The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet: A NOVEL By Reif Larsen, Vintage, Rs 399

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is the unlikely hero of Reif Larsen’s unlikely first novel. From start to finish, this absorbing, albeit sometimes clunky, narrative is burdened with one device — unlikeliness. Larsen throws it in whenever he can, as though it is his best passport to being retro.

Retro may be the new cool — Larsen, a product of Columbia University’s famed writing programme, reportedly got a million dollars for his debut venture — but it must at least aim at achieving something. Even though Larsen begins with a riveting story, somewhere along the way he seems to lose steam, so that the end comes across as a feelgood whimper, belying the promise of the edgy, intense opening.

Straddling graphic novel, Bildungsroman and fantasy, Larsen’s story has eccentricity written all over. Told by a 12-year-old genius mapmaker, it teems with marginalia, scribbles, doodles and sketches, distracting the reader with asides and insights every half minute, so that following the thread of the narrative becomes a Herculean task. In this sense, the novel is ideally suited to those with a limited attention span and a fetish for quirkiness, for T.S. Spivet is no ordinary cartographer. He is not simply interested in geological surveys, but goes about mapping everyone and everything — the flight of bats around his house, his sister shucking corn, facial expressions, ways of telling a genuine smile from a fake one, the presence of McDonald’s across northern Montana, and so on.

Although the voice that runs through the book is that of T.S., born to a cowboy father and “a beetle scientist” mother, the format of the tale is polyphonic. We get to hear the multiple personalities that inhabit the precocious boy’s head. For T.S. is not just a child prodigy, an impulsive liar, a potential murderer and an aspiring secret agent, he is also a habitual bedwetter and a honey nut Cheerios addict. At times, he behaves like any other snivelling, lonesome kid, who converses with a Winnebago named Valero, calls his GPS device “Mr Igor”, has an irrational fear of porridge, and is petrified by a pterodactyl named Gunga Din, who, he believes, hides under his bed at night. (Must there be a bit of Kipling even in childish phobias? Does clever always have to be so obviously clever?) T.S. is Holden Caulfield, Huck Finn, Alice Liddell and Christopher John Francis Boone (of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time) rolled into one.

But, in spite of such illustrious fictional progenitors, T.S. is also an ordinary American boy growing up in Coppertop ranch, in a provincial town called Butte in Montana, surrounded by a model dysfunctional family. His father is a “quiet and brooding broncbuster”, while his mother, whom he refers to as “Dr Clair”, is a “giant and tremendous nerd” — which turns out to be not exactly true. His brother, Layton, has died in a freak accident in the barn, for which T.S. somehow blames himself, and his sister, Gracie, thinks of him as her “spaz brother”. There is also a half-witted ranch dog called Verywell to complete the picture.

Predictably, the craziest stroke of luck must befall such an oddball. Due to the secret machinations of Terence Yorn, T.S.’s “scientific father”, T.S. gets chosen for the prestigious Baird Award by no less than the Smithsonian and must travel across the country, from the West (“the land of myths, drinking and silence”) to the East (“the land of ideas”), to receive the honour. On the way, he has exciting railroad adventures, travelling cross-country in true-blue hobo style. He encounters members of a secret society, who, unknown to him, turn out to be his guardian angels, and learns about the travails of his great-great-grandmother, Emma Osterville, one of the first female geologists in the country, from one of Dr Clair’s notebooks. He also comes close to having a brush with the president — presumably George W. Bush — when he is invited to the White House to hear the State of the Union address.

The most engaging section of the novel is Dr Clair’s potted biography of Emma Osterville, who was trained by her stepfather, Orwin Englethorpe, one of America’s finest but forgotten naturalists and a friend of Darwin, Emerson and Louisa May Alcott. There is more than a touch of self-pity in Dr Clair’s desire to unravel the mystery of a brilliant scientist giving up her career to marry a Finnish-German immigrant farmer — for this is precisely what she has done herself. Neglected by the scientific fraternity, especially by that old boys’ club called the Smithsonian, Dr Clair, as well as Emma Osterville, have their scores settled by the little “mapboy” in the Spivet family, many years down the line. But even so, the fact remains that it is a Spivet boy, and not a girl, who brings justice — which spoils the sweetness of the revenge somewhat.

The irony deepens when we realize that T.S.’s compulsive mapmaking is not just the outcome of his scientific curiosity but a psychological obsession, bringing him closer to understanding his fears and apprehensions. He seeks comfort in maps because they help him decipher the vast unknown that lies “between here and there”. In spite of the attention-seeking child in him, there is also a prescient, world-weary adult inside his head who “had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually”. When the melancholic T.S. looks into the eyes of Stinky the farm goat stuck in a barbed-wire fence, he sees “something extraordinarily foreign in its bulgy unblinkingness, in the total absence of love and loss in that quivering black rectangle of sight”. Such ruminations bring to mind the young J.S. Mill, certainly not a boy with a hyperactive imagination and gift for drawing from the American Mid-West.

While reading Larsen’s story, there isn’t much time for such hair-splitting reasoning. With its private mythology, quaint vocabulary — T.S. christens an unfamiliar piece of cutlery at the awards dinner the “thingy-bobby” — and in-jokes, the world of T.S. Spivet is an escapist’s haven. It makes you sad, angry, smile and maybe even shed a few tears, if you have a thing for Hollywood-style happy endings. But to enjoy it fully, you must forget that the story is told by a 12-year-old with a weakness for McDonald’s happy meals.