An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England
Brock Clarke William Heinemann, 320pp, £12.99
Ever since the fixed grins on daytime TV sofas started telling us what to read, the reader has been a ready couch potato. Everything is provided on zap, from footnotes to an explanatory preface to readers’ group questionnaires at the close. In the aftermath of the French philosopher Pierre Bayard’s guide How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read – never mind Death of the Author – are we confronting the death of the reader?
Such questions provide the backbeat to Brock Clarke’s playful and clever novel, which centres on Sam Pulsifer, a bumbler emerging from a lengthy prison term. As a youth, Pulsifer accidentally burned down Emily Dickinson’s house.
Billed as a novel disguised as a memoir meant as a self-help book, The Arsonist’s Guide is also a rather brilliant satire on the culture of modern reading: the teacher who doesn’t believe in books, the book group there solely to air confessions (“I hadn’t read the book . . . but neither had anyone else”) and the modern English professor who believes “Mark Twain is a cunt” because she sees herself in Aunt Polly. Pulsifer begins to receive letters from readers asking him to carry on burning down writers’ houses – providing the pretext for a highly enjoyable absurdist farce.
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