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Summary
Summary
A lot of remarkable things have happened in the life of Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, beginning with the ten years he spent in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson's house and unwittingly killing two people. emerging at age twenty-eight, he creates a new life and identity as a husband and father. But when the homes of other famous New England writers suddenly go up in smoke, he must prove his innocence by uncovering the identity of this literary-minded arsonist.
In the league of such contemporary classics as A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp , An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is an utterly original story about truth and honesty, life and the imagination.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Clarke's fourth book (after the story collection Carrying the Torch) is the delightfully dark story of Sam Pulsifer, the "accidental arsonist and murderer" narrator who leads readers through a multilayered, flame-filled adventure about literature, lies, love and life. Growing up in Amherst, Mass., with an editor for a father and an English teacher for a mother, Sam was fed endless stories that fueled (literally and figuratively) the rest of his life. Thus, the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, story and reality become the landscape for amusing and provocative adventures that begin when, at age 18, Sam accidentally torches the Emily Dickinson Homestead, killing two people. After serving 10 years, Sam tries to distance himself from his past through college, employment, marriage and fatherhood, but he eventually winds up back in his parents' home, separated from his wife and jobless. When more literary landmarks go up in flames, Sam is the likely suspect, and his determination to find the actual arsonist uncovers family secrets and more than a bit about human nature. Sam is equal parts fall guy and tour guide in this bighearted and wily jolt to the American literary legacy. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
"New Englander Sam Pulsifer always insisted that burning down Emily Dickinson's Amherst home was an accident. The jury wasn't convinced. Now, after serving 10 years in prison, the 28-year-old is determined to get his life back on track: he gets married, has a couple of kids, and moves into a cookie-cutter Massachusetts suburb called Camelot. But the tranquility doesn't last. After a stranger convinces Sam's wife that her husband is a philanderer, the hapless young man moves back in with his parents. (Since their son's incarceration, the once scholarly Pulsifers have drowned themselves in drink.) At his parents' home, Sam finds hundreds of letters from twisted souls requesting that he burn down other famous writers' abodes. When the residences of Edith Wharton and Mark Twain are set ablaze, Sam becomes the chief suspect. Clarke (Carrying the Torch, 2005) renders a refreshing send-up of the self-indulgent memoir, with a cast of characters by turns tragic and absurd. Among the most memorable: a flame-haired English professor who disparages every literary lion with the most despicable of four-letter words."--"Block, Allison" Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In Brock Clarke's novel, somebody's burning down the homes of famous writers. WE all know that plenty of kids took to Route 66 after reading "On the Road," but few juveniles committed thrill-kill murders after paging through "Crime and Punishment." Thus Brock Clarke's publishers apparently do not fear that his new novel, his second, will tempt some unhinged teenager to set fire to Emily Dickinson's house the way his protagonist, Sam Pulsifer, does. This is despite Clarke's lovely descriptions of houses as they burn, baby, burn: "There is plenty that is beautiful about a house burning hot and high in the dark, cold night: the way flames shoot out of the chimney like a Roman candle; the way the asphalt roof shingles sizzle and pop; the way the smoke pours and pours and pours heavenward like a message to the house's great beyond." Sam was 18 when he burned Dickinson's house, accidentally killing a couple having sex on the poet's bed. (The episode was doubly horrible, Sam says, because "my mother was a high school English teacher, my father an editor for the university press in town, and beautiful words really mattered to them.") These deaths got him a dime in a minimum-security prison. At the novel's beginning, Sam has been out for several years, and he seems like one of those hapless Richard Brautiganesque 1960s man-children. He is a 30-something virgin who calls his genitals "private parts." His fiancée, Anne Marie, asks him, "Why aren't you inviting your parents to our wedding?" He lies: "Because they died. ... Their house burned down." Later he confesses: "I wanted to tell Anne Marie everything - about the Emily Dickinson House and how I'd burned it, accidentally, and the people I'd killed. ... I should have told her right away ... but new love is so fragile and I thought I would wait until it got stronger." He waits too long. Before you know it, the now-adult son of the couple who died in the fire shows up at Sam's suburban home and enacts a form of revenge that ultimately causes Sam to have to move back in with his parents. And before you know it, the houses of other famous writers - Frost, Twain, Wharton, Hawthorne, Thoreau - burn down one by one. Sam is suspected. His attempt to find the real arsonist leads him to wonder if one of his newly alcoholic parents could have committed the torchings. Or is it a team of ex-con financial guys he met in the slammer? One of them publishes a "memoir" plagiarized from Sam's verbal reminiscences of the postcards his father sent him when he'd ditched his family for three years. That abandonment, incidentally, compelled Sam's mother to fill her young son's head with H.P. Lovecraftian horror-style lies about the interior of Emily Dickinson's house, lies that motivated her son's break-in to begin with. Clarke knows a lot about arson but appears to be ignorant of what the firebug narrator of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" knew: books burn swell. Imagine tossing a lighted gasoline-soaked book into an open window - what sweet household deflagration would follow! As Sam delivers rants against Hemingwayesque he-man memoirs and false memoirs and memoirs in general, one suspects that maybe memoirs feed flame best of all. In a metafictional moment, Sam even comes across a copy of Clarke's own "real" first novel, "The Ordinary White Boy": "I plucked it off the shelf. After all, I'd been an ordinary white boy once, before the killing and burning, and maybe I could be one again someday, and maybe this book could help me do it, even if it was a novel and not useful, generically speaking." After Sam reads this book's back cover and learns that the author was once a reporter in upstate New York, he glances at the first sentence - "I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York" - and sets the book down in disgust. This is memoir disguised as fiction! "An Arsonist's Guide" begins with an epigraph from Muriel Spark that seems to be used to imply that this novel, too, is autobiographical. The book's first chapter began as a short story published seven years ago in The New England Review; at the end of that version, the narrator promised never again to tell the arsonist's story of Emily Dickinson's house. It is to comic fiction's advantage that Clarke reneged. "An Arsonist's Guide" contains sentences and images that could stand beside the works of the former owners of the literary residences put to flame. There is a single sentence of dialogue (unprintable here) that will paralyze any Willa Gather scholar. There is a lone paragraph describing a woman's head aflame - "Then she pulled out a lighter," part of it reads, "flicked it, and grabbed a clump of her hair" - that could compel Stephen King to increase the fire insurance on his own New England house. Hell, Clarke himself had better buy a fire extinguisher or two from Home Depot. Who knows how many crazy firebug readers this book will goad? As Emily Dickinson wrote: You cannot put a fire out; A thing that can ignite Can go, itself, without a fan Upon the slowest night. David Bowman is the author of two novels, "Let the Dog Drive" and "Bunny Modern." He has recently completed his third.
Guardian Review
Sam Pulsifer burns down the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst, killing two people in the process. He serves 10 years in prison, gets married, has two children and moves to a suburb outside Amherst, where his past, not surprisingly, promptly catches up with him. This book poses as a memoir but functions as a satire, and Clarke has the true comic's loathing of gentility and pretension. After the arson attack, Sam reflects that "someone slashed every tyre on my parents' Volvo, and . . . in a fit of anger or grief, someone hurled a Birkenstock through one of our bay windows". There are set-piece send-ups of Harry Potter, long riffs on suburbia, American college life, consumerism and ageing parents. As if this outpouring of wit and wisdom were not enough, Sam continually reflects on the meaning of literature and storytelling. Books, Clarke seems to be asserting, do not make you happy; they're much more important than that. He's right, of course. So why do we tend to resent the authors who remind us so? Caption: article-arson.1 Sam Pulsifer burns down the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst, killing two people in the process. He serves 10 years in prison, gets married, has two children and moves to a suburb outside Amherst, where his past, not surprisingly, promptly catches up with him. - Ian Sansom.
Kirkus Review
A subversively compelling, multilayered novel about the profound impact of literature (perhaps negative as well as positive). On one level, this is a book about the writing of a book, detailing the experiences that have inspired narrator Sam Pulsifer to compose a volume with the same title as this one. As a teenager, Sam took a tour of his hometown's Emily Dickenson house. When he returned that night, he accidentally burned it down, killing two who were staying upstairs. Though Sam presents himself as an eternal innocent, doing his best to put this unfortunate incident behind him, his narrative offers the perspectives of others who suggest Sam isn't who he appears to be, and that there's no such thing as an accident. On another level, this is a story about stories--the stories that Sam feels sealed his fate, the stories by which we live our lives, the stories we tell ourselves. As a loving father and husband and a dutiful son following his prison sentence, Sam does his best to write his life's story anew, yet he discovers that, in the narratives of others, arson is what defines his character. When a series of other legendary New England literary domiciles are torched, even Sam starts wondering how or whether he is involved. Rendered masterfully by Clarke (What We Won't Do, 2001, etc.), Sam's narrative tone is so engagingly guileless that the reader can't help but empathize with him, even as his life begins to fall apart within the causal connections of these fires. Sam ultimately forces himself to play detective (admitting that the mystery genre is one he never read), while recognizing that he might well be the criminal he is investigating. Is Sam an unconscious arsonist? Is he the product of a dysfunctional (though decidedly bookish) family? Is someone trying to set him up? Can the reader trust Sam? Can Sam trust himself? A serious novel that is often very funny and will be a page-turning pleasure for anyone who loves literature. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When Sam Pulsifer's parents separated for three years during his childhood, his mother lied about his father's whereabouts and also told Sam ghost stories about the Emily Dickinson House in his hometown of Amherst, MA. At age 18, he broke into the house one night to verify these stories, got spooked by a noise, dropped a lit cigarette, burned down the house, and unwittingly killed its two occupants. After ten years in a minimum security prison, Sam moved to the nearby suburbs to live an anonymous life, attend college, marry, and raise children. All is well until the son of the couple who died in the fire shows up on his doorstep, and fires begin breaking out at the homes of other New England writers. While trying to unravel the mystery of the fires, Sam uncovers the deceptions that have molded his life. Clarke (Ordinary White Boy) has created a character feebly struggling against fate in a situation both sad and funny, believable and preposterous. It's a setting so bizarre that the clear moral lesson smacks of sarcasm. In the end, however, this quirky story is entertaining and readable. Recommended.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Porvidence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
