[New-Poetry] Book title du jour (& review)

[Halvard Johnson]

NYT

September 10, 2007
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Burn Down a Poet’s House, and the Mail Just Pours In

By JANET MASLIN

AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE TO WRITERS' HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND

By Brock Clarke.

303 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $23.95.

The narrator of “An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New  
England” is an accidental firebug “with blood and soot on his hands.”  
He committed the unspeakable crime of burning down Emily Dickinson’s  
house. Thus he threw Amherst, Mass., into turmoil, not only because  
he violated the legacy of the college town’s cherished literary Belle  
but also because he killed “two of its loafered citizens” in the  
process.

His name, Sam Pulsifer, is redolent of both pusillanimousness and  
Lucifer. But the actual Sam is too mousy and naïve for either. He  
would have fared better in life had he been less dimwitted, “like a  
child, only bigger” in the opinion of one of his smarter  
acquaintances. But he wouldn’t have been as wildly, unpredictably  
funny. And the hilarity of Sam’s narrative voice is fine compensation  
for its apparent idiocy.

“An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England” is as  
cheerfully oddball as its title. Its cover art includes a tiny  
cartoon sketch of a green-frocked literary lioness garlanded in  
flames, and that captures the irreverence of the author, Brock  
Clarke’s, enterprise. Although it is his fourth book, it feels like  
the bright debut of an ingeniously arch humorist, one whose hallmark  
is a calm approach to insanely improbable behavior.

“I could think of no bigger betrayal than a wife’s changing the locks  
on her husband,” thinks an aggrieved Sam, “just as long as I didn’t  
think about my burning and killing and then lying about it.”

Mr. Clarke’s premise gives him an immediate problem to solve. If Sam  
really torched a treasured landmark and killed people, then served 10  
years in prison by the time this story begins, what kind of monster  
is he? In order to treat this character as a lovable marshmallow, as  
well as an occasionally inspired literary satirist, Mr. Clarke must  
figure out how to sustain this novel’s sunny atmosphere without  
having to justify heinous violence.

So it gradually develops that Sam didn’t exactly mean to incinerate  
anything or hurt anyone. It happened to him as accidentally as  
everything else in his life occurs, amid the cloud of bewilderment  
that follows him everywhere.

Sam never meant to become a serial arsonist. It’s just that the  
Dickinson fire brought forth a barrage of strange correspondence. Sam  
predictably prompted the rage of scholars, even if their fury failed  
to impress him. “There is something underwhelming,” he writes, “  
about scholarly hate mail — the sad literary allusions, the refusal  
to use contractions — so I didn’t pay much attention to those letters  
at all.” But Sam also got dozens of letters from angry lunatics  
requesting that he burn down more writers’ homes.

Here too Mr. Clarke must be careful. His book’s craziness must stay  
jokey. It gets no crazier than the man who wants Ralph Waldo  
Emerson’s house destroyed to avenge his parents’ naming him Waldo. So  
Sam has no plans to fulfill his fans’ requests. He prefers a safer  
course. After prison he went to college to major in packaging  
science, which comes in handy whenever he wants to use a Ziploc bag  
or a mayonnaise jar as a metaphor during this narrative.

He met a woman named Anne Marie. He invited her to have dinner. (“  
‘With you?’ she asked.”) Then he married her and took up the life of  
a suburban father. As the book begins, he lives on Hyannisport Drive  
in a subdivision called Camelot, a place so quiet on weekdays that  
“you couldn’t clip your toenails on your front porch without fear of  
bothering someone with the noise.” Sam accurately surmises that  
despite Camelot’s proximity to Amherst, the two are worlds apart, and  
nobody cares about Emily Dickinson in a place like this.

Soon Mr. Clarke has indulged his slightly condescending screwball  
tendencies to the point where this comic novel is in overdrive. Sam  
has an angry stalker, the son of the loafered couple who perished in  
the Dickinson fire. Sam becomes a suspect when other New England  
writers’ homes begin to burn. And he is dogged by the overweening  
ambition of his prison buddies, a bunch of bond analysts eager to  
write best-selling memoirs even though they don’t have anything  
interesting to remember.

When this leads Sam to open his wide, dewy eyes to the present-day  
literary world, he finds that the memoir is “like the Soviet Union of  
literature, having mostly gobbled up the smaller, obsolete states of  
fiction and poetry.” He finds this truly baffling: “Who knew that  
there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about  
themselves?” He wonders how a newspaper reporter from upstate New  
York can begin a book with the line “I was working as a newspaper  
reporter in upstate New York.”

Even as Sam begins collecting insights for a book of his own, the  
“Arsonist’s Guide” of Mr. Clarke’s title, he runs headlong into  
practitioners of other literary genres. The parodies here are  
priceless, particularly the grim, depressive, snowbound story of a  
lonely and miserable man, one that instantly brings to mind Russell  
Banks’s “Affliction.”

Mr. Clarke sets this part of the book in bleakest New Hampshire, so  
that Sam can feel sorry for the houses for “having to be compared to  
the white snow and failing so completely.” This frozen setting also  
allows him to express a long-smoldering schoolboy hatred of Edith  
Wharton’s “Ethan Frome.”

Eventually overplotted to the point of overkill, “An Arsonist’s Guide  
to Writers’ Homes in New England” (Miriam Levine’s real guidebook has  
the same title, absent the arson) still manages to remain sharp-edged  
and unpredictable, punctuated by moments of choice absurdist humor.  
At the home of Edward Bellamy, the author of “Looking Backward,” Sam  
notes: “It was very, very pretty. You wouldn’t have noticed anything  
was wrong with it except that it was ringed by yellow police tape,  
and there were some faint black singe marks near the foundation.”



Jay Billington Bulworth for President

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html