An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England: A Novel
by Brock Clarke
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Book Summary Information
Author: Brock ClarkeEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-04
ISBN: 1565125517
Number of pages: 305
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Book Reviews of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England: A Novel
Book Review: Publisher's Weekly lacks insight
Summary: 3 Stars
This is an often amusing, but equally troubling novel by a creative writing teacher at U. Cincinnatti. Publisher's Weekly enthused about it without reservations, which is a warning of sorts. Clarke writes well. He fleshes out Sam Pulsifer, his main character, with real personality and flaws. The numerous literary references are funny and fitting. His narrative kept my interest enough that I finished the book in two days.
I did not like any of the main characters. At their core, each of these people (except Sam's mother) are self absorbed and false. The author relegates emotions to a secondary role, not absent, but more as a comic element than a central life experience. They treat each other with cruelty, but the reader is kept at a distance from the sorrow.
There are some amusements within. The author gently mocks the tortured windbags who populate the humanities departments of western Massachusetts colleges, and the mostly literate but occasionally violent citizens of those parts. As the easily identified arsonist of Emily Dickinson's home, our protagonist suffers not slings and arrows, but a Birkenstock hurled through his parent's window. He receives and reviews scholarly hate mail, which is marked by "the sad literary allusions, and a refusal to use contractions." He sits through a literature class led by a misanthropic, penurious professor who thinks that all authors are c***s. She uses that word so often that her students and colleagues snooze right through it. The author describes these people very well. I suffered flashbacks to my own college days.
I did not like this novel. Clarke has good writing mechanics, and he is clever, but that was not enough. Although Sam is admittedly a liar and a coward, his final choices do not make sense. He makes a supposedly courageous choice by continuing to lie to those he loves. The contradictions were not meaningful. If this is a great story, or even literature, then I am unable to appreciate its greatness.
Summary of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England: A Novel
As a teenager, it was never Sam Pulsifer's intention to torch an American landmark, and he certainly never planned to kill two people in the blaze. To this day, he still wonders why that young couple was upstairs in bed in the Emily Dickinson House after hours.After serving ten years in prison for his crime, Sam is determined to put the past behind him. He fifinishes college, begins a career, falls in love, gets married, has two adorable kids, and buys a home. His low-profifile life is chugging along quite nicely until the past comes crashing through his front door.
As the homes of Robert Frost, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even a replica of Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, go up in smoke, Sam becomes the number one suspect. Finding the real culprit is the only way to clear his name-but sometimes there's a terrible price to pay for the truth.
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is a tour de force-a novel disguised as a memoir, a mystery that cloaks itself in humor, and an artful piece of literature that bites the hand that breeds it.
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2007: In An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New Englan, the quirkiest title for a book since Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Brock Clarke lights up the page with the chronicle of a man who, as a teenager, accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, killing two people. ("It's probably enough to say that in the Massachusetts Mt. Rushmore of big gruesome tragedy, there are the Kennedys, and Lizzie Borden and her ax, and the burning witches at Salem, and then there's me.") After serving ten years in prison for the crime, Sam Pulsifer moves on with his life, but the emergence of a copycat who's turning New England's literary landmarks to ash puts Sam back in the spotlight and on a quest for the truth. Comparisons to The World According to Garp and A Confederacy of Dunces may be bold, but this heartfelt, funny, and highly entertaining tale promises to be Brock Clarke's breakout book for certain. --Brad Thomas Parsons
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