Brock Clarke's AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE TO WRITERS' HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND

Before I'd burned down the Emily Dickinson House, they seemed to be normal, healthy, somewhat happy Americans who took vacations and gardened and who'd weathered a rough patch or two... Now they looked like skeletons dressed in corduroy and loafers. Their eyes were sunken and wanting to permanently retreat all the way back into their skulls... Why do we hurt our parents the way we do? There's no way to make sense of it except as practice for then hurting our children the way we do.

I'm rarely as mad as a book as I am at the "wildly and unpredictably funny", "Absurdly hilarious... searingly funny", "wacky and wildly imaginative novel" that "sizzles" and is "funny, profound... a seductive book with a payoff on every page" that is also a "darkly comic" "deadpan satire of all things literary" as all of the dumb little blurbs sprayed all over the book cover of later printings of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England proclaim it to be. And not, as one might expect, because these blurbs are misleading or mere puffery or in any way inaccurate (for all that they are wholly unnecessary; the title alone was plenty, Brock Clarke. You had me with the title). It's because they are. And also because they really, really aren't. 

I know better than to turn to a veddy veddy literary publisher with a name like Algonquin Books for a mere funny read, of course, so I'm not in anyway surprised that what An Arsonist's Guide really is, is an incredibly loving and empathetic argument for the idea that toxic masculinity, while indeed one of the great scourges of our time, does not have to be a life sentence, that, also, it's not exclusively a disorder from which the male of the species alone can suffer (I would argue that the worst sufferer in this novel is a woman) -- indeed, this book might be said to argue that it's high time we rename the phenomenon something more accurate and inclusive like "toxic stoicism." 

Dammit, my sentences are getting long again. But anyway, I'm trying to come around to why this book made me mad, without in anyway conveying the idea that I'm mad because my expectations weren't met or anything like that -- apart from my not having been prepared for what a god damned noble piece of fiction writing The Arsonist's Gude really is.

And yeah, part of my annoyance is really just jealousy, because with this book, my first but not my last Clarke that I'll be reading, Brock Clarke has proven to be exactly the kind of writer I love to hate the most, sweet, smug, punchable author photo and all. It's not just that he's good and he knows it, and is as good as anybody I've ever seen at doing the thing that I most enjoy-yet-roll-my-eyes-at thing of simply taking every cliche that pops into the reader's head as she's reading his work, invert it very simply and neatly, and pointing out that it's true either way, in a way that elicits a rueful chuckle if not a pained guffaw if not a full bout of John Trent laughter (iykyk. Do you read Sutter Kane? I bet Brock Clarke does). Though yes, it's a lot of that. And so I'm sitting here looking at my copy, so laden with book darts right now that it positively sparkles and probably weighs twice as much as it did when I got it* trying to find just the right passages to quote to show you what I mean and I can't decide and that, too, is making me angry.

Which, I mean, that's a pretty good problem to have, really? But... I'm just going to start typing strings of expletives here in a second. So I'll stop for now. I'll be back.

But so, OK. An Arsonist's Guide concerns the life and times of one Sam Pulsifer, a man of around my own age, perhaps a bit younger, who grew up in the nice Western Massachusetts college town of Amherst, MA (home, yes, of Emily Dickinson once upon a time, and also of ZooMass), raised by nice upper middle class parents who mostly kept it together bar a few strange incidents that come to loom very large in Sam's later life but only after, in the kind of dumb teenaged accident that can mark a dude for life even if he hasn't been raised in the tradition of upright New England stoicism that I've already compared to Toxic Masculinity, Sam accidentally does indeed burn down the house where Emily Dickinson once lived, also accidentally killing a couple who were trapped inside and thus forever altering not only his life and his parents', but also that of a boy whose own parents were trapped inside the burning Emily Dickinson House and will have a few things to say or do about it later. Much later. Like after Sam serves a prison term, is released into society and starts sort of half-assedly trying to make good, getting a degree in Packaging Science (the sort of non-subject Subject that writers like Brock Clarke are lucky enough to discover is a thing before any other writers do and get to show off to the rest of us the way an intrepid explorer from a prior generation might bring home a Masai spear or something oops I'm jealous-ing again, aren't I?), establishing a lucrative and respectable career as a designer of containers for products that we all use but never noticed, marrying a beautiful and resourceful classmate and having two beautiful children with her -- all without ever telling his poor old parents that he's even back out in the world yet, until The Plot of the Novel Happens.

And all the Secrets come out. Secrets that Sam has kept from his parents, and they from him. Secrets Sam kept from his beautiful wife and children. Secrets festering darkly in the hearts of a hundred or so letter writers who have certain feelings about certain other famous New England writers and who wish that Sam would give those writers' houses the same treatment he gave the Emily Dickinson House. And the not-so-secret secrets of the poor kid whose parents Sam accidentally killed all those years ago. Not all of these secretes get aired out; not all of the mysteries get solved. But the ones that do, do so to devastating effect, making of An Arsonist's Gude rather more of a cathartic than a funny read. But, let's be real. If I'd known this was going to have Oprah levels of emotional cleansing and warm-heartedness and forgiveness, I probably wouldn't have picked it up.

But I'm glad I did.

*Gently used, from Thriftbooks, after the fearless leader of my favorite online book club praised a non-fiction book of Clarke's a few months ago. I went to get a copy of that book, an essay collection, for fuck's sake, but I saw An Arsonist's Guide and I spent my hard-earned on it instead. So it goes. As it were.