Books

Whimsy, satire and black comedy. Those are three tough genres to pull off, especially when you try to do them all at once, as Brock Clarke does in his new novel. And Mr. Clarke has dared us not to read his book by giving it one of the most intriguing titles to be seen on shelves this fall: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.

This is the odd odyssey of Sam Pulsifer, who went to jail at age 18 for burning down the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst, Mass., unwittingly killing the man and woman copulating in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Sam has done his time and gone straight, or as straight as anyone in this irrepressibly loopy tale. But now, 20 years after the conflagration, his past has found him. Someone has tried to burn down the homes of Edward Bellamy and Mark Twain, and Sam, afraid he'll get the blame, needs to find out who.

He has no lack of suspects. Although he was reviled for torching the Dickinson house – "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" – Sam also gained fans. In his parents' home is a box full of letters from people asking him, for a variety of personal reasons, to burn down the writers' houses in their neighborhoods. But the new arsonist might also be the son of the couple who died in the Dickinson conflagration, out to frame Sam. Or it might be Sam's mother.

So An Arsonist's Guide is partly a detective story, but don't bother reading it to find out whodunit. For after the many Immelmann turns of its plot, the novel winds up in as much of a muddle as when it started. What Mr. Clarke's novel is really about is books and the people who read and write them. It's full of literary in-jokes, including references to the James Frey faux-memoir scandal, Jane Smiley's insistence that Uncle Tom's Cabin is a better book than Huckleberry Finn, and a self-referential bit in which Sam, in a bookstore, picks up a copy of The Ordinary White Boy, Mr. Clarke's first novel.

Mr. Clarke finds just the right voice for Sam, who narrates, and he studs the narrative with juicy aphorisms. On the suburban life of minivans and malls, for example, he observes, "This is how it is these days: you can live in a place without having to actually have a life there." There are even aphorisms about aphorisms: "For those of us who've lost it, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way. Aphoristically, that is."

But as that quote may hint, there's a little too much postmodern knowingness about An Arsonist's Guide, a little too much wit without quite enough heart. The premise is intriguing, but the outlandishness of the way it's worked out, and the absence of any character other than Sam with enough substance to latch on to, allows Mr. Clarke's novel to meander too often and too far away from cleverness into tedium.

Charles Matthews is the former book editor of the San Jose Mercury News.

Brock Clarke

(Algonquin, $24.95)

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