Basically, I love any book with maps in it. So count me as excited.
The gifted, precocious child has become a common trope in the modern novel. There’s Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (which I liked), Jonathan Safran-Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I half-liked) and of course there’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (which I loved). Those are the ones I’ve read and recall right now: Stuart Evers names a few others here.
Generally, I liked Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. I’m going to tell you about it now (and there may be some slight spoilers). I whipped through it in a couple of days — it’s not that long, it’s very easy to read, and I enjoyed it whilst I was reading it. Book and accompanying website are slick, handsome productions. There was a similar buzz around The Raw Shark Texts in 2007, but this book is if anything even more visual — rather than House of Leaves and its academic pastiche/concrete poetry-style textual manipulations, there are proper illustrations and marginalia here, and very nice pretty they are too. At times it feels like an issue of McSweeney’s or a graphic novel, neither of which are necessarily bad things. Larsen’s writing is perfectly fine; slick, polished, imaginative, often quite funny. But.
But: it’s not boring but it is often quite bland. A few chapters in, a ‘book within the book’ appears, which overturns the whole ‘road novel’ side to the text that was just getting interesting, drags on for far too long and really doesn’t work at all. There’s an odd subtext about science/darwinism v.s. religion/faith. Near the end another curious sub-plot about a secret society and wormholes emerges, sort of like a half-hearted House of Leaves but actually Selected Works as a whole probably has more in common thematically with Mark Danielewski’s second ‘novel’, Only Revolutions, without the linguistic inventiveness. Some reviewers have compared it to the neglected Nicholson Baker and his wonderful Mezzanine. I don’t think it’s as good as any of these books.
What troubles me is that Spivet sees the world not like a gifted child at all, but like a pretty good writer wearing his influences on his sleeve. He’s supposed to be a difficult, troubled child, but there is nothing difficult or troubling about his writing. Sometimes he’ll talk to inanimate objects around him and they’ll reply, which could be interesting if Larsen could be bothered to sustain it (see also Kleinzeit) — as it is, it’s sort of interesting but mostly just quirky and cute. Spivet writes like a writer, not a mapmaker. In fact most of the time Spivet actually sounds more like one of Nabokov’s alienated academics (is that a Pale Fire reference on the first page?), with a sprinkling of Delillo in the details, even the odd dash of (oh lord) E. Annie Proulx. Sometimes he does write quite beautifully:
‘When I looked up, I saw them coming toward me: in the distance they looked like a swirl of dust, a dense knot of hands opening and closing, humming through the air, skitting across the surface of the water in my direction. I was not afraid. As they came closer, I could see that they were birds, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, flying so close together it seemed impossible for any single bird to flap its wings on its own. Indeeed, the clot of wing and body and beak moved as one unit with one mind, every wing tip fitting into the glimpse of space just vacated by the previous wing tip, and so the mass moved like the oil-softened teeth of many intermeshing gears. As they came down the canal, I could hear the pump of their muscles, the thrushing of feather on feather. Their eyes stared in all directions at once, seeing everything and nothing, wires of comprehension extending out to every object in space. The sound of a thousand radio stations emanated from their mouths.’
That’s one of my favourite passages. But I look at it again and think: well, no, oil doesn’t actually soften machinery, does it? ‘Emanated’ is wrong there. That’s not how wings work — that’s just how they appear to work. Spivet wouldn’t confuse these things. Ordinarily little stylistic quibbles like this might not matter to me in most novels, but when I’m supposed to believe in Spivet before Larsen, things fall apart.
At least with Safran-Foer, DFW and Baker, you got the impression that (knowledge aside) their characters were understanding the world in fundamentally different ways to everyone around them, even when that made their narratives sound ‘difficult’ or ‘insincere’ at times. We see the world differently after reading writers like Borges, Calvino and Ballard because they really do see the world afresh through pure language — they might involve themselves with strategies of cartography, but they also realise that to reproduce the maps they describe in language would be to miss the point entirely. Or another example — James Kelman’s narrator in Kieron Smith, Boy was no prodigy, but he didn’t need to be because he was entirely human, with a voice unique and different and consistent enough for his world to seem both familiar and alien, above all absolutely involving.
Spivet’s methods of mapmaking just don’t seem consistent with his method of writing. The most basic question of style that Larsen should have asked himself before setting out — ‘How might my mapmaker write a book?’ — is basically ignored in favour of a style which, whilst not unpleasant or offensive, is somehow insufficient.
Do we read this text like we might read a map? We do not. I wish we could.
(Oh, and I noticed a couple of mistakes in the illustrations. At one point there’s a ‘Boredom Box’, a callout from the text that is supposed to describe five different kinds of boredom (p83 in my edition). Only four are listed. Near the end of the book there’s a story about how ‘Tab’ soda got its name (p360/361) — by asking a computer to produce a list of all possible four letter combinations with one vowel — but the list in the margin is a list of words (presumably Spivet-generated) that includes things like ‘Tabu’ and ‘Tada’ and ‘Tame’. I’d like to be able to say these were deliberate mistakes, that these inconsistencies would somehow open up portals of understanding in the text that would lead me on to interesting secret things, but unfortunately I find myself not caring much either way.)
