THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET
By Reif Larsen

This book is a literature teacher's dream. Name a trope about coming of age and you'll find it here. That could be bad and derivative and read like some horrible adolescent novel, the kind you'll find in high school reading labs, but in Larsen's wondrous book those tropes get enlarged and refined.

The most obvious comparison here is to CATCHER IN THE RYE. Our hero is a twelve year old genius cartographer who has recently lost his brother to an accident for which he feels culpable. His freakish abilities and insight make him estranged from everyone except his sister, Gracie, and his mentor, Dr. Yorn. His mother, at least in his eyes, is something of a failed scientist and his father is a gruff old rancher recovering from the loss of his son. So we have here a character just like Holden: brilliant, insightful beyond his years, isolated, and confused. And, just like Holden, T. S. goes on an odyssey of sorts to Washington D. C. and the Smithsonian which has somehow awarded him the Baird Fellowship and is expecting a Mr. T.S. Spivet to be in residence for the next six months.

On this improbable journey from his Montana ranch to the east coast, T. S. hops a freight train, amost gets stabbed to death by a religious fanatic, and hitches a ride from Chicago to D. C. from a truck driver reminiscent of the hipster trucker in Jim Dodge's NOT FADE AWAY. When the book finally settles in Washington and our hero's picaresque adventure comes to an end, everything slows down a little and to my taste seems to get side-tracked with some secret society weirdness that better belongs in a book by Dan Brown than here, but you can't have everything. All I can say is that riding along with T.S. Spivet between Montana and D.C. is a trip rich with discovery and insight.

Once T.S.'s roadtrip begins, he stumbles across the story of his great-grandmother's trip across country with the Hayden Expedition as a geologist as well as her romance with signalman Tecumseh Tearho Spivet. Generations of similarly named scientists, miners, artists, and ranchers ultimately lead, T.S. comes to realize, to his hoboing across country on this particular train or that particular semi on his way to that particular museum. You come of age by taking ownership of who you are and where you come from. It is a lesson that always comes in a flash of insight.

But enough about the story. I want to talk about the book itself. The hardcover edition I have in front of me from The Penguin Press (New York:2009) is the size and shape of a history textbook, which is to say that it has wide pages just right for holding lots of illustrations and graphs and, of course, maps. This kid maps everything and we get to see the results in the margins as he creates them. He polishes off maps of local water tables, maps of male pattern baldness, and a particularly nice map of grown men dancing, all drawn in one of his hundreds of meticulously organized notebooks. Along with the maps are fascinating sidebars exploring such questions as "When Does a Child Become an Adult?", or a chart depicting the evolution (or devolution) of the length of shorts in answer to the question, "When Did a Short Become a Pant?"

My advice is to postpone all further activity and go out and read THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S.SPIVET.