I am Radar

by Reif Larsen
653 pgs

Several year ago, I read Reif Larsen's first book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, and thought it was a fantastic story, ingeniously told. So, my hopes were pretty high when I picked up I am Radar. It's a big book, and I thought "Great, plenty of pages to enjoy reading this time around." Unfortunately, the number of pages this time turned out to be a symptom of the overall problem I had with Larsen's sophomore novel.

The book begins on the night of Radar's birth. Moments before he emerged into the world, the hospital experienced an inexplicable loss of power, and for some reason, the emergency generators didn't kick in, so Radar was born in complete darkness. When the lights flickered back on, the doctor found himself holding a baby with skin darker than he had ever seen before. Even if Radar's parents had both been black, the darkness of his skin still have seemed unusual. The fact that they were both white, meant Radar's life would never be "normal."

At a very young age, Radar's mother took him to a group of Norwegian scientists, who promised their experimental methods--which used electricity--could cure him of his condition. Ultimately they were successful in lightening his skin tone significantly, but he would suffer from the negative side effects for decades to come.

The book then jups around to various times and places around the world, from Yugoslavia in the 1980s to Cambodia in the 1950s, and in each time and place, threads leading back to Radar and his life many years later are slowly revealed.

It wounds like a promising story, and at its core, it is. But unfortunately, it gets buried in Larsen's unnecessary literary sprawl. Larsen seemed to try too hard this time around, almost as if he sat down to write with the goal of writing something profound. It didn't work. Profundity just can't be forced. Case in point.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆