A Few Thoughts on the West of Reif Larsen’s ‘T. S. Spivet’

By Allen M. Jones, 5-24-09

Reif Larsen’s novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, has been rumbling around in the intestines of the publishing industry for the last year or so. An auction, rumors of a near-million-dollar advance, interviews describing a strikingly original narrative that begins in Montana and ends in D.C., maps and sketches by the author…here, perhaps, I thought, might be a book that’s actually worthy of its press releases. A great American novel that happily begins in my own backyard. Alas, and to misquote Thomas Huxley, “Another beautiful premise ruined by a few ugly facts.”

Turns out, the novel’s narrator, T.S. Spivet, is a twelve-year-old genius, a kid compelled to map, complete with marginalia and commentary, the minutiae of his life. From the shape of a corn cob caught mid-crunch to the conversational dynamics around a dinner table, water table maps to the forensics of the gunshot wound that killed his brother, the kid can’t stop drawing. Over 220 sketches with accompanying marginalia are presented as an organic part of the novel itself. If you were pitching the screenplay you’d say it’s Holden Caulfield meets Shane meets Good Will Hunting, and all with a sketch pad.

When the story opens, Spivet’s won a prestigious award at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. His work was submitted without his knowledge and under false pretenses by a mentor. Despite his initial hesitations, Spivet decides to accept the honor. For the sake of the next three hundred pages, the author has him running away from home, hopping a train east rather than coming clean with his family. We now have a coming-of-age narrative shuffled into a road trip saga. Great American novel, capital G, capital A. On his way to D.C., Spivet travels in a Winnebago carried as train cargo, reads from a journal stolen from his mother, dodges railway bulls, and is badly wounded by a Jesus freak in a soiled white tuxedo. Not incidentally, the Smithsonian thinks they’re getting a tenured professor instead of a pre-adolescent Montanan, which creates a nice, lingering tension.

The presentation is gorgeous, the narrative is impossibly complex (with debts to Jonathan Safran Foer and Mark Z. Danielewski – these recent attempts to transcend traditional boards and binding), but the whole edifice stands wobbly on a few small mistakes. It takes a westerner to see it. The first chapters are set south of Butte in Divide, Montana. A place, we’re told, that you might miss if you look down to tune your car radio. In these early pages, our first whiff of something rotten comes when we learn that Spivet’s mother, Dr. Clair, “once roped off the entire hayloft right during the pupae emergence of the seventeen year cicada cycle.” Um…cicadas? In Montana? Yowch. Okay. I’ll cut the guy some slack (and won’t mention my confusion at the idea of “roping off” a hayloft). Every author’s allowed one egregious error in a work so complex. But then, a few pages later, we read that the narrator’s dog had a “hobby of snapping at lightning bugs, Plotinus pyralis. During certain nights in late July, the bugs would all flash in synchrony, as if following some divine metronome.” Nice imagery. But alas and again, lightning bugs? In high-altitude Montana? Having lived here for twenty-seven years, Livingston to Missoula to Helena, I’ve never seen a lightning bug. Maybe I need to get out more.

To be fair, and as we learn toward the end of the novel, T.S. Spivet is a liar. The dreaded “unreliable narrator.” A twelve-year-old who can’t stop telling tall tales. As such, he may be making the whole thing up, lightning bugs and all. (The last words of the novel, buried in a flamboyant Melville-esque sketch of ships, sails, and villains, are “Everything is fiction.”) But these small mistakes, if mistakes they are, are overshadowed by the unforgiveable portrait of the cowboy father, a one-dimensional stereotype with dialogue patterns more native to Faulkner’s Mississippi than Butte, America. He sips whiskey and watches old cowboy movies and says “fer” and “wrastle” and “sho.” After shooting a rattlesnake, he says, “Sho. She’s a big one. Maybe we’ll bring that rope back to the house. Show your mudder.” For those of us perpetually-aspiring western writers who’ve busted our chops trying to get a handle on the hesitant, tight-lipped mumblings of cowboy dialogue (the only clear masters of the form are, in descending order, Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx), a rancher saying “sho” and “mudder” is like reaching into a cookie jar to find a mousetrap.

Clearly, I have my own issues. Damn if the West hasn’t always wrastled with this particular demon. Folks from Back East (and Hollywood) gittin us all wrong. According to the worlds created by those who are interested only in the West as a cliché, six shooters carry at least ten rounds, horses ceaselessly nicker, and every overfed grizzly has to stand up and roar before it attacks. From the beginning, we’ve found ourselves at the mercy of authors and auteurs who don’t know the first thing about us. It’s a breach of contract, a betrayal of the relationship between author and reader. As soon as I set down my credit card, I agree to spend time with your work; in return, you’ll show me something new about myself, about the world in which I inhabit. You’ll entertain and instruct, and hopefully do it from a position of authority greater than my own. But when that contract is broken, even in the smallest detail, the entire experience is called into question. Particularly when a novel is presented with such high expectations, it’s hard not to feel ripped off.

The author, a product of Brown and the MFA program at Columbia, a documentarian and Brooklyn brownstoner, has clearly appropriated Montana as a symbol, as a colorful starting point, but without bothering to get to know it. We’ve once again been reduced to a device. I want to like Reif Larsen’s book. I really do. It’s brilliant in so many ways. Unfortunately, the small mistakes – rather like black mustaches graffitied across a Michelangelo – smear the larger masterpiece.

Allen Morris Jones, author, editor and the founding Books and Writers editor at NewWest.Net, writes from Bozeman, Montana, where he is the owner and principal editor of Manuscript Medics, a firm that specializes in helping writers hone their projects and ready them for publishing.