Reif Larsen's "Selected Works of T.S. Spivet'

Tecumseh Sparrow (T.S.) Spivet is a 12-year-old cartographer from Montana whose drawings and diagrams are good enough to be published in "Science, Scientific American, Discovery, and even Sports Illustrated for Kids." On the strength of them, his proud mentor, a professor at Montana State, secretly nominated T.S. for an award for the popular advancement of science from the Smithsonian.

When someone from the Smithsonian calls to tell him he's won, T.S at first hesitates— he's about to start seventh grade, after all— but decides to travel to D.C. to accept the prize. Without saying anything to his parents, T.S. leaves early one morning and hops a freight train to travel East.

The narrative concerns his journey— which is, as novelistic journeys perhaps inevitably are, both literal and metaphorical. The story also concerns family dynamics (T.S.'s brother Layton had died in an accident shortly before the novel opens) and family history.

On his way out of the house, it seems, T.S. grabbed a journal kept by his entomologist mother, and he reads it as he travels. It turns out to be his mother's reconstruction of the life of his paternal great-great-grandmother, a geologist who was a member of Hayden's geological survey of Wyoming in 1870.

Fascination with hobos

The narrative takes its own journey as well. In addition to switching back and forth between T.S. and his great-great-grandmother, it meanders through dozens of sidetracks that crisscross the main story. The decision to hop a train, for instance, is made in the context of T.S.'s fascination with hobos, which he explains in some detail.

Through this multiplicity of threads, Larsen succeeds in capturing the voice of a very bright, albeit very odd, 12-year-old boy. T.S. is smart enough to see much of what's going on around him but not mature enough to make sense of it. You see this in his enormous vocabulary, which he doesn't quite control:

I had tried (and failed) to make a map of [my father's] face that properly captured all that went on there. His eyebrows were just a little too explosive and unkempt for their own good, yet they always arboretumed up and out in this perfect kind of way, hinting that my father had perhaps just returned from a long, searching ride on his burgundy Indian motorcycle.

The constantly digressive nature of the text is enhanced by the extensive marginalia. Interspersed on almost every page are T.S.'s maps— and this is a boy who maps almost everything, from his sister shucking corn to his top nine favorite movies and their thematic relationships to "Unihemispheric Slow-Wave Sleep in the Bottlenose Dolphin"— as well as drawings and textual asides. He helpfully draws dotted lines from the text to each bit of marginalia so you know when to read it.

Follow the maps

This way of reading actually takes a bit of getting used to; my tendency is to immediately scan over charts and illustrations when I turn to a new page. But no: It's more rewarding to relax and let yourself follow the map that T.S. has created.

Except, of course, it's not T.S. who created it. In fact, though Larsen's text is well constructed, it's the overall presentation that makes the book intriguing. The collaboration between Larsen and his designer/typographer, Ben Gibson— who isn't identified on the title page but should be — is a tour de force.

I've worked in publishing long enough to know that there's significantly more involved in a good layout than handing the artist a Word doc and a few jpegs and saying "put this on a page." The book as produced must have been the result of a true partnership, and it's an insult to Gibson that his name isn't more prominently placed.

The book isn't completely successful— the story falls apart a bit in the last section, after T.S. arrives in D.C.— but it's well worth reading as a story and experiencing as a new style of story-telling. I look forward to seeing what Larsen, and Gibson, come up with next.