The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

Believing his family ill equipped to grapple with his ascendant career-and especially fearful of threatening his mother in her own efforts-T. Sixteen-year-old sister Gracie dreams of becoming a movie star, and kindly professor Doctor Yorn serves as the boy’s mentor, submitting his charge’s maps and illustrations for the Baird award. is certain does not exist, is also a writer, as he discovers after swiping one of her notebooks before beginning his journey to the Smithsonian. His mother, a scientist in search of a mystical insect that T. suffers from a guilt complex years before most of us grapple with such stuff. Another son, Layton, died earlier that year in a gun accident in the barn, the grisly result of one of T. drops into cowpoke vernacular when trying to communicate with his hard-driving cowboy father, a man clearly bewildered by his child. On top of that, he’s a right laugh, which never hurts.

with his own creditable identity, making him every bit as doubting and overwhelmed as he is precocious and indomitable-he’s a little bundle of paradoxes, with the proper literary DNA of any well-formed character. Inventing a preternaturally bright child is always tricky, but Larsen imbues T. All of which makes Larsen’s novel an ambitious endeavor, and its success depends on how readily you believe that the narrative voice actually belongs to this particular boy.

For starters, he’s likely smarter than just about anyone you know, and he gives crash courses in Butte’s watershed, Darwin, Erwin Rommel, film, wormholes, toasters, and Humboldtean metaphysics. is anything but a child in his intellectual proclivities. And, of course, the dull pang of leaving childish things behind as manhood encroaches on the scene. retains the intrinsically boyish qualities that fill the pages of, say, one of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod novels: the love of a good breakfast cereal and a dog’s wet nose, the alternating thrill and guilt of gumming up the pursuits of a love-struck sister. is an obsessive mapper and measurer, a prodigy for whom sketching a cut-in of beetle cilia is akin to a few rounds of PlayStation for the average prepubescent boy. Not that our plucky hero, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, twelve-year-old cartographer magnifique, doesn’t embroil himself in some shenanigans when he lights out from his family’s Montana ranch, jumps a freight train, and makes his way to the Smithsonian in Washington to claim the prestigious Baird award for the popular advancement of science. Spivet, features an upstart whose growth and burgeoning self-awareness are captured in an internal monologue, rather than sundry adventures on the trail. Unlike most bildungsromans- especially of the road-story variety-Reif Larsen’s debut, The Selected Works of T.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen