THE Q&A: REIF LARSEN, NOVELIST, MAP-MAKER, INDUSTRY SAVIOUR

Reif Larsen's first novel, "The collected works of T.S. Spivet", is an unexpected success story. About a precocious young cartographer from Montana who heads to Washington, DC to collect an award, the book is clever, heartfelt and visually arresting, full of maps and drawings by Larsen himself.

"People ask me if I am T.S.", he says, referring to his 12-year-old narrator (Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, in full), who shares his love of map-making and cataloguing the world around him. We are in Larsen's Brooklyn apartment, which is littered with maps. A long list of dance moves is scrawled on a chalkboard wall in the kitchen ("Fox Trot", "Rumba"). Still, Larsen takes pains to say the book is not autobiographical.

Publishers were the first to fall for the charms of T.S. Spivet. Ten of them competed for the book, which ultimately went to the Penguin Press for nearly $1m--a rarity among first-time novelists, particularly in a recessionary book market. As a result, Larsen has been hailed by some as an industry saviour, and criticised by others as an over-hyped schoolboy with a penchant for marginalia.

His novel takes the footnoted storytelling of David Foster Wallace and Marisha Pessl to new widths--he fills the extra-large margins (the book measures 12'' across) with pictures, charts, maps and explications. This may be unique, but I found the most delight in Larsen's prose. Here, in a passage culled from the margins (where he injects a good deal of poetic observation), he hits the sweet spot between childlike and adult, funny and lump-in-your-throat sad:

The genesis and sustenance of their love thus got filed away with the rest of the unspoken subjects...materializing only in tiny trinkets: the horseshoe ornament in the cab of the pickup, a single picture of my father as a young man...that Dr. Clair had pinned to a wall of her study; those quiet moments of contact that I occasionally saw them have in hallways, where their hands briefly met, as though they were exchanging a secret pile of seeds.

In an interview, Reif Larsen talks about cowboys, science, the craft of writing and what to read on a road trip.

More Intelligent Life: Why the choice of the precocious child narrator?

Reif Larsen: Well, at first I wanted the cowboy himself, but then the flashbacks got too complicated so I had to settle for the son of a cowboy. There have been books written before about kids with extraordinary abilities positioned on the hinge between childhood and adulthood. Instead of using adult symbols and myth-making they see the world as the world is, whereas we have a complete network of symbols. T.S. actually maps everything and sees it as is. People are always asking "oh, are you T.S.?" I'm not, although were both obsessed with maps and drawing all the time.

MIL: Given the long tradition of using child prodigies as main characters, do you feel it offers certain advantages?

RL: The child prodigy is such a cultural archetype--we are drawn to these prodigies and yet expect them to fail. There's always this notion of a genius growing up to be a failure. You want them to be (and at the same time you wish to be) a genius and yet you are suspicious. One of my favourite novels is "The Tin Drum" where the narrator is a child but quite advanced. We grant the power of narrative as long as it's contained within the boundaries.

MIL: You're an east-coaster. Why pick a far-off ranch in cowboy country as the setting?

RL: I took a road trip to Idaho and was bitten by the western bug, by the yawning possibilities of the West. It's such an American story. And I see Westerns as an interesting genre--contagious and eternal. Think about the classic cowboy riding 1,000 miles up to Kansas, that type of cowboy was only really around (historically) for about 15 years. We like the idea of a drifter with an itchy trigger finger--its flexible and vague, re-negotiable and emotional. A rogue vigilante who follows the cowboy code. Our greatest cowboy like that is the Marlboro Man, if that says anything.

MIL: This seems true in the case of T.S.'s father especially, who is such the archetypal cowboy, with his strange expressions and shrine to Billy the Kid.

RL: I was doing a documentary in Crawford Texas, interviewing people who lived there about what it was like before George W. Bush moved there. I met a man named Ricky Smith. He was so aware of himself and spoke in a strange vernacular, often using a telephone pole as a frame of reference--"higher than a telephone pole"--even though there wasn't a telephone pole for miles. There was one time he was roping cattle and took a call on his cell phone. This mix of old and new is interesting.

MIL: The end, when T.S. reaches his destination (the Smithsonian), is a big letdown for the boy. Is the journey usually more exciting than the end?

RL: The anticipation is more exciting than the real thing, especially as he ends up in the crazy world of adults. He's such an empiricist, and yet his tools become outdated, as is part of growing up.

MIL: How did you come to the idea of putting images and maps in the margins?

RL: I found the voice of the character first, and didn't quite know about the text-image relationship. I came to see it, to see maps, as digressive. A footnote can be bossy, and disruptive, the author saying 'look how much I know'. So the idea of map-making came around. Its a playground for the mind. And the presence of the arrow is so seductive, and allows for leaps from text to margins an back. For example in the section on male-pattern baldness, T.S. is able to say "let me tell you, let me show you".

MIL: So what's your next project?

RL: A Balkan Congo thriller with an underground society of puppeteers, who travel to places under siege, performing shows about particle physics. Its been fun to figure out.

MIL: Whoah. It seems science finds a way of creeping in to your work.

RL: I love science. I don't fully understand it, but it's a direct conduit to vastness. It seems opaque but it's the heart of existence. I've always been a fan of magical realism in Latin America and the surrealism in Eastern Europe. By creating a world within a set of rules and enforcing the surreal you get away with powerful things.

MIL: Besides these, what novels have been really important to you?

RL: The big ones. "Moby Dick", "Anna Karenina", "100 Years of Solitude". More recently "Middlesex"--I listened to it on tape during a road trip and the story world [and] my world came together. Author, story, reader all synchronised.

MIL: Sometimes you do have those perfect moments where you read a book while travelling and it totally colours the trip.

RL: Yes, I try not read about the places I'm going to, but something else.

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Picture Credit: Elliott Holt, The Penguin Press