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An interview with Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

  Rief Larsen poses with the space-time continuum.

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Reif Larsen read from his bestselling book The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet last Thursday at the Boston Public Library. The next day, I was lucky enough to steal a few minutes with him at his parents' house in Cambridge before he took off to New Hampshire. What followed was a lengthy discussion on Buddhism, cowboys, space-time, and the future of books. (Be warned, there are a few T.S. Spivet spoilers)

 

 

Peter Franklin: The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet has gotten some pretty incredible reviews, including a glowing one from Stephen King. How do you handle all these acclamations people have been stacking on your book? Is it overwhelming? Kind of surreal?

 

Reif Larsen: I don't read any of them. That's how I handle it. (laughs) I haven't read anything since the book came out. When a book comes out you're in a pretty vulnerable position. During this time I wanted to be not cynical and open, and generous. I'll read them at some point, but I don't think now's the best time for me to read them. I ask my agent to collect the ones that are smart. I don't really believe any reviews. What's more important is me talking to readers.  A lot of reviews have some kind of weird agenda that's not about the book.

    

     But it is weird, going from being a very private person who's working away for years and then suddeny having to talk a lot about yourself and your work. It's a very strange transition and one of the challenges is staying normal. I've tried as much as possible to keep a really level head, to navigate the waters that way. I imagine it's very easy to drive yourself crazy or believe that you're something that you're not. I could see how people could believe they're the greatest or the worst. The praise will come and so will the criticism. And if you tie your self-worth to that, you'll either be very uplifted or very crushed. And so I think it's important to have some kind of internal compass.

 

F: A few of the other interviews I've read have mentioned you're a practicing Zen Buddhist. I think one of the most interesting aspects of your book is the way you weave Buddhist concepts into a story you yourself have said is quintessentially American. Some of the parts that stuck out for me were Mr. Englethorpe's remark that death is beautiful and how he goes on to explain how necessary it is, which reminds me of the Buddhist notion of the emptiness of all things. And T.S.'s notion of how we already have the whole world mapped inside our brains recalled to me the interbeing of subject and object. Were these intentional inclusions? Did you set out wanting to bring these concepts into an area where they had not been explored as much, or did they just voice themselves through the characters? 

 

L: I'm glad you saw those things. I think a lot of them were unintentional. I actually had some more Buddhist stuff in there. There was a whole section where T.S. was trying to think about how he could be still in relation to the Sun. He was thinking about monks being still, because his body was all jittery from riding the train. There was an image he drew of a monk doing zazen.

 

But I think a lot of it was subconscious, that I just kind of inserted in there from the character. It's interesting how this stuff sneaks in there, and how T.S. is a little Buddhist in some ways. Particularly the notion of how we all have a map of the world. We're all perfect beings, we just have to realize our perfection. I think I write books about characters and situations and first and foremost the reader becomes enamored or despises these characters. That's how you hook a reader. And the larger ideas are snuck in there in the context of the character. Other writers like Naipaul or Saul Bellow write these big books of ideas. You have many people just talking in this kind of philosophical way and I don't think I do that. I'm glad they get out there, though. One of the big challenges for any Buddhist in America is how you reconcile freedom from attachment and being quiet and present in a culture that values none of these things and in fact preaches the opposite. Some of T.S.'s struggles are uniquely American. I didn't set out to write a story about a twelve year old Buddhist who's struggling to be Buddhist in America. (laughs) But there are hints of that.

 

F: Do you have a favorite Zen writer or teacher that has influenced your thinking or your practice?

 

L: I've read a lot of books on Zen. I think I discovered Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind when I was about 18.

 

F: That was the first Buddhist book I read!

 

L: Yeah, it is for a lot of people. And, what's her name? She was in the Austen Zen center for a long time. She wrote Everyday Zen...

 

F: Charlotte something?

 

L: Charlotte Joko Beck. That's it. Those are all good books. But I find Zen or Buddhist writers often write pretty bad fiction. It's pretty new age-y, or overly wrought with puddles and pebbles. (laughs) And yet I like reading liturgy, and Dogen, the Diamond Sutra, stuff like that. There's a quiet, contemplative beauty there. But it doesn't translate well into contemporary American fiction, at least for me. I'm sure there are other examples. And there are writers who are not Zen writers - like Whitman for instance. He wasn't a Zen Buddhist. But a lot of his stuff was about the kind of infinite loop of our existence. Or Rilke. I think often writers who don't know they're gesturing at the infinite are ones that I'm more drawn to rather than specifically Buddhist writers.

 

F: Even though these people aren't practicing Buddhists, I think there's a kind of understanding in Buddhism where something doesn't have to be specifically labeled as Buddhism for it to instruct people in the same way.

 

L: Yeah. Most fiction could be characterized as dealing with the same matter and forces Buddhism does. In particular, short stories are almost like the modern koan. They kind of point, without specifically pointing, at the unpointable. I think that's the goal of every short story writer, leaving the reader with that kind of hum of gesturing at the absolute and the infiinite, or the hopelessness or the hopefulness or whatever it is. In a way that's what we're all going for, to point without pointing.

 

F: Switching gears a little bit. You did a lot of research for this novel. You travelled out West and stayed on a ranch for a while and wandered around Chicago in the middle of winter. Was there any point where you wondered if it was really all worth it for this novel? Or did you have some kind of inner voice that just said, keep on keepin' on?

 

L: Yeah, everyday I asked myself, "What am I doing?" The novel is a form of communication that's been around for a while now. But it's a strange thing. I rarely read anything that's 350 pages. Why would someone stick around with you and deem this worthwhile? I'm a slow reader so it takes me a couple weeks to read a book. That's a lot of time that you're devoting to it. When I was writing this I was like "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to write a novel." And it took me four years. That's a long time for a young person like me. And yet, even as I was questioning myself everyday, I knew that this was really what I was going to end up doing.

 

I took such joy in the process of writing. Of creation. Even moments where I had to throw out 150 pages, I took some joy in that, a kind of masochistic pleasure. I tell this to young writers who are rushing to get published. Yes it's great to get paid for what you do and you can write another book, but never forget that if you are really a writer, you will always be looking forward to the time that you're writing. It's not when you're on a book tour. It's nice when you can hold a book in your hands, but the moment you hold that book in your hands you should feel the need to get back to the page, and struggle and sweat, and be sleepless. If you really are meant to be a writer, then that's your calling. And as painful as it is, I'm no more happier than when I wake up and spend six hours sweating it out. As a writer you constantly have to be suspending your disbelief that this is worth it. Chances are very few people are going to read your stuff and you're not going to get paid for it. You have to do it because you love it.

 

F: It's a definitely a labor of love. But it has its perks: Part of your research involved watching a lot of Westerns. What would you say is your favorite western film?

 

L: There's so many. Shane, probably. Stage Coach is one of the original ones. Red River is also great. Those are the classics. Unforgiven is pretty good. It's weird. They keep getting this updated nouveau-Western. I think it just comes back every 10 or 15 years. Let's check back around 2020, and there'll be another wave of Japanese nouveau-Westerns. A Cowboy Bebop kind of thing.

 

F: I loved Cowboy Bebop. Such an interesting, creative show.

 

L: That was one of the reasons why I wrote this book. I was interested why cowboys have continued to be around. If you look at the classic cowboy, the team that drove cattle up from Texas to Kansas, where they would load these cows onto trains to be taken back East, that kind of culture and that mystique was only really around for 15 or 20 years. They invented barbed wire and everything was fenced off. You still have cowboys who work on these ranches, but you don't have that drifting guy who moved across the plains. And yet, why do we have Zane Grey and others who started writing these cowboy books in the '20s? Then we had the whole resurgence in the '30s, '40s, and '50s with the western movies. We keep seeing this again. Why do we see our politicians start using the vernacular of the cowboy? I think it's because there's something intensely American about him.

 

But it's also a vague, multi-sided, and flexible archetype. You can pick and choose what you want to take from the cowboy. You can be the gruff man of few words, or the kind of Gene Autry cowboy who goes by the cowboy code, or the ruthless guy who shoots on sight. There's all kinds of flavors that you can take on. Like all myths or stories or figures, there's room for you to inject what you want.

 

F: And each time it reoccurs, it's kind of filtered through the culture of the time.

 

L: It's interesting, the father in this book, he's a cowboy filtered through cowboy movies. He talks like a John Wayne character. Everything is one liners. I worked on a number of documentaries before I wrote this book, and one of them was with a friend of mine who was shooting this movie called Crawford, about the people who lived in Crawford, Texas. We met this actual broncbuster, who was named Ricky Smith, and everything he said was in crazy one liners. He was such a good storyteller. And yet he was very aware of himself as a cowboy.

 

There's this one amazing shot where he's breaking this new horse. And he had him running around this circular corral, slowly, with a whip. And then he gets a call on his cellphone. We had this beautiful footage of him, reaching into his pocket under his chaps and he says (taking on an exaggerated cowboy accent), "I can't talk to you now partner, I'm breaking this horse! I'll call you back." This wonderful collision of the old and the new. All of his stories would culminate in these one liners, often about telephone poles. Which is very weird. I looked around - there were no telephone poles out there. Where was he getting this stuff? One time, he was like "This mule, he was wild, and we were trying to get a harness on him, and he jumped up, and sliced his whole belly from belly to top. A 20 inch gash. I was trying to stitch him up, he bucked, and boom! Blood started spurting out higher than a telephone pole!" Or "I could run that donkey up a telephone pole!" What if there was a character who spoke in these cowboy jingoisms but was so deeply ensconced in his own mythology that he couldn't see his way out of it? I liked the father in that way. And then we learn in the end he's not such a bad guy. For all of his armor that he has up, he's rooted in the real world.

 

F: The ending was touching. The father appears out of nowhere -

 

L: Like in a Western.

 

F: (laughs) Yeah, and they go into this tunnel together.

 

L: That may or may not exist.

 

F: Right. That kind of goes back to what you were saying about short stories. It leaves it open-ended. I know you originally had the afterward that ties some of that up.

 

L: Yeah. But it's better to leave that to the reader. We've migrated the afterward, it's on the website. I think that's one of the interesting things about books. I think books will be around, but one of the interesting avenues for exploration is how books talk to the media around them.

 

We designed this website to be expansive for the book. It's designed as a failed Smithsonian exhibition of T.S.'s work. You click on a panel and it brings up one swirl of the book, like his sister's bedroom, Dr. Clair's desk, the Billy the Kid shrine. And it's interesting to try to mimic the evocative and immersive space of a novel on a website which is a thousand miles wide and one inch deep. That was a challenge. I was working with this really amazing website designer called Jeff Rabb. He's done a lot of book websites. It was so cool because I was like "we need to change the stage lighting on the title." And he goes "Okay." (makes computing noises) And that would happen. It was so satisfying. I think he was excited because we were doing something different. It wasn't just a publicity bookmark. It was a living, breathing thing. As you explore it, you kind of have to become a detective and find these hidden links about who put the book together, and what happened after the book was done. For readers who want that kind of answer, it's there. But to give an afterward right after that last moment would've closed off the wonderment a little bit. I didn't want to extinguish that or bump people too much in one way or another.

 

F: In your interview with Bookslut, you mentioned the idea of books as artifacts, as sensory experiences that, especially in the case of your book, don't translate well into digital devices like Kindle. Do you see authors such as yourself and Mark Danielewski bringing people back to the sensory experience by posing a sort of counter revolution to digitilization, or do you think there's a place where Kindles and illuminated manuscripts can get along?

 

L: The latter. I think I said in a couple interviews that I forbid them to do a Kindle version of this. And now, apparently I can't do that (laughs). It's not legally within my bounds. They're actually looking to do a Kindle version of this, because they came out with the new big Kindle, the Kindle Triple X or something. I haven't seen it yet and I don't know if they're even going to do it.

 

But my point about the Kindle, and maybe I'm just old-fashioned, is that they haven't figured out the e-book technology yet because literature is antithetical to the immediate gratis feedback one gets from the internet. Great books take weeks to digest. The meaning comes slowly over time. You have to sit with it, you have to be beguiled by it. The meaning is elusive. That's what great books do. When we see a screen, we have this tendency to be like "What's the story? Give it to me." And move on.

 

There's something about having the physical artifact, the way your elbows bend, the way you interact with it and the beat of turning the page that marks out how we digest the story. When I think about where something is in a book - I know it's like top left and about halfway through (gesturing with Gin Phillips' The Well and the Mine). And Kindle collapses that geography. Maybe that's silly and in 30 years people will just be reading off screens. But I think we want to hold something.

 

F: I'm definitely with you on that. Old fashioned or not.

 

L: There's something so great about books.

 

F: There's a real pleasure from holding the book. The smell - the new book smell, the antique book smell.

 

L: The problem is people are looking at it from a commercial point of view. I think people should look at it from a storytelling point of view. How do we tell stories, how do we read stories? Narration will always change, novels have changed. They will always change. The new media presents really cool challenges. There are opportunities.

 

F: With your second novel, which I understand concerns puppeteers, beseiged cultures, and particle physics -

 

L: (laughing) It sounds crazy when you talk about it like that.

 

F: You said yesterday, maybe jokingly, that it might involve strings, like T.S. Spivet had marginalia and arrows. That reminded me of something I read in this book, Postmodernist Fiction by Brian McHale, where some college students in the '20s who were going to publish a book that came with fireworks and a phonograph record. The logistics of it made it impossible. Way too expensive. But at what point do you think the accoutrements get out of hand?

 

L: As soon as you start thinking about them as accoutrements.

 

F: Yeah, in T.S. Spivet the marginalia was absolutely essential to the book. There were some important developments that occurred in the margins.

 

L: Yeah - I have a certain allergy to fireworks, that's funny I've always called them that. The sort of bells and whistles that are just there for the sake of being there. When I was in college, hypertext fiction was all the rage. I looked at some of them, and they were just awful. Learn to tell a story and then let's be innovative. I sort of developed this allergy to metatextual games and form for form's sake. In that way I'm a traditionalist at heart. Tell the story, learn your characters, figure out the best way to tell your story.

 

I think where we are now is that we've been fortunate to have all these innovators and experimental writers that have pushed the boundaries of what's been done. Now a mainstream book can have arrows and marginalia and be a mainstream book. It's not like people think it's crazy. I was joking about the strings of course. As a storyteller and as a writer, you have to think "How do I need to tell the story and what are the tools at my disposal?" And we have a lot more tools now. But for me it's always story first, form second. I think formal constrictions, or obstructions - have you seen The Five Obstructions?

 

F: No, I haven't.

 

L: It's about Lars von Trier's mentor, who had fallen into this depression in Haiti and made this very influential short film in the 1960s called the Perfect Human. Basically Lars von Trier challenged this guy to remake his movie five times and each time gave him a series of obstructions. Like, you have to have a cut every twenty frames, it has to be filmed in Cuba, you have to make an animated version of it even though you hate animation. The constrictions or obstructions lead to amazing things. In that way, I think they can be wonderful kick-starts. What he did was turn it around - given these obstructions, how do I tell the story? It's back at the story level. As a creator, it's a great movie to see.

 

F: How would you say the experience of writing has changed between novels? Do you feel any pressure from the success of T.S. Spivet?

 

L: Well, T.S. Spivet just came out (laughs). I don't know how successful it is. It's still in its infancy. For me, it was successful because it came out. That was my only expectation. I actually haven't really assigned any pressure on myself. I wrote a really weird, strange book and people responded to it. That means I'm either more normal than I thought or people are stranger than I thought. And I'm going to write another strange little book, and maybe people will react. As soon as you start having expectations, you sink your ship. I'm just trying to do my little strange things that I do. I don't think I could do anything but that. Not to get all Buddhist, but you do what you do. You be present, and let the rest figure itself out. I frankly was shocked at the reaction to this book by a lot of people. I thought it was going to be marginal. It makes me feel good I guess, that we're all more alike than I originally thought. Just do what you do. That's the only lesson you can take away from it.

 

F: That plays back to the end of the book. He gets to the Smithsonian and he's not doing what he does. He has this choice between his perceived dream, and going back to what he knows and what he does. And that's what he chooses.

 

L: Do you think he keeps making maps?

 

F: I think so. It seems to be so ingrained into his person. He wouldn't know what to do if he ran out of places to map. And he still has Montana to map.

 

L: (laughing) He still has to do those 1200 maps of Montana. That character, Corlis Benefideo was a character from a Barry Lopez short story, called "The Mappist." I like borrowing characters like that.

 

F: I thought it was interesting the way you worked in some historical personages. Not overbearingly. It's very easy to completely botch throwing a historical figure into your story. But the way Emerson appears in the story - he's there, but he's not really there.

 

L: He was more there, but I took it out. He wrote a poem about Englethorpe. But my editor was like "You don't want this to be about Emerson." Who knows if that actually happened. It's about the mother imagining this. It almost says more about her want for her ancestors' importance. Not even her ancestors. Or her husband's ancestors' importance. And they must've known the Alcotts, and all these people. And Agassiz, of course.

 

F: Actually that was something I wanted to ask you. With the mother's manuscript - I know your writing style is kind of improvisational, from your history of improv comedy in college - was that part of the book something you had an inkling about early on? Or something you had written before and figured you could actually incorporate into this?

 

L: It was definitely a part of this project. But it was the hardest part of this whole book for me. I had this strong urge that it needed to be in there, but I didn't know why and I didn't know where. I was also prepared to cut the whole thing. Originally, T.S. wrote it. Which is totally different. I realized that was not a good thing because we are willing to grant him certain extraordinary abilities as a kid, but that would've been breaking the rules that I had set up. He couldn't be a mapmaker and also a novelist.

 

I had to shift the authorship to Dr. Clair. When I realized it's not him, it's her, that was a really big breakthrough. But it was from a craft point of view, it was tricky. You're doing a lot of work there but it's all by proxy. This is a journal that a character has written being read by another character. You're looking over T.S.'s shoulder as he's reading it. It's doing work for her character, it's doing work for his character, and it's doing work for their relationship. But it's all sort of a roundabout way. It's also narratively performing the task of lulling the reader into that long distance travel.

 

F: I thought that was something that you really accomplished well. He even says it to a certain degree - "I'm not a long reader, but what else is there to do?"

 

L: Yeah, and then you have the tracks along the margins.

 

F: I liked how you threw that in there. My favorite was the arrow - "Here I was bored." Everyone I hear that has traveled by car or by train in that direction has said, you get out of the Appalachians and you hit the cornfields. And there's just nothing. Cornfields and blue sky for as far as you can see. It starts off and you're wowed, and then the wonder kind of wears off. You handled that really well. He's on a train and no one knows that he's there. And there's nothing going on in the environment around him.

 

L: Yeah, I loved that. I've driven cross country a bunch of times and I've taken a train across country a couple times, and that feeling where you're not sure of where you are, you're no where and you're everywhere. That was my inspiration for creating the pseudo-scientific history of wormholes in the midwest. There is this kind of purgatory, transient transcendence that happens in the Middle West. The book is very purposefully cut up into these three geographic sections that each have a narrative or mythological connotation. The West is the land of mythology, the Middle West is the fly over country but also maybe where everything actually happened. And the East is the land of high falutin' ideas and institutions. In that way, it's a very traditional road novel. The three part structure is also very Western. It's classical storytelling.

 

F: Where did that come from, exactly? These wormholes in the middle of Iowa?

 

L: A lot of it was travelling in the middle of the night and not knowing where you are. I've always been interested in space-time and have read a lot about blackholes. What if there are places in this world that are so flat, that there's actually this kind of unsteadiness to the quantum foam there?

 

F: One of my favorite ideas from T.S. Spivet is the room-feeling. That was something that you really excelled at. Any words on what inspired you in creating the different "room-feelings" in the book?

 

L: Hmm. I don't know. That comes from the dark well. When I write I try to expand the audio-visual to the smell and taste and touch. It's a simple thing I tell my students. Those are actually the more emotional senses that we have a hard time, particularly smell, articulating. If you can drop some of those details in, it starts to work in a kind of undercurrent emotional level. A lot of room-feelings are those things you can't describe. It's not how it looks, it's the smell, the buzz of the refrigerator, the low-grade temperature. It's just naturally how I write, but it's really good to hear you responded to that. That you got a room-feeling.

 

F: I definitely could feel it. I think that's really when you achieve success as a writer, when you are able to convey exactly what you intend to the reader. I think that's a problem that pretty much any artist faces. That translation between what you have in your head, what you can put out through your hand, and then how other people see that.

 

L: It's also the mapmaker's dilemma.

 

F: Last question. I have to know. Does T.S.'s Oregon Trail scheme actually work?

 

L: (laughs) I heard from a friend that the 1989 edition actually had that loophole in it. I've never experienced it myself. But someone said they found a loophole that was subsequently fixed in the 1990 version. But I've discovered other loopholes. Like on old Sega Genesis games, like Sonic, if you press a bunch of buttons you actually could go behind the landscape. I loved getting inside of games. I wish that life had those little loopholes. But then there's also that disappointment. "Well, this game kind of sucks."

 

F: That was one of my favorite passages.

 

L: Thank you.                    

 

For more info: Check out tsspivet.com