The story told in the margins
Great expectations for a 29-year-old's debut novel
BROOKLYN - When Reif Larsen's sixth-grade teacher at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge assigned a paper on an African animal, most children wrote six pages on lions or tigers or cheetahs. Not Larsen. He turned in 23 pages on the army ant, which hunts its prey in marauding columns of tens of thousands.
Seventeen years later, Larsen channels his inner nerd in his first novel, "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet," for which he was reportedly advanced $900,000 after a fierce auction among nine publishers last June. It was an unusually high sum for a book of any kind, much less a debut work of literary fiction. Then again, "T.S. Spivet," due out today, is an unusual book.
Its narrator, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, is a precocious, awkward 12-year-old who obsessively maps the world he inhabits, whether diagramming dinner table conversation or stages of male pattern baldness. He runs away from his family's Montana ranch to accept an award from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Larsen, the 29- year-old son of two artists who urged him to engage in more practical pursuits, has Spivet making margin notes and drawings to help recount his great adventure and inner journey.
The result is a book that Larsen likens to "exploded hyper-text" with arrows directing readers to the marginalia that are crucial to his storytelling. It is a novel with graphics, not a graphic novel. Its 255 scattered maps and diagrams and drawings illuminate its main character rather than illustrate its plot.
Larsen confesses to feeling a little overwhelmed these days. "I was just talking to my agent. I said, 'It feels like the calm before the storm,' " he says. "She said, 'You're lucky there's a storm. Usually it's the calm before the calm.' "
In addition to selling US rights to Penguin Press in last year's bidding war, Larsen's agent, Denise Shannon, has secured separate deals - with separate advances - with publishers in two dozen other countries. Publishers Lunch, an industry newsletter, reported that Penguin advanced Larsen roughly $900,000; Penguin will only confirm the advance was in the high six figures.
"I thought it was a unique, very highly original debut novel of a new voice," says Penguin president Ann Godoff. "He really was the auteur of this book with all of its moving parts and pieces. The uniqueness of that made me very excited to edit it and publish it."
Boston literary agent John Taylor Williams is surprised Penguin's advance was for US rights only. "That would have been in the top 10 percent of deals if it were a world deal," says Williams, who is also a Larsen family friend. "Usually a book gets foreign rights after it's a bestseller in the United States. It could be the story of the year, to get this amount of money for an unknown author for a complex book and to get this many licenses before it's published."
A typical advance for a first novel is less than $50,000, says Jim Milliot, senior editor at Publishers Weekly. He estimates Penguin must sell at least 150,000 copies to earn back its advance. "A good first novel will sell 50,000," he says. "People would sign up for another one if it sold 50,000."
With only 10 percent of books earning their advance, Larsen professes a belief in modest expectations. Godoff insists it is unfair to encumber Larsen with the burden of their investment in him. "The marketplace made that decision," she says.
Larsen, lanky and as blond and blue-eyed as his Norwegian roots would suggest, lives with his girlfriend, a doctoral student in Russian literature, in a Park Slope brownstone with walls of glass-doored bookshelves. He grew up in Cambridge, in a loft-like former toymaker's shop and pharmaceutical warehouse that also holds his parents' studios. Larsen first encountered the West, where he set his novel, on river rafting trips with his father, Peik Larsen, a painter and printmaker.
Despite a lifelong love of storytelling, Larsen originally considered writing too self-indulgent an occupation. He participated in improvisational theater at Brown University, spent eight months teaching in South Africa and Botswana, and graduated in December 2002 with a major in education. After Brown, Larsen conducted educational research in England, then moved to New York in late 2003 to be near friends and, yielding to the lure of writing, applied to Columbia University's master of fine arts program. He has taught creative writing and hopes to do so again. He practices Zen Buddhism.
Larsen remembers the bald eagle that swooped down as he listened to Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex" on tape driving in rural Illinois in early 2004. "Here I had this amazing transcendent encounter with literature, yet I had always had the feeling writing was a selfish pursuit," Larsen says. "The meeting of reader and the page is a kind of growth."
Larsen finished the Columbia program last fall; "Spivet" is his master's thesis. When he started writing the book on July 17, 2005, he conceived Spivet as a 57-year-old former cowboy writing drunk from a Paris prison. Larsen soon created the 12-year-old cartographer instead but didn't think of adding drawings until he'd almost finished writing. "I realized that we weren't going to really understand T.S.'s character unless we saw his actual creations," Larsen says, "because in many ways that's where he lets down his guard." To research the book, Larsen spent many hours in the archives in Butte, Mont., and taught a writing workshop at a dude ranch in Idaho.
Clear parallels link Larsen and Spivet. Larsen pored over National Geographic maps as a boy and can draw a freehand map of the world. Spivet's mother is an entomologist who specializes in beetles, and Larsen's mother, Judith Larsen, creates dramatic photographs of human bodies superimposed with esoteric scientific images. She used to take him to a "Beetlemania" exhibit at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology that featured a case with roadkill and tiny carcass-cleaning dermestid beetles. Larsen, in a style reminiscent of sand paintings, loved arranging plastic ants in drawings.
"Certainly to write a book like this you have to have some obsessive qualities," he says. "I like to think that I'm more socially adjusted." The blackboard in Larsen's kitchen suggests that he is. It lists the dozen dances - the mashed potato, Macarena, and lawnmower among them - he and his guests performed at his recent birthday party.
Larsen originally thought he'd use footnotes in his book, but he rejected them as pompous and opted for the margin notes. "Some of the most important, juicy reveals that T.S. makes are the last line of a sidebar," he says, "kind of tucked away as though he's dipping his toe into this new kind of emotional literacy." Although Larsen's images appear hand-drawn, he created them with a computer tablet and Adobe Illustrator.
Larsen has started his second novel, which he describes as a "Balkan-Congo thriller" featuring an underground puppet troupe. He launches his US tour for "T.S. Spivet" with a reading Thursday at the Brookline Booksmith. Last week he held a preview for 16 local booksellers over wine and cheese kabobs at his parents' home in Cambridge. "It's the hottest category - crossover books," says Robert Hugo, who owns stores in Andover, Marblehead, and Newburyport. "The young people will read it, and the adults will read it."
Larsen has already fielded questions about how people should read his book. "My only advice," he says, "is don't skip the margins." 