Brock Clarke seems to be something of a well-kept secret. My sister,
after many glowing emails, lent me her copy of The Arsonist’s Guide to
Writers’ Homes in New England, but I have yet to come across anyone
else who’s read it. And I can’t imagine why because it is fabulous.
The 2007 novel is narrated by Sam Pulsifer, who, during high school,
accidentally (yes, accidentally, like most of the events of his life)
burns down the Emily Dickinson house. It happened to have two people
inside of it. Sam serves his time dutifully, with a number of bond
analysts who went down for insider trading. Upon his release, he severs
any ties with his old life that weren’t already dissolved, and by the
time he’s gotten to college and met the lovely Anne Marie, he’s telling
people that it was his parents who died in that fire. Sam and Anne
Marie settle down, have a couple of kids, and life is swell as long as
Sam’s lies don’t come back to haunt him. But this wouldn’t be a very
good book if they didn’t, and it is, so they do. Sam retreats to his
boyhood home and his not-dead parents, who have a whole house full of
secrets, including a shoebox of fan letters addressed to Sam. In
parades a veritable freak show of characters, including a very angry
relative of his unintentional victims, a literature professor who hates
literature and has one very choice word for most female writers, the
aforementioned bond analysts, a disgruntled roofer, and Sam’s in-laws,
who decide they’d feel better calling him Coleslaw from now on. A wild
goose chase ensues that sees Sam racing the clock to find out who is
burning down the homes of New England’s finest writers before they can
pin all the blame on him; at the same time he is trying to fix the
shambles his life has become.
This book is hilarious and bizarre and terribly terribly sad all at
once, with sentences that start out witty and end in tears. My
particular favorite being: “Because this is another thing mothers are
good for: they know how to get at the truth, and then, when that truth
makes you too tired to hear any more of it, they know when to guide you
through the darkness and put you to bed.” It is a book about the books
and the people that change your life, whether you want them to or not.
- MOLLY POHLIG
