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Recommended Reading: 'An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England'
September 13, 2007
One of the things I like best about
Algonquin Books is that they keep mixing it up. Their big book last year, of course, was
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. This year, it's
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke. Could two books be more different? The Gruen: a slightly sentimental and spectacularly gritty look at a Depression-era circus troupe. The Clarke: a spectacularly snarky and slightly clunky picaresque about an accidental arsonist.
Brock Clarke has several novels under his belt, but as Janet Maslin noted,
An Arsonist's Guide "feels like the bright debut of an ingeniously arch humorist." The "slightly clunky" remark from me has to do mainly with the device of a bunch of thuggish businessmen who believe they've come up with the next great self-help trope; it distracted me from Clarke's otherwise much lighter touch.
The plot grabbed me immediately because of its writerly bent: Sam Pulsifer is a bit lost in mid-life, in large part because as a teenager he deliberately burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts -- and accidentally murdered two people still inside (I hate to ruin part of the plot by telling you who they were and why, although other reviewers have probably alread done so). Sam's forced to confront his past when other great writers' homes start going up in flames, since he remains the most likely suspect.
However, that simple summary cannot do justice to Clarke's wily, subversive humor. In his Washington Post review, Ron Charles wrote "This straight-faced, postmodern comedy scorches all things literary, from those moldy author museums to the excruciating question-and-answer sessions that follow public readings. There are no survivors here: women's book clubs, literary critics, Harry Potter fans, bookstores, English professors, memoir writers, librarians, Jane Smiley, even the author himself—they're all singed under Clarke's crisp wit."
In other words, while Sam Pulsifer may or may not be incinerating the great writers' homes of New England, he's definitely firing on all comic cylinders. This is the perfect fall read; you can almost smell the burning leaves, the foxed books, and the smoke rising from the bonfire Clarke's made of moldy assumptions about literature and life.
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on September 13, 2007 | Comments (3)
