by Brock Clarke
305 pages, Algonquin Books, 2007

“I been there before,” Mark Twain writes at the conclusion of “Huckleberry Finn.”  This sentiment of familiarity could easily be applied to Brock Clarke’s catchy but flawed latest novel, “An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England.” Occasionally, redundancy is a good thing. Readers need to be metaphorically hit over the head with themes in certain books. Yet, Clarke’s fake memoir, focusing on the rambling tales of an accidental arsonist burning down Emily Dickinson’s home, fails to spark more than a small flame of a well-executed novel.

Sam Pulsifer is a self-proclaimed “bumbler,” with no sense of direction in life. He accidentally sets fire to the famous poet’s house, causing the deaths of two people making nookie on her bed. When Sam gets out of jail 10 years later, he goes to school to become a packaging scientist, meets the perfect woman and has the perfect kids. The family moves to a little part of suburbia, aptly named “Camelot.” Here, Sam has a “normal” existence, until the day that Thomas Coleman, son of the victims of the Emily Dickinson house fire, appears out of nowhere, threatening to fill Sam’s wife and kids in on his dark past.
As more New England writers’ homes start to go up in flames, the story becomes more ridiculous. What starts out as a smart, satirical novel poking fun at the literary world turns into Sam’s own prophecy: a bumbling, sputtering story filled with alcoholic parents, affairs, vengeful victims and prison mates, and an ending that’s about as believable as the movie version of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

I really wanted to like this book, mostly because the idea is a great one. There are moments when Sam seems to try to make profound comments about literature. His parents both worked in the world of print, and books and stories played a defining role in his childhood. His mother uses stories of the Emily Dickinson house to scare him, and Sam lacks a complete comprehension of the potency of stories. He starts to realize his ignorance while eavesdropping at a book group in a bookstore:

“I hadn’t read the book, of course, but as far as I could tell, neither had anyone else, and besides, that wasn’t what it was there for: the book was there to give the women (mostly) a reason to confess to the feelings they’d already had before reading the book, which as far as I could tell they hadn’t actually read. The confessions made everyone feel better, I could tell, because the café was now filled with their bright, non-book-related chatter. The book had made them happy! This was a revelation to me because I remembered how unhappy reading books had made me back when I read them—they were full of things I didn’t entirely understand and never would, and they made my head hurt.”

Sam’s observations of a suburban book group filled with members who don’t even read tries to imitate Tom Perrotta’s better written scene in “Little Children.” This is the biggest problem with the book. Everything Clarke tries to address—the pretentiousness of the literary world, the lack of acknowledging the real world among academic types, and the James Frey-ization of memoirs—has already been written about in a more compelling way in previous books.

By far the best part of the book is when Sam stumbles across a Harry Potter book group. He talks about the members and how they “commenced to talk about the fog and how it was a very English fog, and then there was a long, sincere discussion about how very magical fog was and how they’d be sure to wake up their kids when they got home to show them the fog and then find a passage in the book featuring fog, and then they’d compare the literary fog and the meteorological fog.” The ridiculousness of farfetched symbolism is at least amusing here.

Sam is a funny character, but ultimately fails to be much more than a “bumbler.” That said, I couldn’t stop reading it, because I wanted to find out what happens to poor, literary-struck Sam and his disheveled life.