Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a novel that’s easy to talk about but difficult to write about. It’s a natural distinction for a book that’s so beautifully designed and obsessively layed out—what can one say with mere words, after all, when the subject of one’s words is a text that incorporates as marginalia scientific diagrams, heartbreaking sketches, sweeping illustration, and nuanced cartography. I’ll just say that Larsen’s debut is everything one could hope for from such an expansively composed volume: it is by turns beautiful, moving, witty, informative, mysterious, and devastating. I spoke with Reif Larsen a few weeks ago, just before he launched the book in Toronto.
When T.S. lists the clubs he’s joined, he includes the Official Dolly Party Fan Club. It occurred to me that though we know a whole lot about what T.S. reads, sees, thinks, and feels, we don’t really get any information on what he’d listen to. What would be on T.S. Spivet’s playlist?
It’s funny that you ask this, because there’s this blog called Largehearted Boy, and they asked me to do a playlist, though it wasn’t necessarily what T.S. would listen to. Because I thought about this and realized that the Coppertop Ranch is kind a music-less place, aside from kind of the crackle of the Westerns on television.
It’s weird because he’s so attuned to sound throughout—he diagrams the sounds of the railroad!
Yeah, you’d think. But I kind of like that he has a record player and he’s not really in tune. Definitely Gracie [T.S.’s sister] has her girl pop going on, and in fact today we’re releasing another section of the website, Gracie’s room, and two friends of mine, the website designer and my friend Sarah, wrote a pop song for the website. And I’m now a little bit afraid that my book will be the book that had that sweet song, it’ll be remembered as the book that went along with the song. So in terms of what he would listen to, I kept putting Dolly Parton in there, partly as a joke, but Dolly Parton’s really good. I like that he has this weird pre-sexual crush on her in some ways, because I kind of did too.
We have this science program in the states called Radiolab, it’s really well done, and it tackles a different abstract idea like time or memory from a very kind of everyman way. And one of them was music—pop music—and why it works. And they were saying why Country music has a kind of universal following. Like Dolly Parton—they use the example—she can fill stadiums in Zimbabwe for three nights in a row. Most people don’t even know the words, but they understand the sentiment behind her voice. That cry break—there’s a universal understanding that the story is like ‘things used to be better, now I’m in the shit, I’m looking for the grass over the hills.’ And that, in some ways, is the Western narrative—looking for the brighter pastures. So Dolly represents some deep integral story lines.
Early in the book, T.S. faults his father for being influenced by what he calls the “falsified cultural memory” or Westerns. I think one way of reading this book—of reading T.S.’s journey—is as a continual testing ground for a set of American cultural memories within which T.S. lives. Can you talk a bit about the idea of cultural memory in this book? Which of the cultural memories influencing T.S. are falsified? Which are valid?
That’s a big, strong question. So I’m going to personalize that so I can bite off a chunk of that. I think the role of any fiction, or story, for that matter, is to personalize the universal. So at least for me, as a reader, I buy into personal struggles and stakes. But good novels, as you’re buying into these very specific and personal struggles, also make you struggle with grand ideas. So this is what I was trying to do without being too heavy-handed about it. T.S. encounters all of these characters on his journey who either represent archetypal characters in the American consciousness, or are slight twists on them—so he meets the wandering native American, but he listens to Rush Limbaugh. Because it’s almost like T.S. is confronting the American cultural narratives, trying to make sense of them, but like a Western—I very much modeled this book like the classic Western, three part structure, coming of age, cross-country journey, search—I wanted to play to that balance of ‘this is something fresh, this is something new,’ but the reader also feeling like they recognize something. If you do it right, there’s magic in that. This is what happens when you’re watching a Western, you’re like, ‘oh, I know this story, I’ve seen this before, but I’m so hooked in.’
I met Sam Lipsyte a few weeks ago because he was here in town reading for a class a friend teaches, and somehow you came up—I must have been asking about Columbia [where Larsen studied and Lipsyte teaches]—and I told him that I was reading the book. He asked what I thought, and I said I was really enjoying it, that it was just such an incredible object. He agreed, and then said, ‘It’s funny, I once told him to get rid of those drawings, and I don’t know if I was right.’ Have you had trouble with people embracing the very idea of them?
Oh man, Sam is so great. Sam saw it at an early stage. I was experimenting at one point with having images. I wrote the thing almost all the way through with text, with no images, and in his workshop I think I was plopping in a couple of clip-arty things. That’s what I was nervous about. If you’re going to include images, they have to be up to par, they have to be doing the narrative work on par with the story. So a couple years after that workshop, I really faced this fork in the road: do I hire someone to do them, do I abandon them? Another guy at Columbia, Ben Marcus, was like, ‘you’ve got to do them.’ I’d written everything in Microsoft Word up to that point, and all the digressions were footnoted. I really struggled with the footnotes, because there’s such a tangled history in fiction, anyway.
And especially at this moment in time—you don’t want to be immediately dismissed as a Wallace follower.
Exactly. He does something very specific with them—for him it’s almost like a cerebral steam valve. For me, they actually work better in his non-fiction than in his fiction. And there’s something really authorially intrusive about them, asking your reader to constantly break their narrative sight lines, to go down to the bottom of the page, so they better be really important. So another thing that Ben said was get the Adobe Creative Suite, so I got it and got a Waycom tablet, so I did most of the drawing on tablet, and it really opened up the book. All of a sudden they’re not footnotes, they’re marginalia. It was huge. I think that was the key to the book. Because it’s much closer to what T.S. would think about—he’d actually think about the geography of the page. When I discovered those little arrow lines, that lateral movement, there’s something much more akin to reading. I had to suddenly edit way down—I probably had about ten times as many diversions. But it made explicit the kind of dueling narratives of the main text and the margins. And I began to feel out what he was comfortable with saying in the margins, in annotation. That’s where he pushes out of his comfort zone a little bit.
One of the book’s recurring syntactical arrangements goes something like this: “As I sat in place A or did thing B, it occurred to me or dawned on me or suddenly struck me that particular truth C is the case and had been all along.” Are these small moments of epiphany the trophies of youth? Or the rewards of the observant?
I think T.S. is in an interesting place, as we all were, which is poised on the balance point of childhood and adolescence. I’m not like a cognitive psychologist, so I can’t label everything, but I’ve been around kids a lot, so I’ve seen this transition and how it plays out in a lot of people. They’re transitioning from being an observer and things being done to them to being an actor in the world—they start to imagine themselves as cognizant and having a cause and effect relationship with the rest of the world. They’re also establishing a grid of meaning around themselves—they stop just seeing things and start replacing things with signs and signifiers. Which is kind of sad, in a way, because our systems of symbols are shorthands that keep us from actually seeing the world in many ways. So the role of the writer is to cut through that symbolism and describe things in a surprising way. But that’s how they actually look, if we look at them. So with T.S., I think often he’s trying to come up with the rules of the world, in the way that kids do. They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s how this is, that’s how that is.’ Because he wants to hang his hat on these things, but they keep getting undermined. He’ll come to a conclusion, and in the next scene it will be totally disproved. I think this is how kids do it—at least how I did it in my mind. You want to cling to these truths, you want them always to be true, but the only constant, the older I get, is that everything’s in flux. There is actually nothing you can hang your hat on. It’s all illusions to comfort us.
[Slight spoiler alert for this question—skip it if you’ve not read the book] When talking about US presidents, Layton says to T.S. that “When you die, it’s always your fault.” Yet our understanding of who is at fault for Layton’s death evolves over the course of the book—we move from believing that T.S. had his back turned to knowing that he had his hands on the gun. Why was it important for you to have this sadness at the book’s centre, and how did you imagine the evolution of T.S.’s grief?
John Gardner said that at the centre of every story is a wound. It wasn’t like I set out saying, ‘Where’s my wound?’ But the death, and the circumstances of the death, developed organically as I was writing the book. And strangely enough, T.S. became more and more culpable. And when he made that speech at the end, that was when I realized how much he was actually there. That, to me, as a writer, suddenly made sense—why there was all this suppression. Can you imagine as a kid actually being there, holding the gun, even if it wasn’t his fault! But I think what was very important was cracking the door a little bit more and a little bit more. It’s a slippery slope if there’s some big secret in any book—how do you crack that door slowly in a way that doesn’t seem forced, but that keeps the engine at the heart of the book alive? As writers, we’re translators of the heart, and that’s hard to do. But for something that is suppressed and not mentioned apparently in life, Layton is mentioned a lot in the book. So how do you give the feeling to the reader that this is something that churns up all these characters in their own way, but vocally is not mentioned.
Of the members of the original Megatherium club—the founders, I suppose—many lacked formal education. It seems to me that the characters in the book who have a formal education—T.S.’s mother, Dr. Yorn, Jibsen—are to some degree trapped by it, whereas T.S., obviously lacking formal training, is imaginatively free. What, for you, are the possibilities of the amateur?
I’m glad you saw this a polemic against education! That’s interesting—I actually hadn’t considered that. T.S. obviously has a sort of education, of course, although his actual teacher…
I mean, it’s a celebration of knowledge and education, but it does question throughout some bureaucratic motivations…
My model of learning was always that I did the most work and got the most excited about what I liked—not what was assigned to me. I mean, I wrote a twenty-three page paper about ants in the fifth grade, because I just got really into that. I didn’t have to do that, but I was really into it. I guess more than anything it’s my belief in one needing to get excited about what drives you. And often that can happen in crazy ways outside the classroom. Also, in some ways, the invention of the disciplines—great inventions; who ever did it, congratulations—but they also, as they have manifested themselves in academia, have limited our thinking, because we’re so plugged into our niches. Our systems are set up to prevent renaissance men from happening. Not that I want bullshitters who know a little bit about a lot of things, but I do want cross-disciplinary thinking. When you see it, and see it done well, it’s so cool, and so refreshing. What I do like about T.S.’s way is that he’s not weighed down by, ‘I can’t do this, because it’s not in my field of expertise.’ I’m not against them, but I wanted to explore the different ways institutions can hold us. The Smithsonian isn’t necessarily shown in a favourable light here—but I love the Smithsonian.
Late in the novel, T.S. reveals that he likes to draw an additional, final panel onto the newspaper comic strips. What’s the relationship between this sort of deterministic action and his mapmaking?
I’m really interested in this, the idea of the fifth panel—the symbolism of it. One of the things about maps and about stories is that they work because they’re bounded. Because there’s a world that’s circumnavigated by the book, or by the borders of the map. But the expansionist gesture is in our minds. The document is bounded, but our imagination around the map is what connects it to the outer world. So by drawing the fifth panel, you are enacting that expansionism in a way, sort of breaking the rules of the map, the boundary. And I forget exactly what T.S. says about it, but how in doing so, there’s always something of an empty feeling, he feels hollow. I think we don’t want to explicate the fifth panel—the fifth panel should lurk in our imagination.
Maybe the afterword [an extra section of the novel, that will appear on the book’s website] is a kind of fifth panel for this book. In regards to the web—I’m interested in the future of books, and I think they’ll be around for a long time, I really do. I think they’ve screwed up the Kindle so far, because humans are humans, they want the weight of a book in their hand. When I’m reading a book, trying to remember a quote, I’ll remember that it’s, you know, upper left corner, third of the way down. So the Kindle collapses that personal geography that we have with a book, so they haven’t figured that out. But I do think that books will more and more have to talk to the media around them. My brother, he’s twenty years old, not a big book reader, gets all his stuff online—people are now used to navigating online content. So whether a book likes it or not, it’s going to have all kinds of companion sites, whether created by the author, or created by other people. So I think for storytellers, it’s a really cool opportunity to look at what books do well, what websites do well, and how we make that conversation rich. I think the challenge in a web environment is that it’s 30,000 miles wide, and one inch deep. How do you mimic the boundedness, the evocativeness, the knee-deep feeling of being in a novel on a website, using the tools of the web? So that’s one of the things we’re trying to do with the website. For the reader who gets to the end of this book, and wants to lurk in that story-space a little bit longer, we give them a different medium, give them a taste—give them the extra diagram—but no more, that’s where the boundedness comes in. I was paired with an amazing designer for this book, and with an amazing web designer for this book.
At one point, T.S. is forced to abandon his suitcase in a Chicago train yard and can take only the essentials in his daypack. If you had six items to put in yours, what would they be?
That’s hard. A journal, certainly. Can a journal and pen count together?
It’s a combo, sure, counts as one.
A thighmaster, probably. To keep toned. It would be useful, I think, in many ways. I think if you had years you could learn to use it as a weapon. A pillow—there’s a lot that one can do with a pillow. Probably some kind of knife, like a Leatherman. A hoverboard.
Well obviously. Like a Back to the Future II, personal one?
Exactly. It would have to be invented before I could take it. That’s it. I’m done. I’d only need five. No, wait! A bottle of very fine single malt Scotch.
My second quick question. The pets in this book have excellent names—Heritage the llama, Verywell the dog. If I gave you a cat right now, what would you name it and why?
I think I would want to name it a number. I’d have to think about the number. Something high, like 243. I just love things that are named like that. That’s too long. It’d be 200 for short, but its full name would be 243.
T.S. recalls Mr Benefidio as noting that “A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas tat we did not know were previously connected.” The novel ends with a reproduction of T.S.’s map of Chicago, in which he charts the frequency of people walking alone. What are that map’s disparate ideas? What bridges does it form as it closes the book?
Well, I think for every deep, real truth, the opposite is also true, often. So in that map, the co-existent truths are that, yes, we are alone, and yes, we are not alone. Those can be held in simultaneous regard, and for me, that map—I am saddened by that map, and also heartened by that map. I see T.S. looking out at this single woman on her cell phone, and reaching out to her by mapping her, saying you and I, we have the same quest. But in doing so he kind of is, in a sense, throwing up his hands and saying, there can only be one.
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