Mind maps of a boy genius

FICTION: The Selected Works of TS SpivetBy Reif Larsen, Harvill Secker, 375pp, £17.99

IT'S NOT easy being a boy genius, but sometimes being a genius may render the difficulties of being part of a family traumatised by tragedy slightly easier. But wait; make that a tinybit more bearable.

Meet TS Spivet, not Eliot, and prepare for an imaginative, just-about-plausible odyssey that succeeds in being about many things; information, the imagination, America, grief, adventure, the past, celebrity – everything, life itself.

Here is a novel with a difference, which announces it is exactly that before you even open it. The designers have set out to present a book that has been carefully and cleverly made, as well as written.

One thing is certain; Reif Larsen’s wonderfully original debut, destined to please readers of all ages, is the Next Big Thing, and for once, The Next Big Thing appears far less opportunistic than it usually does.

That’s not to suggest that Larsen’s engaging yarn, with its echoes of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover and Nicholson Baker, is not without its well calculated crowd-pleasers. Running parallel to the narrator’s candid telling of his story, white lies and all, is a terrific array of diagrams and drawings: TS, son of a Montana rancher and a depressed mother who may or may not be writing her family story, has a love of maps and a gift for scientific illustration.

The text itself is as much fun to look at. Young Spivet’s voice firmly establishes itself, and while we hang on his every word our eyes savour the look of the pages as well as the sidebars and asides, many of which contain crucial detail. There are also unintentional flashes of the technical virtuosity of Laurence Sterne, who, though Larsen never refers to him, is yet again shown to have been there first. Larsen is having fun while proving that a nerd’s book doesn’t have to be self-important. And it’s not. For all that is described, and TS is a generous narrator, unopposed to digression, a great deal more is left unsaid.

IT IS PUZZLING and never quite explained why his mother, a scientist with an obsessive commitment to finding a tiger monk beetle – which may or may not exist – could have married a rancher apparently incapable of coherent speech. But then the detached trance-like way the parents operate may well be due to the tragic death of Layton, the narrator’s younger brother, who had a zest for life and was certainly his father’s boy. As he mourns his dead brother, TS also attempts to understand his sister, Grace, who dreams of being an actor and seems the most normal member of the household. The parents don’t tend to speak much to anyone, never mind each other. There is also a dog, Verywell, who misses Layton.

The spirit of Layton dominates the story. There are many references to him, including a wonderful image of him dressed in his pyjamas and cycling off the roof of the house – TS recalls it as being just like the scene in the film ET. While TS inhabits his head and the world with references, facts, projects and explorations, Layton lived for the moment. Ironically he met his death by accident when the brothers were working out a way of playing together by measuring the speed of bullets passing through the air.

IT ALL BEGINS with a phone call one August afternoon when TS speaks on the phone to a man from the Smithsonian Institute. That conversation leads to TS packing his equipment and setting off to deliver a speech at the venerable institution, where the specialists who have been using his submitted material have decided to award him a major prize – the catch is the Smithsonian thinks it is honouring a man, not a 12-year-old.

TS, the S stands for Sparrow, because, as he explains, a sparrow crashed into the window just as he was being born. His mother, so taken by the sight, had the broken skeleton of the bird assembled. Thus the narrator acquired a middle name and an interesting heirloom. He is an unusual character, and a likeable one, always remaining, when even at his most academically pompous, the saving side of precocious: “I had been meticulously mapping all of these activities ever since I was eight, as that was the age when my cognition and wisdom each blossomed from that nascent bud of childhood just enough to sufficiently grant me the perspective required to be a cartographer. Not that my mind was fully developed . . . Even now I occasionally wet the bed, and I still maintained an irrational fear of porridge.”

The narrator’s unlikely train ride – even a career hobo would splutter – across America is brilliant, particularly as he plots the route in the margins of the pages and gives some impression of the vastness of his 2,500-mile journey. His loneliness and his hunger are vivid. TS may be a dreamer but he is also very interested in food. When the train stops he soon finds a McDonald’s. The comic edge is dulled during a dangerous encounter in Chicago with a mad preacher, and all of this is well handled. Before TS left home with his suitcase packed with all his equipment, he took one of his mother’s many notebooks. It is an act of subversion but also of love. This notebook proves fascinating, as it is an account of his father’s grandmother, whose life seems to eerily replicate that of the narrator’s own frustrated mother.

LARSEN SUSTAINS THE story by having his boy hero reach Washington DC, where all is not as it may have been expected at the Smithsonian; the creepy archivist has decided to play his mistake to the advantage of the institute. Somehow it all becomes more grim as the grown-ups take over.

Far more than a picaresque, this is a lively, sophisticated narrative that looks to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnand succeeds in being both popular and literary. It is a shrewdly commercial publishing move from Harvill Secker, more widely known for its magnificent service to literary foreign fiction in translation. Larsen's range of references is impressive – Ralph Waldo Emerson has a walk-on part as does Louisa May Alcott – and fun.

TS embarks on an extravagant lie and survives to tell the tale. It is never knowing and seldom sentimental. While the third and final section may not match the verve of the opening sections, this could be blamed on the adults. The finale admittedly is Hollywood, but after so much pleasure does it matter?

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times