A short life of the author
Reif Larsen (born 1980) is an American novelist and filmmaker whose debut, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009), is one of the most inventive and visually ambitious novels of the twenty-first century — a book that combines a coming-of-age adventure story with hundreds of hand-drawn maps, diagrams, scientific illustrations, and marginal annotations to create a reading experience unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. The novel was an international bestseller, translated into over thirty languages, and adapted into a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, 2013). Larsen’s second novel, I Am Radar (2015), is an even more ambitious — and more demanding — work that attempts to connect the history of puppetry, particle physics, and twentieth-century warfare in a single narrative.
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009)
The novel’s protagonist is Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, a twelve-year-old prodigy living on a ranch in Divide, Montana, who obsessively maps everything: the behaviour of beetles, the migration patterns of birds, the movements of his family members through the house, the emotional topology of his own grief after the accidental death of his younger brother. When T.S. receives an unexpected phone call informing him that he has won the Baird Award from the Smithsonian Institution for his mapmaking, he decides to travel alone from Montana to Washington, D.C. — by freight train, because he is twelve and cannot drive — to accept the prize.
The physical book is itself a remarkable object. The text is printed with wide margins that are filled with T.S.’s illustrations: detailed maps, scientific diagrams, cross-sections of firearms, anatomical drawings of insects, charts of family emotional states, and other visual marginalia that comment on, extend, and sometimes contradict the narrative text. The design — worked out in collaboration with the publisher and illustrator — is integral to the experience of reading the novel, not decoration. The marginalia create a second narrative that runs alongside the first, and the tension between the two — between T.S.’s rational, cartographic way of understanding the world and the emotional reality that resists mapping — is the novel’s central theme.
The novel is, at its heart, a book about the desire to understand the world by representing it — and about the inevitable failure of representation to capture what matters most: grief, love, the mystery of other people. It is also a very funny and moving adventure story about a brilliant child navigating an adult world that is simultaneously more dangerous and more kind than he expects.
I Am Radar (2015)
Larsen’s second novel is a vastly more ambitious and more difficult book — a 640-page narrative that spans decades and continents, connecting a series of seemingly unrelated stories: a baby born with inexplicably dark skin in New Jersey, a puppet theatre company performing in the Cambodian jungle during the Khmer Rouge era, a physicist in Norway, a radio operator in the Congo. The novel’s connective thread is the idea that performance — specifically puppetry and theatrical representation — can intervene in the real world, and that the boundary between art and reality is more permeable than we assume.
The book’s ambitions are enormous — it attempts to be simultaneously a novel about particle physics, the history of puppetry, the nature of consciousness, and the political history of the twentieth century. Critical reception was mixed: some reviewers admired the scope and intellectual ambition, while others found the novel overwrought and structurally incoherent.
Style and Influences
Larsen’s work belongs to the tradition of maximalist, encyclopedic American fiction — the tradition of Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Z. Danielewski, in which novels aspire to contain entire systems of knowledge. His particular contribution is the integration of visual elements into the novelistic form — T.S. Spivet is one of the few novels in which the illustrations are genuinely necessary rather than merely ornamental.
Collecting Larsen
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009, Penguin Press) in first edition brings $20–$60. The physical quality of the book — its wide margins, its illustrations, its unusual design — makes first editions particularly desirable as objects. I Am Radar (2015, Penguin Press) brings $10–$25 in first edition. Signed copies are available through Larsen’s public appearances.