The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet: Precocious, but Entertaining

Late in Reif Larsen’s debut novel, the titular character, a 12-year-old mapmaking prodigy, mentions E. L. Konigsburg’s classic novel for middle readers,

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It’s a telling reference: If you treasure Konigsburg’s novel about two precocious children who run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you’ll probably enjoy Larsen’s story of a precocious young boy who flees Montana by train to accept an award from the Smithsonian. If whimsical fiction about children who are wittier and wiser than 99.9 percent of all adults isn’t your thing, you should vigorously ignore this book.

Almost every page of Selected Works features Spivet’s diagrams of roadkill and railroad-signal-light schematics. Digressions are what Selected Works does best: When Larsen advances the plot, as in an overlong swath in the book’s center where Spivet reads his mother’s journal or a foggy encounter with an evil hobo, the resulting passages feel uninspired. But Spivet’s narration is undeniably funny; not since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close has a precocious young boy carried a novel so ably.