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Twelve-year-old T.S. Spivet draws maps of train routes and water tables, maps of loneliness, the resilience of memory, even a map of his sister shucking corn. Author Reif Larsen notes, "I think I'm gently expanding the definition of the word map." And about those maps: Larsen, the son of two artists, created them himself. "I got almost all the way through the draft before I realized that we needed to see T.S.'s maps and his diagrams," the novelist explains. "That's the territory of his heart." When T.S.'s work is honored by the Smithsonian — the institute naturally assumes that T.S. is an adult — he runs away from home in Divide, Montana, and hoboes his way to Washington, D.C. An adventure story, a family saga, and a format-busting beauty (T.S.'s drawings appear on more than half the pages, mostly in sidebars and cutaways alongside the main body of text), The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a revelation. Recommended by Dave, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S.Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world.
When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal — if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal — is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls.
T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself.
As he travels away from the ranch and his family, we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads, he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.
All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science's inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.
T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.
Review:
"Fans of Wes Anderson will find much to love in the offbeat characters and small (and sometimes not so small) touches of magic thrown into the mix during the cross-country, train-hopping adventure of a 12-year-old mapmaking prodigy, T.S. Spivet. After the death of T.S.'s brother, Layton, T.S. receives a call from the Smithsonian informing him that he has won the prestigious Baird award, prompting him to hop a freight train to Washington, D.C., to accept the prize. Along the way, he meets a possibly sentient Winnebago, a homicidal preacher, a racist trucker and members of the secretive Megatherium Club, among many others. All this is interwoven with the journals of his mother and her effort to come to grips with the matriarchal line of scientists in the family. Dense notes, many dozens of illustrations and narrative elaborations connected to the main text via dotted lines are on nearly every page. For the most part, they work well, though sometimes the extra material confuses more than clarifies. Larsen is undeniably talented, though his unique vision and style make for a love-it or hate-it proposition." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
I fell in love with "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet" on the first page, and so did the New York publishers who pushed the bids for this enchantingly illustrated novel toward $1 million. The narrator, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, is a comically precocious 12-year-old boy on a secret trek to Washington, D.C., who speaks in a mixture of Victorian formality and eighth-grade goofiness. He maps and diagrams... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) and annotates everything around him, from the orientation of his parents' Montana ranch to how his older sister shucks sweet corn. His guileless asides and antique-looking drawings fill the margins of "The Selected Works," mixing the graphic intensity of Nick Bantock's "Griffin & Sabine" with the ironic footnotes of Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace. Beware the bookstore display: If you pick this novel up and page through it, you'll be taking it home. The story opens when T.S. receives a surprising call from the Smithsonian Institution. Apparently, someone has submitted T.S.'s scientific drawings that show how the Carabidae brachinus beetle expels boiling secretions, and he's won the prestigious Baird Award. (Of course, T.S. knows all about the Smithsonian's second secretary, Spencer F. Baird, who in the 19th century increased the institution's "collection from 6,000 to 2.5 million specimens before he died in Woods Hole.") Unaware that T.S. is just a boy, the museum administration invites him to give a speech and begin a fellowship in Washington. "All at once the preposterousness of what was happening fell into place in my mind," T.S. tells us. "I didn't often remember that I was twelve years old. Life was too busy to dwell on things like age, but at this moment, faced with a great misunderstanding fabricated by grown-ups, I suddenly felt the full weight of my youth, painfully and acutely." In the wildly digressive chapters that follow, T.S. describes his "hoboing" cross-country adventure to the nation's capital, without money, without transportation and without telling his parents. Not to worry, though: His getaway suitcase contains "two sextants and one octant," along with his "Harmann Radiograph," "a Berenstain Bears handkerchief" and "underwear galore." He advises himself to "get some makeup and change your complexion. Buy a top hat. Speak in an Italian accent. Learn to juggle." He thinks of himself as reversing the trek of his cartographic heroes, Lewis and Clark, but we see him in that long line of alienated young Americans that stretches from Huckleberry Finn to Jack Kerouac. "I did not belong here," T.S. says, echoing their sentiments. With a break-your-heart mixture of deadpan humor, childlike anxiety and cerebral enthusiasm for all things (phone cords, pants, pirates), T.S. reflects on his brief life as he travels across the country, hidden inside a new Winnebago ("The Cowboy Condo") being transported on an eastbound Union Pacific freight train. "One need only whisper the phrase 'bustling railroad town' to raise my blood pressure a notch," he says. But woven through his delightful anecdotes and tangents is the story of his childhood, his alienated parents and the ranch where they all live together in silence. These dark details emerge slowly, mostly in the marginalia, as though they can't be spoken straight out, but we learn early on that T.S.'s younger, much adored brother was killed six months earlier. No one ever mentions him, and the parents have withdrawn deep into their grief, leaving T.S. adrift, feeling unloved and guilty. His mother — whom he refers to only as "Dr. Clair" — rarely leaves her study; his stoic cowboy father makes it clear that he has no use for an effete, cerebral son. T.S.'s compulsive mapping and diagramming is clearly an effort to make sense of the horrible randomness of his experience. Every drawing, he confesses, is an attempt to confirm "a feeling I had had my entire mapping life, since I first charted how one could walk up the side of Mt. Humbug and shake hands with God." In his diagram of the sound waves produced by a Winchester rifle, his illustration of the dinner table set for four instead of five, or his map to the funeral, the pathos of these marginal comments is crushing. There must be a touch of T.S. in his creator, Reif Larsen, the young, unknown writer who made New York publishers lose their minds at the auction for this manuscript. The enormous size of his advance may stem from the fact that the novel makes such an enchanting first impression. There's a problem, though, when you actually sit down to read it through: "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet" loses its way about halfway to Washington. The first problem is that a big chunk in the middle of the novel is turned over to recounting the contents of a manuscript that T.S. has stolen from his mother. This internal story about his great-great-grandmother, who was also a precocious young scientist, simply can't compete with T.S.'s own adventure or his far more engaging voice. And then there's the disastrous ending, the whole final quarter of the novel, which grows unforgivably silly. A collection of campy adults, secret passageways and wholly ridiculous events forfeits all the novel's earlier magic for something cheap and tedious. The boy's complicated, emotionally fraught troubles with his parents, which have been so sensitively developed throughout the story, evaporate into gassy sentimentality in these final pages. I can't remember the last time my initial affection for a novel was so betrayed by its conclusion. It's maddening that somebody didn't help this young author polish "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet" into the genre-breaking classic it could have been. You can follow Charles on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group) (hide most of this review)
Review:
"Two predictions about The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet: readers are going to love it as much as I did, and few if any will have experienced anything like it. I'm flabbergasted by Reif Larsen's talent, and I was warmed by his generosity — if this book were a mug of Sundy's magic juice, I would surely hold it in two hands. The drawings that cascade and tumble through the pages could be a gimmick — cutie-poo tatting on the edge of a lace doily — and in the hands of a lesser novelist, that might have been the case. But because T.S. is such a vivid and realistic character (in spite of his Asperger's/OCD tics, not because of them), they add texture, humanity, and humor. This is a very funny book. I laughed until tears ran down my face when T.S. explains how to win at Oregon Trail, and if he were a real boy, I would seek him out so he could teach me how to win at the old Pitfall Harry game. Here is a book that does the impossible: it combines Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Little Miss Sunshine. Good novels entertain; great ones come as a gift to the readers who are lucky enough to find them. This book is a treasure." Stephen King
Review:
"Debut novelist Larsen's writing is as detailed and absorbing as a map, and while the ending is a bit of a stretch, the overall story is a delightful and poignant adventure." Joy Humphrey, Library Journal
Review:
"A willfully original and diverting book, full of carefully penned ephemera, a bit like Schott's Miscellany written as a confessional novel." Tim Adams, The Guardian
Review:
"Miraculous... The novel is a cabinet of wonders, an odyssey of self-discovery, a family romance, a symphony of topography, geology and American history.... Read it and marvel." Bookpage
Review:
"Fantastically charming, funny, and smart. I felt my brain growing as I read it. Who knew the combination of cartography and adolescence could prove to be so touching and so much fun?" Gary Shteyngart
Synopsis:
#LINK<Discover The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet for iPad.>#
A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world
When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls.
T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself.
As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.
All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science's inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.
T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.
Reif Larsen is twenty-eight, studied at Brown University, and has taught at Columbia University, where he is finishing his MFA in fiction. He is also a filmmaker and has made documentaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, and sub- Saharan Africa.
Jem Wierenga, September 17, 2011 (view all comments by Jem Wierenga)
This book might be the defining example of why not every book could be put into an e-book format. The illustrations twined throughout the story simply couldn't be translated onto a digital screen. I have both a copy of this book in both paperback and hardcover, and I'd have to say even the softcover - though formatted bigger than a trade paperback - still can't give satisfactory weight this work, nearly an art book in itself, deserves.
While the plot resolves more abruptly than expected, the journey to reach the conclusion offered more than enough satisfaction in emotional honesty and illustrative wonderment. I can happily pick up my copy, cradle it between my crossed legs and open it to any page to read Larsen's words with enjoyment and delight in his pictures.
Very nice debut. I'm looking forward to more from him. If you're a fan of Jonathan Safran Foer or Jeffrey Eugenides, you might really like T.S. Spivet.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (4 of 8 readers found this comment helpful)
Hobie, June 23, 2009 (view all comments by Hobie)
Books like this are great examples of how popular opinion and some nifty pictures get a book more buzz than it deserves. And a fine example of a children's book masquerading as adult fiction. Should be shelved in children's picture books. If your interested in experimental books others are more worthy reads.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (20 of 44 readers found this comment helpful)
mm harper, June 17, 2009 (view all comments by mm harper)
Oh, the problem with endings. I can't count how many engaging novels I've read that kept me reading, and enraptured, until they slammed into a brick wall three-quarters of the way through.
I adored T.S. Spivet from page one--his family, his world, his maps. The diagrams fascinated me. They were sometimes funny, sometimes heart-wrenching, and always added another dimension to T.S.'s character. Even when the story suddenly swerved into the ditch, the maps and diagrams kept me interested, and kept T.S.'s spirit alive.
I really wish the author had allowed the character and the story to continue in the way it began, with solid supporting characterizations and solidly realistic situations. These are what allowed T.S. to be so wildly improbable a kid. Once we actually get to the Smithsonian, everything gets strange and pretty unbelievable.
However, I would recommend this book. Its many delights are worth putting up with a sloppy end. I look forward to Reid Larsen's next offering,
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (23 of 44 readers found this comment helpful)
Twelve-year-old T.S. Spivet draws maps of train routes and water tables, maps of loneliness, the resilience of memory, even a map of his sister shucking corn. Author Reif Larsen notes, "I think I'm gently expanding the definition of the word map." And about those maps: Larsen, the son of two artists, created them himself. "I got almost all the way through the draft before I realized that we needed to see T.S.'s maps and his diagrams," the novelist explains. "That's the territory of his heart." When T.S.'s work is honored by the Smithsonian — the institute naturally assumes that T.S. is an adult — he runs away from home in Divide, Montana, and hoboes his way to Washington, D.C. An adventure story, a family saga, and a format-busting beauty (T.S.'s drawings appear on more than half the pages, mostly in sidebars and cutaways alongside the main body of text), The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a revelation.
by Dave
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Fans of Wes Anderson will find much to love in the offbeat characters and small (and sometimes not so small) touches of magic thrown into the mix during the cross-country, train-hopping adventure of a 12-year-old mapmaking prodigy, T.S. Spivet. After the death of T.S.'s brother, Layton, T.S. receives a call from the Smithsonian informing him that he has won the prestigious Baird award, prompting him to hop a freight train to Washington, D.C., to accept the prize. Along the way, he meets a possibly sentient Winnebago, a homicidal preacher, a racist trucker and members of the secretive Megatherium Club, among many others. All this is interwoven with the journals of his mother and her effort to come to grips with the matriarchal line of scientists in the family. Dense notes, many dozens of illustrations and narrative elaborations connected to the main text via dotted lines are on nearly every page. For the most part, they work well, though sometimes the extra material confuses more than clarifies. Larsen is undeniably talented, though his unique vision and style make for a love-it or hate-it proposition." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review"
by Stephen King,
"Two predictions about The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet: readers are going to love it as much as I did, and few if any will have experienced anything like it. I'm flabbergasted by Reif Larsen's talent, and I was warmed by his generosity — if this book were a mug of Sundy's magic juice, I would surely hold it in two hands. The drawings that cascade and tumble through the pages could be a gimmick — cutie-poo tatting on the edge of a lace doily — and in the hands of a lesser novelist, that might have been the case. But because T.S. is such a vivid and realistic character (in spite of his Asperger's/OCD tics, not because of them), they add texture, humanity, and humor. This is a very funny book. I laughed until tears ran down my face when T.S. explains how to win at Oregon Trail, and if he were a real boy, I would seek him out so he could teach me how to win at the old Pitfall Harry game. Here is a book that does the impossible: it combines Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Little Miss Sunshine. Good novels entertain; great ones come as a gift to the readers who are lucky enough to find them. This book is a treasure."
"Review"
by Joy Humphrey, Library Journal,
"Debut novelist Larsen's writing is as detailed and absorbing as a map, and while the ending is a bit of a stretch, the overall story is a delightful and poignant adventure."
"Review"
by Tim Adams, The Guardian,
"A willfully original and diverting book, full of carefully penned ephemera, a bit like Schott's Miscellany written as a confessional novel."
"Review"
by Bookpage,
"Miraculous... The novel is a cabinet of wonders, an odyssey of self-discovery, a family romance, a symphony of topography, geology and American history.... Read it and marvel."
"Review"
by Gary Shteyngart,
"Fantastically charming, funny, and smart. I felt my brain growing as I read it. Who knew the combination of cartography and adolescence could prove to be so touching and so much fun?"
"Synopsis"
by Penguin,
#LINK<Discover The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet for iPad.>#
A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world
When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls.
T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald's, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself.
As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.
All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science's inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.
T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.
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