One way to approach The Selected Works Of T. S. Spivet is as an encyclopedia of narrative conventions, new and old. This story of a brilliant "mapboy" from Montana features, for example, the manuscript within a manuscript, as twelve-year-old Tecumseh Sparrow finds and reads his mother's fictional imaginings of their ancestors. This story is read on the road, as our protagonist travels east to Washington, D. C. But the defining characteristic of the text is its hybridity, the illustrations that demonstrate T. S.'s capacity for drawing maps. Readers must alternate between the body of the text and the extensive marginalia. The cartography trope is pervasive; Larsen examines various ways of knowing, determining finally that an intuitive understanding is preferable to a scientific examination of our physical surroundings. While T. S. sketches more than his local geography, finding ways to map processes, it is his mother's writing that remains beyond the realm he can draw, his mother's writing that maintains his sense of wonder once he has tamed his environment.
The first third of the book is, in many ways, the most compelling. The Spivet Family, living on the Coppertop Ranch just south of Butte, presents a fundamental dichotomy. Dad is a rugged rancher; mom is an obsessed scientist. T. S. is, himself, quite different from his sister, who lives a conventional teenaged reality of benign rebellion. Always in the background is the memory of a brother who died in a rifle accident. There are questions whose answers T. S. cannot chart: what relationship has his mother with his mentor, Dr. Terry Yorn? what responsibility has T. S. for Layton's death?
But just as readers sharpen their curiosity about life in Montana, T. S. flees to ride the rails to Washington. Yorn has nominated him for a Fellowship at the Smithsonian, and the trustees award it, not knowing that their favorite new illustrator is pre-pubescent. Our protagonist makes the appropriately reckless decision to tell no one. The "fish out of water" stuff is deferred, though, as we follow T. S. across the country. Brilliant but not particularly resourceful, this young man is no Huck Finn. Larsen can do little but get him into an RV on the flatbed of a train and drag him to Chicago. What, in other books, would be the conflict is underplayed, for the most part, and, when it is central to the plot, it is resolved in unbelievable ways. This is the part of the novel that relies on "Dr. Clair" Spivet's notebook fiction, and it takes some time to build empathy for new characters. By the time T. S. sleeps his way through the final leg to Washington, in the cab of a racist trucker's rig, we are ready for resolution.
T. S. is, like so many people before him, disillusioned in D. C. Administrator Gunther Jibsen, and everything else at the Smithsonian for that matter, is not what T. S. was led to believe. There are some touches, like a secret society, that are either red herrings or, perhaps, central to the plot all along. One wishes that Larsen had left himself more time for this final section. The politics of this book are delicious, lambasting both an unnamed, jingoistic administration and those politically-correct effetes who fail to grasp the true importance of T. S.'s work. But, that said, the lightning-quick resolution feels perfect, and it leaves readers with profound questions: what really happened? and what will?
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