THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET - Reif Larson - Fiction

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET is a beautifully illustrated novel about a twelve-year-old boy, T.S., a map-maker, scientific illustrator, and adventurer, who is awarded a prize from the Smithsonian for his work and decides to head out to Washington DC to claim it. Not being old enough to drive, or arrange his own transportation, he hops a train with the help of a rather clever technique, and embarks on a series of adventures obviously evocative of Huck Finn. Along the way he fends off an attack by a homeless man, befriends a native american rail-jumper, and is picked up by a helpful, if racist, long-haul truck driver. Once in DC, T.S. learns to appreciate the opportunities afforded by a wondrous place like the Smithsonian, and also comes to terms with a real love for his hometown in Montana, and his distant but loving family.

The story is peppered with delicious details, quirky charaters, and of course, entrancing illustrations representing the maps T.S. creates of the places and events he experiences. For fans of vaguely metatextual work [HOUSE OF LEAVES, INFINITE JEST, even I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU)], the extra details are confetti frosting on the cake. But what of the cake? Even with the addition of two intriguing sub-plots (T.S.'s brother was killed in an accident when the boys were playing with guns; T.S.'s mother is secretly a novelist, perhaps edging out her public avocation as an entomologist) the plot is loosely spun. The characters are over-drawn in the sense of young adult fiction; they accept T.S. too easily, are too single-minded in nature, and become vehicles of fancy more than form. The conniving Smithsonian official who invites T.S. out becomes drawn into his fantasies of using T.S. to promote science to the public, and take on the insidious infiltration of creationists into the American landscape. T.S.'s father, though eventually revealed to have a modicum of caring for his son's well-being, is the quintessential tough cowboy, from his pickup truck to his hat to his "sett'n room" with its shrines to pop-culture Westernalia. And of course, everything that T.S. had dreamed about is real: hoboes do exist, and they ride the rails with the help of a telephone hotline, manned by members of the Megatherium club, a type of scientific secret society that still slinks through the halls of the majestic Smithsonian, which still inspires in T.S. the type of spirited awe that simultaneously rings true for a boy of his age and interests and also makes you wonder how piteously cruel his adolescence will be.

The question remains: who is Larson's audience? Aside from a small joke at the beginning, the book is perfectly pitched to appeal to the middle school reader. (The joke being: the Smithsonian calls for T.S., assuming he is older; he has been out shucking corn with his sister Gracie and tells the caller that he lives with Gracie. The caller assumes Gracie is his wife; he says no, we were just shucking when you called. The reader can imagine.) Comparisons to Huck Finn are natural and practically elicited; Milo of THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH also comes to mind and, in a way, Stuart Little. We learn only what T.S. learns about his parents and their relationship, the effects and possibly the causes of his brother's death, and the best ways to conduct oneself amongst adults who may not have one's best interests in mind. In the most disturbing scene, T.S. is being knifed by an insane man who believes himself to be a religious saviour; T.S. at first accepts this as his fate and his retribution for not being able to save his brother, and only fights back as a physical response to the pain. Yet, we aren't given to see T.S. as suicidal, or even very perceptive about the resonating effects of what must have been the most traumatic event in his parents' lives. His father quite obviously and excessively loved T.S.'s brother Layton more. His mother is shown to have given up a scientific career in favor of a family, and perhaps, hidden literary ambitions. But despite T.S.'s frequent references to Layton, even hiding his name in every one of his maps, he is less than perceptive about the reciprocal reactions of his parents.

Ultimately, the author that TSWoTSS reminds me of most is Nicholson Baker: not in subject matter, thank goodness, or in tone, but in the sense that it is the extraneous details, the afterthoughts and observations and attention to weft and grain, that lift the power of the story away from its plot, and elevate it beyond.

THE MAGICIANS - Lev Grossman - Fiction

Perhaps the more we write about magic, the more it stays the same. Grossman's book has been described as fanfiction about fanfiction, as it uses a fictionalized and gently lampooned version of Narnia ("Fillory") to create its own fictionalized and utterly more street-savvy version of Harry Potter. Grossman's main character, Quentin, is a nerd from Brooklyn, a high-school senior interested in magic tricks as just another way to divert his precocious and overbearing intellect. On his way to a Princeton interview with his best friends, he gets shanghaied into an entrance exam for a magical college, simultaneously breaking open and confirming his dearest inner fantasies. Then, offered acceptance after a dazzling magical feat brought on by stress and sleeplessness and utter indignation, Quentin dithers, wondering whether he has perhaps been tricked into a second-rate magical institution, a community college of sorcery rather than Magic Harvard. This guy is great!

Really, Lev's biggest accomplishment is making Quentin so real, while also giving him enough of a hero complex to lend his later journeys plausibility. Quentin has a hard time accepting the reality of his situation, looks down on some of his peers, and takes a classmate's apology for fighting him as an excuse to tell him that if he tries it again, Quentin will fucking kill him. I love a wizard from Brooklyn. I only wish that more of this side of Quentin had bled into Brakebills, his magical college; a magician who introduces other magicians to rap? A magician with street cred? Quentin is a little too bookish for that, making his relationship with his nerdy girl-magician counterpart practically inevitable, but he also makes a lot of the same mistakes that other twenty-somethings do, throwing himself into his first relationship with gusto, floundering after college and diving headfirst into drugs, making sexual mistakes, and underestimating people until it's too late.

As the novel points out, and references frequently, the people of Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Lord of the Rings are ultimately too strong, too willing to undertake pain and grief, and too committed to ideals about stewardship of other worlds and quests for unknown treasure. Quentin takes his defeats hard, and legitimately so. He takes years to get over them. He goes into hiding. He gives up his gifts. In Lord of the Rings, characters give up their entire families with one scene of tears, and a few wistful remembrances. While parent/child relationships are resolutely terrible across the board at Brakebills, friendships seem to mean a lot more.

I suspect we will never tire of reading about normal children realizing their inner magical abilities and riding off into great adventures and fascinating educations. However many times and in however many ways this story has written, it continues to be entertaining, even as certain aspects (the boarding-school nature of all magical academies, for instance, and their complete isolation from the outside world) are repeated again and again. It would be great to read about a magical university completely integrated into a regular one--a special major at State U, classes enchanted to look like business classes to outsiders, where students who have to deal with living, working, and playing among the mundane world are actually studying for a Bachelor's of Sorcery. The trick of putting all your wizards in one basket is too easy, and, as Grossman points out, doesn't prepare them for the endless possibilities and paradoxical emptiness of the real world, once magicians are thrust back into it. But a school where you're the only magician on your crew team, and you have to hold yourself back from casting Oars of Quickness? The story of the young magician is the story of the outsider, the hero, the student, and the adept all at once. Even if Grossman's characters suspect that they have lived too long to go back to Fillory, the story never gets old.

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS - Tracy Kidder - Nonfiction

Without his clinical practice, Paul Farmer believes he would be nothing. It seems that, without Paul Farmer, his clinical practice also believes it would fail. The organization he has set up, Partners in Health, is a model for third-world healthcare, an oasis in the drought- and TB-stricken central plateau of Haiti. There's not much Paul Farmer can do about the drought, though he does stigmatize the foreign city planners who proposed the dam that shut off much of central Haiti from the river that used to irrigate its plains. What he and his team can fix, though, is TB, and through a combination of begging, borrowing, and stealing, they have dramatically lowered the number and severity of instances of TB throughout the region of Haiti which they serve. He and his collaborators have also started programs in Peru and Siberia to deal with MDR-TB, multiple-drug resistant strains, and the World Health Organization has, after much prodding, accepted his criticisms and proposals for change in the way they deal with TB and MDR-TB in rural and developing areas.

A worthy life, to be sure. Farmer has also written multiple books and more than 100 articles, received an MD and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard Med, and was awarded a MacArthur genius grant. He heads many boards of directors for organizations dealing with global health. As of the writing of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Farmer had one daughter with his wife Didi, who was living in Paris finishing up her doctoral studies. This is what we know about Farmer from the book, as far as facts go. But a book with the author as a pivotal character becomes as much a work of fiction and of fact, and with a life as large and conspicuous as Paul Farmer's, it is just as important to note where Tracy Kidder has tried to spin Farmer's story.

Although Farmer's relief efforts in Haiti and his proselytizing for better global healthcare are portrayed as unambiguously good, and a little scattershot--Farmer is portrayed as being mostly unable, or unwilling, to prioritize--his personal life is given a little more glamor than it, perhaps, deserves. Much is made of Farmer's wife and children living in another country, and seeing Paul only when he is forced to delay his business activities, such as when he is injured. One is given the impression that his daughter is growing up fatherless, and his wife is being neglected. True as it may have been at the time, Farmer now lives with his family, which has grown to include two more children, another daughter and a son. Whatever we can say his responsibilities may or may not be, with regard to his family, he certainly doesn't seem to be as much of a failure as Kidder portrays. Another juicy plotline involves Ophelia Dahl, one of the five co-founders of Partners in Health. Farmer met her when she was 18, doing charity work in Haiti, and we are led to believe that they shared a great romance, which ended when Farmer proposed, and Dahl realized that Farmer was too single-mindedly dedicated to be anything more to her than a friend. Later, when Farmer meets Didi, a Haitian, Ophelia sends her well-wishes, but the tone of the narrative is that Dahl is somewhat regretful. Now, perhaps this is true, but Dahl is open about her lesbianism, and has a child with her (female) partner. It's hard for me to believe that much love was lost between Dahl and Farmer.

It also seems nearly incredible that someone as much of a whirlwind as Farmer could do as much as he has done--complicated, time-consuming endeavors like running charity organizations, writing nonfiction books about Haitian politics, teaching at Harvard Med and Brigham and Women's hospital, and working on global healthcare policy with the WHO. Farmer is shown as nearly frenetically active, and I'm not doubting his sheer ability to perform these feats; rather, I question Farmer's seeming lack of premeditation and planning. If we are to believe Kidder, a man who cannot remember to change his clothes every day is simultaneously capable of working with a multinational policy organization, drafting changes and additions to a laborious document that will lay out the steps that need to be taken by any organization dealing with tuberculosis outside of a first-world hospital. At the very least, there must be more to Farmer than meets the eye. Though we are, again, given only brief snapshots into his medical and graduate careers, in order to have been successful, he must have also been able to at least borrow an eye for detail, for taking care of loose ends, and figuring out what needs to happen when, in order to get an MD, a PhD, a functioning healthcare organization, and a TB mandate. Kidder is happy to make it seem as though Dahl runs the show from behind the scenes, but Farmer and his list-making deserve some of the credit.