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

by Pa Rock
Reader

Brock Clarke teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.  His 2007 masterwork of fiction, "An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England," testifies strongly to his creativity and his ability to write.

The central character in this tale is Sam Pulsifer.  Sam grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, the only child of academic parents – a mother who taught high school literature and a father who was an editor for the local university press.  He was raised on stories from his mother, most of which involved the town’s signature landmark – the Emily Dickinson house, and postcards from his father who skipped out on the family for three years in order to find himself.

One evening when Sam was eighteen, old enough to stand trial as an adult, he broke into the Emily Dickinson house.  He was standing downstairs smoking a cigarette when he heard a sound that startled him.   Sam inadvertently dropped his cigarette as he rushed from the house to avoid being discovered.  The sound which drove Sam from the historic home was probably related to the house tour guide and her husband, the Colemans, who were upstairs having sex on Emily Dickinson’s bed.    

The fire that resulted from Sam’s carelessly tossed cigarette destroyed Emily Dickinson’s home, killed the Colemans, and sent Sam to prison for ten years.  

Fast forward nearly twenty years and Sam has served his time in prison, cut ties with his parents and community, graduated from college, started as career as a “packaging” scientist, married, and fathered two children.    He hasn’t told his wife, Anne Marie, and kids much about his parents, other than a fabrication that they had died in a house fire.  When Sam and Anne Marie’s second child was born, she decided that they had outgrown his old college apartment and they began looking for a good community in which to raise their children.    Anne Marie had heard that Amherst might be the perfect place to raise a family, and Sam, who had never shared any of his Amherst past with her, eventually agreed to move to a new subdivision outside of Amherst – a place called Camelot.

And that is basically where this tale begins.  One day as Sam is mowing his lawn, he is confronted by Thomas Coleman, the son of the couple who died in the fire that consumed the Emily Dickinson house.    Young Mr. Coleman tells Anne Marie that Sam has been having an affair with his wife, a lie that Sam admits to rather than telling Anne Marie that he has been lying to her for years about his past – and from that point Sam’s life begins to unravel – and the homes of famous writers from New England begin to burn.

Brock Clarke’s novel is about stories and the ways in which they define and control our lives.  He also uses it to take potshots at some of the staples of the literary community as he tackles memoirists who make up memoirs rather than writing their stories as fiction,  people who join book clubs to use primarily as therapy groups, and buffoonish authors who see their work as all-encompassing and yet inexplicable.

“An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England” is a complicated work of fiction presented in the guise of a memoir.    While the over-arching plot may seem a bit outrageous, it is made believable by the characters whose idiosyncratic lives come together to form the fabric of this surprisingly satisfying tale.   The book left me with an urge to pack a few classic American novels and take a long, meandering drive through the backwoods and byways of New England.

(Note:  As a bonus, there is an afterword in which the narrator, Sam Pulsifer, interviews the author, Brock Clarke.   Their “discussion” adds a layer of enhancement to this story about the power of stories.)