Trying to appraise “I Am Radar,” Reif Larsen’s splendid second novel, in terms of plot is an exercise in futility. At first the novel may seem to be a globetrotting epic about art and science. Larsen describes the incredibly intimate lives of struggling families around the globe, ranging from white, suburban New Jerseyans learning to deal with their strange baby (the titular Radar) to Serbians being torn apart by the ethnic war that rages around them. He stutter-steps between disconnected places and timelines until he at last pulls all the strings together for the book’s grand reveal. But such a description is misleading as to what really matters in the novel. Far more than events, it is the people inhabiting its pages and the relationships they make and break that drive the book’s strong aesthetic power. 

The book is divided into five sections that seem unrelated but are all part of a grand larger picture. Larsen flows between Radar’s birth and the lives of his parents before he arrived in their lives, a Serbian family in the war-torn Balkans (Radar’s paternal homeland), and Radar’s awkward early adulthood and his introduction to Kirkenesferda, a mysterious puppet troupe and band of Scandanavian scientists. There are also scenes in Indochina and the Congo. Kirkenesferda is the glue tying together these disparate parts of the novel. Through the troupe, Larsen explores the relationship between the observer and the observed and between art and the world. They give bold and innovative performances on quantum entanglement, nuclear fission, and other kinds of scientific theater, and they perform in the most horribly war-torn pockets of the globe, but their performances are mostly audience-less. Kirkenesferda is interesting and enigmatic, and it is only too bad that Larsen does not develop them more. 

What truly lights up the pages of “I Am Radar” is Larsen’s delicate touch when it comes to character. Larsen’s depiction of the Serbian father Danilo, who desperately seeks to bond with his son as their family and world fall apart, is a typical example of this touch: “‘Every tradition is meant to be broken,’ said Danilo, though he was not sure—nor would he ever be—if such a thing was true.” Danilo’s difficulty in leaving “tradition” behind reflects Larsen’s talent for showing how children repeat and repeat the sins of their parents as they struggle to tear free of their past. Whether it is Danilo, or Charlene—Radar’s neuroticly destructive but well-meaning mother—or any other member of his diverse cast, Larsen’s portrayal of the human is spot on. Reasoned or cryptic, the novel’s cast pops off the page and drags the reader into their gritty lives. Even when the reality of the story strains the limits of credulity, the book remains grounded by the simple fact that the characters feel remarkably, and at times painfully, real.

What grounds “I Am Radar,” in other words, is that it is about children growing up. It is about parents struggling to understand and accept that tradition is, as it is put so eloquently by one of Larsen’s characters, “shitty rules made by shitty people.” But Larsen also shows that tradition can be hard to shrug off completely, since throughout the novel the past stretches out pallid hands to control the present. And it is not just tradition that pulls the strings in “I Am Radar”—whether people are struggling to control themselves, parents to control their children, or puppeteers to control their puppets, this theme of control echoes throughout the novel. When Larsen stays within the literal, this theme is engaging and drives many of the subplots that reside within the sections. When he goes outside of his characters and strives to make a grander metaphorical point about the nature of the world and puppetry, the result is unconvincing at best. “My dear, the mask cannot be the player, and the player cannot be the mask,” says a Kerkenesferda actor to Radar’s mother—here, it is not hard to groan inwardly at Larsen’s vague attempt to make a point. 

In general the writing is at times incredibly self-aware, which leads to some charming moments and skillful displays of Larsen’s wordsmithing. Once a character quips to another, “Why do you need the author when you have the book?” The novel is littered with pictures and diagrams, for example, and from time to time it will refer to a fictional novel, “Spesielle Partikler,” that records much of the same story that Larsen himself is telling. By the end of the book, when the plot has moved past the contents of “Spesielle Partikler,” it also begins to refer back to itself. Most of the time these metafictional touches are immersive and interesting, although it can drift into the realm of sounding a little high and mighty in a book that is at its core driven not by the point it is trying to make, but by the relationships held within. 

And then it ends, all too suddenly and prematurely. In sharp contrast to the middle sections about the Balkans and Cambodia, where Larsen does his best character work, the novel peters off into a quiet and disappointing finale. By this point it has managed to pick up all the pieces and set a blistering pace through the jungles of Africa as readers barrel towards the last page and Kirkenesferda’s last performance. The rushed, botched ending casts a harsh spotlight on the rest of the book because, for all the beauty of Larsen’s characters, they are left woefully adrift, many of their destinations or fate completely unknown. “I am Radar” quite simply feels 50 pages too short, as if Larsen had cut the novel off with an uncertain hand-wave. 

Despite its pitfalls, this book is certainly still worth reading. Larsen crafts an evocative and distinctly weird world out of evidently extensive research. His writing drips with creativity; the characters are deep and engaging. In the shortest summation that can be mustered: “I Am Radar” is a journey that far surpasses its destination. 

—Staff writer Ben G. Cort can be reached at ben.cort@thecrimson.com.