance doesn't nurture, that attraction is more than a compatibility of I.Q.'s, that life surprises us, that people aren't always what they seem. It would not be necessary to consult the author bio to know that Larsen has an M.F.A. - the novel is creatively written, sometimes quite beautifully so. But it is plagued by that sense of writers' workshop insularity: it doesn't aim to mean much. It is also burdened by device. The margins of the book are full of extensive sidebars in small typeface and graphs, charts, drawings, images, all meant to represent the range of Spivet's fascination and output. After a reference, for instance, to an essay on wormholes, the reader is directed by arrow to further description: "The monograph was by a Mr. Petr Toriano and it was titled 'The Preponderance of Lorentzian Wormholes in the American Middle West 1830-1870.'" It continues. Following some of the marginalia requires repositioning the book, turning it around and sideways, making it something for neither the formalist nor the arthritic. I imagine Larsen was trying to do David Foster Wallace's deployment of addenda one better. But what he has done, in some sense, instead, is deny the reader's own instinct for visualization. If you had any inclination to try to picture the mosquito proboscis, or the drainage patterns of bitterroots, let's just say (or to go look them up), you don't have to because there they are rendered for you on Pages 26 and 122 respectively. (And just so you know, Larsen produced them himself with Adobe Illustrator.) Roland Barthes made distinctions between those texts so micromanaged that they ensured reader passivity and those texts, active texts, that invited a greater degree of participation. "The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet" merely creates the illusion of choice; you might leaf through it at Barnes & Noble and assume you could simply ignore the sideline material, except that actually you can't, because Larsen puts key elements of the story in it, essential points about Spivet's emotional state. The reader's attentions are consistently shifted, refocused so that suddenly the experience of reading a novel becomes not a refuge from the distraction of Internet life but a more insistent facsimile of it. When you are reading an article online about TARP, you can always choose, say, to link to the résumé of Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, or just forge on ahead, but here you must go to all the places Larsen's arrows point. And I am here to tell you that it can be exhausting. Spivet maps everything: birthplaces of world religions, fiber-optic networks, the reach of urban loneliness. Ginia Bellafante is a television critic at The Times.
Guardian Review
Reif Larsen's debut novel combines meticulous eccentricity with an amazingly broad appeal: the tale of a child prodigy with an obsessive interest in mapmaking and scientific illustration, it's as lovable as it is odd, while the book is a thing of beauty in itself. For narrator Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet ("I didn't often remember that I was 12 years old") illustrates his adventures with all manner of maps, doodles and diagrams, so that the margins come alive with pictures and asides illuminating and commenting on the main storyline. When a child discovers maps, their horizons - the immediate throng of home and family - are thrown into perspective: what looms so large is revealed as terrifyingly, or liberatingly, insignificant. The young TS's obscure Midwest birthplace is "a town of hold-out ranchers, fanatical fishermen, and the occasional Unabomber". He grows up marooned on a ranch with his comically mismatched entomologist mother and wild west-worshipping father; his teenage sister, Gracie, is conventional enough to be perpetually enraged by her eccentric family, while his adored older brother, Layton, is confined to the margins, along with the gunshot accident which killed him and about which nobody speaks. In an attempt to comprehend and bring order to his world, TS maps everything from the shucking of corn husks and the rhythm of his father's sips of whisky, to the effects of mood on footsteps, the five kinds of Gracie's boredom and "Patterns of Cross Talk Before and After", a mournful diagram of dinner-table interaction stilted by Layton's absence. He analyses "The McAwesome Trident of Desire" ("the smell, the nostalgia, the arches") and expresses the complex layers of noise made by an approaching train in "Freight Train as Sound Sandwich". But it is his more conventional drawings that set the story - a 2,000- mile road trip from the American west, "land of myths, drinking and silence", to the east, "land of ideas" - in motion. TS has been submitting work to scientific journals and institutions for some time. When the Smithsonian invites him to Washington to accept an award, he screws up his courage, packs his theodolite and sets off, filing the fact that they're expecting an adult under the "Do Not Worry List", along with all other practical considerations (we all have a version of this list; TS's, which also includes "not enough time", "adults" and "bear attacks", extends out beyond the page margins, neatly illustrating its open-endedness). Just how TS makes it to the Smithsonian gates, "dirty, in a torn sweater vest and camouflaged hanky, covered in blood, holding a massive umbrella", is a tale that grips and falters by turns. Like many adventure stories, it combines the tense immediacy of realism with extreme improbability; the casual inclusion of wormholes and secret societies lowers the fictional stakes somewhat, which is a shame, as TS's interactions with various broken and baffled adults along the way are all nicely judged and utterly believable. Likewise, the story of a scientific ancestor which TS reads in a journal he's stolen from his mother is a mannered distraction from the main narrative. For it's TS's voice - and scientific pencil - that enchant the reader. He does not, of course, sound like any 12-year-old on earth, but he sounds totally like himself. In him, Larsen combines a child's appraising gaze with the fresh unclouded eye of the scientific observer or frontier explorer, seeing as though looking for the first time. From his father's mythology of the wild west to his mother's family history of scientific struggle and frontier expeditions, the novel is rich with the American tradition of discovery: this is TS's inspiration, whether he's describing the geographical wonders of the west or mapping the vanishing points of his own childhood (throughout the book, Larsen beautifully expresses how closely the concept of discovery is now intertwined with nostalgia). It's also very funny: as well as his pictorial marginalia, Larsen makes grand use of the comic tradition of footnotes, producing drumroll punchlines, intimate confessions and bathetic, pomposity-puncturing asides. Marginal notes also provide a surreptitious outlet for TS's darkest thoughts and fears - about his part in his brother's death, the threat of family breakdown - as the unspoken creeps in at the edge of the page. The world's terrors and confusion can not, in the end, be held in check by mapping them. One of the many clever things about the book's structure is that its secrets are revealed as gradually to the reader as to the hero. TS's journey - towards forgiveness, understanding, adulthood, love - is a familiar one, but the views are spectacular. Reif Larsen is at the Hay festival today. Caption: article-jjlarsen800.1 When a child discovers maps, their horizons - the immediate throng of home and family - are thrown into perspective: what looms so large is revealed as terrifyingly, or liberatingly, insignificant. The young TS's obscure Midwest birthplace is "a town of hold-out ranchers, fanatical fishermen, and the occasional Unabomber". He grows up marooned on a ranch with his comically mismatched entomologist mother and wild west-worshipping father; his teenage sister, Gracie, is conventional enough to be perpetually enraged by her eccentric family, while his adored older brother, Layton, is confined to the margins, along with the gunshot accident which killed him and about which nobody speaks. In an attempt to comprehend and bring order to his world, TS maps everything from the shucking of corn husks and the rhythm of his father's sips of whisky, to the effects of mood on footsteps, the five kinds of Gracie's boredom and "Patterns of Cross Talk Before and After", a mournful diagram of dinner-table interaction stilted by Layton's absence. He analyses "The McAwesome Trident of Desire" ("the smell, the nostalgia, the arches") and expresses the complex layers of noise made by an approaching train in "Freight Train as Sound Sandwich". - Justine Jordan.
Kirkus Review
A coming-of-age novel that works very hard to charm. T.S. Spivet makes maps: of his bedroom, of his dreams, of his sister shucking corn on the front porch. T.S. is precocious, having established a considerable reputation by the age of 12. His career, however, is a secret from his parents, a taciturn rancher and an entomologist T.S. calls "Dr. Clair." So when the Smithsonian wants to give him a prestigious award for his work, T.S. declines the honor. Out on the ranch with his cowboy father, though, trying to fill the place in his family left by the death of his more rustic brother, T.S. has an epiphany: He is not like his father; he does not belong in Montana. So he hops a freight train and heads out across America. That T.S. learns a lotabout himself, his family and the world beyond his boyhood homeshould go without saying. In its essence, this is an oft-told story, and the particular brand of quirkiness Larsen employs has become quite familiar too. The most distinctive feature here is the marginalia: Pages are bordered with T.S.'s charts, diagrams and explanatory comments. Reaction to the novel will, one suspects, be mixed. Those who are as scientifically minded as the protagonist will be irritated by the details Larsen gets wrong. It's jarring to read that the Spivet family has a photo of Linnaeus hanging in their home, since the father of modern taxonomy died in 1778. More persistently troubling is the fact that T.S. is characterized throughout as a cartographer, but most of his annotated illustrations fall well outside the standard definition of cartography. Not all drawings are maps. Readers used to the textual trickery of David Foster Wallace or Mark Z. Danielewski are likely to find T.S.'s pictures and musings merely precious. But there's certainly an audience for heartfelt whimsy, and for an easy read that appears to be smart. Only sales will tell if Larsen's debut was worth the hefty advance paid by the publisher. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a mapmaker whose highly accomplished drawings have appeared in exhibitions at the Smithsonian and have garnered him the coveted Baird Prize, for which he is asked to come to Washington, DC, and deliver an acceptance speech. Unbeknown to everyone, T.S. Spivet is a 12-year-old boy who lives on a Montana ranch with his cowboy father, scientist mother, and bored teenage sister. Unwilling to forgo his award by revealing his age, T.S. secretly hops a freight train and travels to DC. Among the bizarre and impractical items he brings along is his mother's notebook, in which she has written a partially fictional account of their ancestor Emma Osterville, who struggled to be a scientist in a misogynistic environment. Emma's story in some ways parallels T.S.'s, as they both battle narrow-minded thinking in the world of science. Debut novelist Larsen's writing is as detailed and absorbing as a map, and while the ending is a bit of a stretch, the overall story is a delightful and poignant adventure. Recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09.]-Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
