Quirks that work

Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Penguin, 2009).

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet is the kind of book that teeters on the edge of being irksome. It is, like so much postmodern pop culture, self-consciously idiosyncratic, bubbling with quick, knowing references to everything from railroad signals to Dolly Parton. The literary mechanism that enables such detail is a twelve-year-old cartographer - a child prodigy. His obsessive-compulsive mind spills out onto every page, and frequently into the margins. Footnotes, drawings, and maps are integral to the story; they are "illustrations" in the truest sense.

And although Larsen never makes this explicit, while the protagonist is twelve-year-old T.S., the speaker seems to be adult T.S., with emotional insights that could come only with life experience. These adult reflections also fill the pages, and the result could easily turn pretentious.

But Larsen errs on the side of charming. All the minutiae are offset by the powerful simplicity of T.S.'s "emotional journey" - he has lost a brother and is trying to understand, not only his role in the death, but his role in his transformed family. He uses his scientific work to grapple with his very unscientific dilemma. Not only does T.S. surreptitiously insert his brother's name into every one of his maps, but his personal issues determine the kinds of maps he draws. Faced with a surfeit of new sights and sounds on his first trip to Chicago, for instance, he ultimately chooses to chart the terrain of loneliness: he counts the number of people walking alone, and then the percentage who deflect their loneliness with cell phones or iPods. One of my favourite "maps" in the book uses arrows to illustrate the changing flow of conversation at his family's dinner table, both before and after his brother's death.

So all the bits and bobs have a role to play, and while some might find the end result cloying, I do not count myself in their number. The quirks worked for me. (For quirks that do not quite work, see the film 500 Days of Summer, playing now in your local theatre.)