Trivia triumphs in a Pynchonian world

Tim Martin searches for connections in Reif Larsen’s novel

wear thin – involves the creation of art installations at moments of conflict across the 20th century. The novel splinters into historical episodes (animatronics in the Killing Fields, puppetry in the Yugoslav Wars) before rejoining Radar as he sets off, accompanied by a character from a Borges story, to mount a show of his own in the nearcontemporary Democratic Republic of Congo. As with Spivet, Larsen’s book wears its research heavily, mounting a barrage of trivia that ranges from depictions of sign language or Morse code to recurring extracts of a fabricated book in Norwegian. The reader, one senses, is supposed to grope for connections across the different stories and periods. The book’s structure and narrative aspire to those of Thomas Pynchon. Signature Pynchonian enthusiasms are deployed with a doggedness that feels less than coincidental: secret scientific societies, countercultural histories, genocide, code networks, mannequins and so on. Any writer working in this territory needs to negotiate a debt to the master and, sure enough, one character early on reads a Pynchon book in a shop and is “so overcome with what we are able to accomplish with the simple constellation of words that she walked right out of the store in a daze”. Since Larsen can’t help being a far cosier writer than Pynchon, without either his devastating impulses towards farce and threat, or his breathtaking talent for description, being sufficiently impressed with another writer’s work that you steal it feels like a dicey metaphor to have chosen.