The selected works of TS Spivet. By Reif Larsen

The selected works of TS Spivet 

Spivet embodies the uneasy balance of innocence and insight prevalent in depictions of children

And here obsession is more than an attempt to exert control over quotidian uncertainties; it becomes a whole system of ordering a life against tragedy. Finding both comfort and a modest sense of adventure in precision, Spivet maps everything

With this novel, Reif Larsen seems to be announcing himself as a compassionate observer of prodigy incubated in emotional isolation and, at the same time, as a potentially eviscerating contestant on “Jeopardy

The novel is full of these easy demystifications: that brilliance doesn’t nurture, that attraction is more than a compatibility of I.Q.’s, that life surprises us, that people aren’t always what they seem. It would not be necessary to consult the author bio to know that Larsen has an M.F.A. — the novel is creatively written, sometimes quite beautifully so. But it is plagued by that sense of writers’ workshop insularity: it doesn’t aim to mean much.

Marginalia - “The reader’s attentions are consistently shifted, refocused so that suddenly the experience of reading a novel becomes not a refuge from the distraction of Internet life but a more insistent facsimile of it.”

Is one of the most  important molecular biologists in the world, whose research has thus far saved thousands of lives, and as we come in contact with more diseases resistant to penicillin... however here he is just another Arab man with fifty crabs who is harassed and whose life work is being destroyed.