Customer Reviews

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

This question is quoted from a scene within the novel itself. This story certainly produces an effect on me, but the effect it produces is not one that I consider to be `good'. It is undoubtedly well-written but it is infuriating. Most of the characters are either incomplete or utterly inadequate. That could be okay: there is a rich subterranean vein of satire flowing just below the surface and just one reliable viewpoint would be enough to make this work for me.

I kept reading, through to the end, in the hope that Sam Pulsifer, the narrator, would stop observing his life and start taking responsibility for the living of it. Or, perhaps, we'd get another viewpoint which would add a dimension of contextual sense. The bit that did appeal to me (and for which I will allocate two of the three stars) was the notion that a number of different characters thought that the burning of various houses occupied by prominent writers in New England might in some way improve their own lives. This potentially clever idea was essentially lost to me in the bumbling fiasco otherwise known as the life of Sam Pulsifer.

Of course, there is an alternative explanation. This might be an incredibly clever book which only a true literary aficionado will enjoy. Each reader will find a different book between the same covers. All things are possible.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Think a mini version of Marisha's Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and you'll understand the world that awaits you in Clarke's book. Like Pessl's novel, Clarke's novel has an intellectually sophisticated narrator, who utilizes a wealth of complexly constructed sentences to tell his multilayered tale of coming of age and attempts to solve two mysteries, and who has interwoven all throughout the text countless observations and aphorisms about life.

Specifically, our narrator Sam Pulsifer is trying to unravel the mysterious surrounding his parents' lies and strange behavior and who is attempting to, and then starts succeeding at, burning down homes of famous authors around the New England area. The end result of Pulsifer solving both these mysteries is that he is baptized by obliteration into adulthood; the world he thought he knew disintegrates before his eyes, and he begins to attempt to atone for all the years of not taking responsibility for his actions.

Now granted, Clarke's novel isn't quite the masterpiece that Special Topics in Calamity Physics is, however that does not diminish the fact that this is a novel you should considering reading because it still is very entertaining and moving; it is a well paced jaunt, told with humor, charm, wit, sadness, self-depreciation, and tinged with heartbreak, about a topic I think we can all agree is quite perplexing - Life.

Sam Pulsifer is a bumbler. And in true bumbler fashion, he doesn't know he *is* one until he meets white-collar criminals in prison who scoff at such individuals. Sam is an innocent soul: a blissfully naïve young man who accidentally starts a fire in an historic house and accidentally kills a married couple secretly meeting inside it. This is his story, which he begins for us after his 10-year incarceration and the resumption of his life. The narrative is conveyed in first person by Sam himself, written at a time in the future when hindsight is 20/20 and he can keep us interested by providing forecasts in regular asides: "This turned out, much later, to be something of a mistake on my part, but how was I to know that at the time? How are we supposed to recognize our mistakes before they become mistakes? Where is the book that can teach us *that*?"

Sam goes to college, gets a good job, marries well and has two children before the big trouble starts: someone else begins to set fire to other historic homes in New England, and fingers start pointing once again at Sam. But we readers know he didn't do it, don't we? Having read lots of literature in his lifetime but not detective stories, Sam doesn't quite know how to go about investigating the situation and clearing his name. In Sam's case, ignorance is not necessarily bliss; and he unwittingly gets himself in deeper trouble as he goes along. But at least he realizes his limitations: "The truth is that the world is full of bumblers exactly like you, and to think that you're special is just one more thing you've bumbled." Low self-esteem is one of Sam's personal demons.

What sounds like serious business is really a comic tragedy, with many humorous moments found in Sam's assessment of what Life throws at him. Unlike other reviewers, I found Sam to be a likable character. His stream of consciousness over-analysis of every encounter is the kind of thing that really *does* buzz through our minds; we just don't write it all down like he did. And if we took the time to record it, it would sound just as immature and surreal and ridiculous as what we read in these pages.

Author Brock Clarke is obviously familiar enough with the region (Amherst, the Pioneer Valley, the greater Springfield area) that he can portray it realistically and poke subdued fun at it at the same time. Local readers will laugh out loud more than once. At least *I* did.

A glance at the book title will no doubt panic every director of every historic home across the country. "Yikes! Why would he write this kind of thing and put this terrible idea into people's heads?" they might lament. Well, just as most mystery readers don't run right out and commit murder, most readers of AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE won't be inclined to torch the nearest entry on the National Register of Historic Places. And even so: I can't think of another title that would be appropriate for this book. An enjoyable memoir of a fictitious character who deserves better than his due.

(3.5 stars) The guilt of Sam Pulsifer, who describes himself as "the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, and who in the process killed two people, for which I spent ten years in prison," permeates this memoir of a lost life. Now in his late thirties, he is the happily married father of two children, a man who managed to graduate from college and get a terrific job as a packaging engineer. All is going well--until Thomas Coleman, the son of the couple who died in the Emily Dickinson House fire, about twenty years ago, appears on his doorstep. Coleman promises Sam that he will continue to pay for his crime in ways he never dreamed of.

Sam has never told his wife Anne Marie about his past, and she has no suspicions at all about his missing ten years, but before long, Sam is locked out of his house and living with his parents, and Thomas Coleman's car is parked in her driveway. Soon the homes of other writers--Edward Bellamy, Mark Twain, and Robert Frost--are torched. The police, of course, gravitate to Sam's door. As the crimes increase, Sam's domestic life---with his father, mother, and Anne Marie--becomes even more convoluted.

Author Brock Clarke does a masterful job of creating a breezy, conversational point of view, and his dialogue is natural and often filled with dark humor. As the crimes become more numerous, Clarke ratchets up both the suspense and the number of suspicious characters, leaving the reader hard-pressed to figure out how Sam will ever surmount his increasingly formidable challenges. As the cast of outrageous characters grows, Clarke keeps the humor high, and his use of absurdist details, wild scenes, and in-jokes about writers and their work keep the reader amused.

Though the novel is fun to read, it requires more than the usual amount of "willing suspension of disbelief." After ten years in prison, Sam is still a complete innocent about life, and his compulsion to lie, over and over again, makes him a protagonist with whom many readers will fail to identify. The fact that his wife has never been mildly curious about his ten "lost" years, about his education, or about his lack of long-time friends strains credulity, and the lives of his parents and the people he meets are so off-the-wall that any pretense of reality disappears.

The novel, however, requires a certain amount of reality to give the humor some context, and the reader must be able empathize with Sam in order to have the ending make sense and provide resolution. Filled with wacky scenes and oddball characters, the novel will amuse many readers, while its lack of subtlety will leave others asking "Is that all there is?" n Mary Whipple

This book has one of the quirkiest story lines I have ever read. Brook Clarke has restored my faith in the Great American novel with this sad, yet funny work about a hapless guy named Sam Pulsifer who mistakenly burns down Emily Dickenson's house and kills two people in the act of lovemaking in the process! He does ten years in the joint; when he gets out, he is bound and determined to redeem himself by going to college. Sam, against the predictions of his parents, goes to school and majors in Packaging Science, marries, has two kids of his own, buys a house in suburbia, makes a new life for himself, and out of the blue the past comes knocking on his door one day (with no warning as he is mowing his yard like a good suburbanite) his nightmare begins all over again.

The book reads like an episode of Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" except it is much darker, and a heck of a lot more funnier. I don't personally believe that this work suspends credulity all that much. It has to, to some degree, otherwise it would not be an entertaining novel. Nevertheless, Clarke's characters are not all that complicated, yet they are textured and, in the case of Sam's mom, pitiable and unlikable at the same time. As for Sam's character, I'm not sure if he is "hapless," as the book jacket describes him, or he is just a hopeless romantic/sentimentalist.

At the end of the story, Clarke leaves it up to the reader to figure out if Sam's taking the rap is an act of nobility, or just another case of "bumbling," perhaps a little of both. I greatly enjoyed this book. The plot was funny, sad, quirky and idiosyncratic. Clarke kept me turning the pages, so much so that I finished the book in two days. I like a book with an unorthodox story line. It is not so unorthodox, though, that you get lost. This book is one to curl up with and get lost in for a couple of hours.

Brock's Arsonist's Guide was not quite everything the blurbs built it up to be. Was it funny? Well, it has it's share of chuckles, but you run no risk of abdominal cramping. Was it sad? Yes, but not in a grab-the-kleenex tear-jerker sort of way. The sadness is more a sickening pity that borders on anger, simply because pity wears thin rather quickly. The reader's anger and frustration continues to build as the development of the main character (Sam Pulsifer) unfolds, and the reader begins to realize that Sam is not just an unfortunate bumbler, but a miserable, whiny, spineless tart who invites disaster into his life by lying down and letting it steamroll all over him.

While the writing itself is quite good, the characters are not very realistic, and simply refuse to let the reader relate to them.

Apparently some reviewer, along with the article I read in the book pages of the Washington Post Book Review, thought somewhere in this book laughs sat at every page. I waited for the delivery, for the laughter to jump off that page, but it never did. Despite that complete failure--it actually possessed the exact opposite effect for me--I still felt compelled to read on.

Just about every other page of this book is pumped full of this luke-warm jelly of a depressing tale. EVERYTHING goes wrong for Sam Pulsifer. At every turn, he introduces himself into more trouble and more trouble and it almost became to depressing to read, the tale far too sad for the weak of heart to read on. But that may be because I felt attached to Sam, whereas somebody who feels no emotion one way or another for him may not care. What kept me reading was not the hilarity or the depression, but to see what happened next because, along the way, Sam does so many unbelievably stupid things that I had to see how it turned out, and it turned out as expect, but because of an act of his own.

That is one bad thing about the story, though: Sam does so many stupid things--such as becoming his own detective, trying to solve what happens in the pages for himself--that it's hard not to ridicule the author for making the main character do so many rediculous things that incriminate him later on. He should've handed everything to the police early on to get things cleared up and stayed in his house. But where would the story be?

These parts make the story fatuous and unbelievable, along with some of the rather nutty characters, too, that lend it the same quality, but maybe he did that on purpose.

The reason I give this story four stars is because everything binds well, is symmetical. Sure, Sam goes on rants within himself and critiques his every move, but the author does that to develop the character. And, really, it isn't that much. Clarke uses symmetry--the very similar fashion Sam describes each moment in the novel--to give the reader an overall impression of the character and his thoughts, and he does it well.

When I started reading this book, I thought the pacing and writing was interested. At first. As you get deeper into the book, however, it becomes redundent while not saying anything at the same time. The pacing is quick and the sentences are overly long and it just never stops saying what it is trying to say without saying something in the first place! (It's kinda like that). I found the plot to be pretty dull and the humor to be non-existent. Of all the reviews that claim this book is funny, I just don't understand it. It's unusual for me not to finish a book once I start but reading this reminded me more of a forced homework assignment than anything that you would read for pleasure. I highly recommend that you SKIP IT!

A breezy read full of observations about the human condition that seem almost wise had they been made by a child, but since the story is told from the viewpont of an adult they come off mostly as whimsical, quirky and border line idiotic, terms that aptly describe just about every character in this novel as well as its cutely odd plot. If you like a heavy dose of absurdity mixed into your mysteries, and plenty of literary references tossed in for good measue, this is the book for you. If I was the type, this would probably qualify as a single sitting read. Mild curiosity and amusement along with a dash of irritation at the narrator's inability to solve relatively simple problems in blatantly simple ways (because he is by definition a bumbler, and the author insists he must live up to this description no matter what) propels the reader forward to an ending that is not intended to take anyone by surprise, but manages to be somewhat poignant if not quite profound.

In the interests of full disclosure: Brock Clarke is the brother of one of my coworkers and he came to present at our fledgling Creative Writing conference out of fraternal affection and perhaps a free (steamtabled) dinner. Thus, to counter the really base ad hominem attacks appearing in these reviews, my impression of Brock Clarke, Human Being, is quite menschy.

I also got to hear him read the first chapter of this book at our little conference, so maybe that experience put a better idea into my head of what Sam Pulsifer's voice should sound like: something between gullible and sardonic. Thus when I sat down the other day to read this book, I might have had more preparation to this character's voice than other reviewers.

I think this book *is* hilarious, but I acknowledge that if you're not one for literary allusions, you'll probably hate this book and deride the author as pretentious. There's also some stuff that I think if you haven't been to grad school or worked in a college will also sail right over your head, such as Lees Ardor and her knee jerk antagonism. I think every college worth its salt has a Lees Ardor. (I'm afraid at my school it might be...*me*!) And Harry Potter parents might feel a little defensive after reading this.

The plot is absurd, but not absurdist, and even when I was caught thinking Pulsifer sure was being a moron, I found myself reading along for absolute treasures in prose as some other reviewers have quoted. One of my favorites is when he speculates about his wife whether he's actually made her happy or just too busy to cry.

If you're looking for realistic fiction with deep round rich characters and a suspenseful plot, this will surely disappoint. However, it is worth your time if you want to get into a real 'everyman' (who isn't, or doesn't at least feel himself or herself to be a bumbler at times?) and ask questions about love and family and above all, what's the point of books, of stories? Do we read to become like the characters we read about? Do we read to escape? What are books, what are *writers* supposed to do for us, anyway? And you meet some pretty outrageous unforgettable characters (like the bond analysts) along the way.

Maybe Clarke's done himself a bad turn in writing 'niche fiction' that appeals to overeducated twits like myself. It seems that many reviewers would prefer if he wrote Oprah niche fiction. I'm glad he didn't. It's about time I got to laugh at myself and wonder exactly why do I do what I do with all these books...? Seems that the people who enjoy this book are the ones it's making fun of. I don't know what to say about the people who hate this book so much I fear some arson might be practiced at Mr. Clarke's home.....