#19: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Brock Clarke

Bleh. Despite the buzz, I just couldn't stomach this book. (I picked it up originally because of the basic premise: narrator Sam Pulsifer burns down the Emily Dickinson Home by accident. And as an Amherst grad, I wanted to see what was being done, even fictionally, to my alma mater.)

Anyway, so we (we being this book and I) started off badly. I just didn't like the narrator. He seemed so pathetic, and incapable of standing up for himself. And since the novel is first-person, it didn't bode well. (I even took this book on a week-long vacation, and had a hard time opening it.) The other problem is the writer's cleverness; once or twice is fine, but Clarke hits you over the head with it every chance he gets.

For example, courtesy of page 117:

“Forget the drinks,” Morgan said. “We want you to tell us how to burn down houses like the one you burned down. And after we do, we can write a book about it.”

"An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England," G-ooff said. "We've already come up with the title."

"Why do you even need to be an arsonist to write the book?" I asked. "You could always just pretend to have burned down the houses and write the book anyway."

The paragraph itself is funny, but page after page, the device just gets old. In the end, it's the, well, end, that just ruins the novel. Basically, once Sam gets out of the slammer, he gets married and has kids, and never mentions his crime. But then the son of one of the people killed at the Emily Dickinson House shows up and tried to destroy his life in revenge. At the same time, coincidentally (or not?) someone starts burning down other writers' homes and Sam looks like the culprit. Since he's the narrator, you know it's not him (unless Clarke had decided to pull a Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which he doesn't.)

After bumbling his way through some 260 pages, Sam eventually figures out who did what. But the logic is off. He decides that the real culprit (whose name I will omit, to avoid the spoiler) is the actual culprit because that person utters the exact same sentence as the detective. "As every detective knows, the rhetoric of crime and the rhetoric of crime solving are the very same, and if Detective Wilson were trying to solve the crimes, did that mean that [real culprit] had committed one of them?” What a cop-out.

And in the end, Sam learns nothing. The moral? "Maybe this is what is means to take responsibility for something: not to tell the truth, but to make sure you pick a lie for a good reason and then stick to it.” In the end, Sam stays pathetic and still doesn't stand up for himself. So what was the friggin' point?

Boo. Seriously.

Next up: Eat, Pray, Love