Arson Wells

Book report: An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke

Panning a novel that I devoured in 50- to 80-page chunks approaches being disingenuous. Perhaps an An Arsonist’s Guide, released in fall 2007 to overall glowing reviews (though readers on amazon.com gave it only three of five stars), amused me even as I felt ashamed. No, this is not a guilty pleasure type of fiction, though it might be for others.

What had me returning to the 305-page story after work each night last week was a solidly set plot, clear prose and outright cleverness, not to mention archness. I got most of the in-jokes about the historical writers, from Emily Dickinson to Mark Twain. Then Brock slid into the first-person narrative digs at contemporary book culture, the current popularity of memoirs, the staginess of readings, the misplaced worship of acclaimed writers and not least the rebellion against all these by both practical book lovers and the legions of non-readers in America.

That author Clarke slipped in smart references into the narrator’s lame voice might be his sliest trick. Our hero is middle-aged Sam Pulsifer of Massachusetts, and he recounts his life, beginning with being a teen sneaking into the Dickinson home-turned-museum after hours, on a lark. He leaves behind a cigarette, and the title comes to light.

Unfortunately, a docent and her husband were upstairs, and Sam begins adult life in minimum-security prison for their accidental deaths. The novel engages on Sam’s release. We learn of Sam’s fellow convicts, politicians and Enron types. We start to know his pathetic parents. Sam marries. The adult son of Sam’s victims shows up. Intriguingly, Sam’s father has kept the many fan letters he received while locked up. A number of screwballs hate Robert Frost and Edward Bellamy, among the others, for being neighbors — their houses, that is — for nearly sensible reasons, and hope Sam will make a career of his teenage nightmare.

I chose An Arsonist’s Guide because of my soft spot for comic novels. They’re so hard to get right, and when they do I want to learn from them. This one basically does, even arriving at a great climax, mostly unpredictable, and tying all loose ends decently.

Sam admits from the start that he is a “bumbler,” and that is what was infuriating. I don’t need fiction to be stocked with people better than me or just like me, but blockheads try my patience. Movies about dopes are intolerable, too (Billy Bob Thornton’s well-liked A Simple Plan comes to mind — I quit watching the video within 20 minutes).

A very few bumblers are forgivable. Ignatius J. Reilly of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces would be the king of these. But other than that, I quit this books with this sort of protagonist, too, It’s just me. I’m not being a snob. Chuck Palahniuk and T.C. Boyle stock their stories with low-lifes of low IQ, but theirs have enough innate intelligence to move through life. “Bumblers” don’t, and books about them have a common artifice.

A full day after completing An Arsonist’s Guide, I figured it out. If bumbler-driven books were movies, they’d have what Roger Ebert calls idiot plots. In such flicks, the forward action is prompted by a usually central figure having no common sense, even the barest amount.

Sam Pulsifer should have figured out things starting as a mopey teen-ager in that country club prison. But if he did, there wouldn’t be any back story, much less current tale. But Brock Clarke, I thought, could have made a much more pleasing book if Sam learned even a little each time from his many mistakes. Then it hit me.

Authors, and screenwriters, must be attracted to bumbler figures because they can attach to them any contrivance (the idiot plot) and complete a full-length novel or movie, without explaining more than: “Such and such happened. It might as well have been out of the blue, because Stupido didn’t see it coming.”

The well of imagination goes deep, but slacker storytellers don’t have to throw down much rope to dip in when they make their protagonists little more than marionettes.