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

  PRAISE FOR

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

  “Wildly, unpredictably funny…. Although it is his fourth book, it feels like the bright debut of an ingeniously arch humorist, one whose hallmark is a calm approach to insanely improbable behavior…. The parodies here are priceless.”

  —The New York Times

  “Funny, profound…. Clarke’s novel is an agile melding of faux-memoir and mystery. Spot-on timing gives it snap, and a rich sense of perversity … lends texture. It’s a seductive book with a payoff on every page.”

  —People magazine, Critic’s Choice, four stars

  “Clarke’s novel sizzles. This straight-faced, postmodern comedy scorches all things literary, from those moldy author museums to the excruciating question-and-answer sessions that follow public readings…. They’re all singed under Clarke’s crisp wit.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “[An] absurd, if weirdly compelling faux ‘memoir,’ which takes aim at the danger of stories—at least false ones…. Gets at some unexpectedly poignant emotional truths.”

  —USA Today

  “An Arsonist’s Guide contains sentences and images that could stand beside the works of the former owners of the literary residences put to flame.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Absurdly hilarious…. Searingly funny.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Enormously funny…. A cautionary tale about the strength of stories to burn a path of destruction.”

  —The Chicago Sun-Times

  “Darkly comic…. Bittersweet and ultimately sorrowful, Clarke’s book suggests that we’re all subject to the whims of the stories we tell ourselves.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “This is a sad, funny, absurd, and incredibly moving novel. Its comic mournfulness, its rigorous, break-neck narrative, delight. Bless Brock Clarke and his spookily human arsonist. They’ve given us a wonderful book about life, literature, and the anxieties of their influence.”

  —Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

  “Clarke turns up the heat on New England’s classic novelists—and their homes…. Moving and memorable.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “Clarke has the ability to crack us up with his clever insight into human nature and suburban angst, but there is also a depth to his characters that helps raise the story above straight satire.”

  —MSNBC.com

  “Every bit as quirky and engaging as its title…. Evokes John Irving, with a dollop of Tom Wolfe tossed in for good measure…. Pulisfer’s disarming charm and witty insight carry the day.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “While I was reading this dark, funny, tragic novel, I would look at the people around me and feel sorry for them because they weren’t occupying the same world I was; they weren’t living, as I was, inside the compelling, off-kilter atmosphere of Brock Clarke’s pages. This is the best book I’ve read in a long time.”

  —Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel

  “Both philosophical and deeply funny…. Resembles Richard Ford crossed with Borges: a thoughtful, playful exploration of everyday life, as well as a metafictional examination of the purpose stories serve in our lives.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Sam’s disasters are good news for readers … particularly if they like their comic novels with a sharp edge, witty commentary and hilarious allusions.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “[A] wacky and wildly imaginative novel…. It’s nearly impossible not to care about and laugh with Sam. He’s a misunderstood outcast, a knight errant on a quest to clear his name. But in this hilarious and original novel he does much more: He appeals to the fool in everyone and comforts us in knowing that we’re not alone.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Part mystery, part comedy, part insightful memoir, Arsonist defies the conventional formula in producing a wildly entertaining novel.”

  —Daily Candy

  “Brock Clarke flames entire genres of fiction in this clever and often hilarious tale.”

  —Paste

  “[A] brilliant novel.”

  —People, Style Watch issue

  “Sam Pulsifer is now one of the great naïfs of American literature…. [This] rollicking, hilariously and subtly heartbreaking novel … is at the same time a wrenching examination of what happens when you pry up the floorboards, flake off the stucco, open up the books and see what’s really going on between husband and wife, parents and children, friends and lovers.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “An incisive satire that takes on everything from authors to reading groups and Harry Potter.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “A witty, intensely clever piece of writing that scrutinizes our relationship with stories and storytelling…. Clarke composes with panache, packing his pages with offbeat humor, vibrant characters, and tender scenes.”

  —Utne Reader

  “Rousing…. The antic goings-on and over-the-top characters are so entertaining.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Brock Clarke is our generation’s Richard Ford … [and] Sam Pulsifer is an Everyman suburban nomad, a literary misadventurer who is as insightful and doomed as he is heartbreakingly hilarious…. I love this book.”

  —Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment

  “A loopily shambolic narrative as captivating as its feckless firebug narrator…. The perfect end-of-summer book, funny and sharp and smart enough to ease the transition from beach to boardroom. Just don’t leave it near a pack of matches.”

  —Village Voice

  “It’s a blast—its story line rollicking and often absurd, its themes satisfyingly hefty.”

  —Time Out Chicago

  “Like TV analysts who deconstruct Tiger Woods’ swing, it’s not easy to do justice to writers like Brock Clarke. But I know just enough to recommend An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England to anyone, and especially to anyone who wants to read the best, newest manifestation of great American writing.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “A multilayered, flame-filled adventure about literature, lies, love and life…. Sam is equal parts fall guy and tour guide in this bighearted and wily jolt to the American literary legacy.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “A subversively compelling, multilayered novel about the profound impact of literature…. Rendered masterfully by Clarke, Sam’s narrative tone is so engagingly guileless that the reader can’t help but empathize with him, even as his life begins to fall apart within the causal connections of these fires…. A serious novel that is often very funny and will be a page-turning pleasure for anyone who loves literature.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  ALSO BY BROCK CLARKE

  Carrying the Torch

  What We Won’t Do

  The Ordinary White Boy

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

  A NOVEL BY

  BROCK CLARKE

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill • 2008

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2007 by Brock Clarke.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, September 2008.
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br />   Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2007.

  All rights reserved.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Although this novel is written as if it were a memoir, none of the events depicted in it are remotely true. The home of the poet Emily Dickinson still stands elegantly in place on a lovely street in Amherst, Massachusetts. Also still standing are the homes of Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, and assorted other literary greats mentioned herein. As for the characters and their actions, they either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  eISBN-13: 9781565126381

  At the end of an hour we saw a far-away town sleeping in a valley by a winding river; and beyond it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with towers and turrets, the first I had ever seen out of a picture.

  “Bridgeport?” said I, pointing.

  “Camelot,” said he.

  — Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

  The memoirs written by the members of the Autobiographical Association … already had a number of factors in common. One of them was nostalgia, another was paranoia, a third was a transparent craving on the part of the authors to appear likeable. I think they probably lived out their lives on the principle that what they were, and did, and wanted, should above all look pretty. Typing out and making sense out of these compositions was an agony to my spirit until I hit on the method of making them expertly worse; and everyone concerned was delighted with the result.

  — Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent

  Part One

  1

  I, Sam Pulsifer, am 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 and, as letters from scholars of American literature tell me, for which I will continue to pay a high price long into the not-so-sweet hereafter. This story is locally well known, and so I won’t go into it here. It’s probably enough to say that in the Massachusetts Mt. Rushmore of big, gruesome tragedy, there are the Kennedys, and Lizzie Borden and her ax, and the burning witches at Salem, and then there’s me.

  So anyway, I served my time, and since the sentencing judge took mercy on me, I served my time at the minimum-security prison up at Holyoke. At Holyoke there were bond analysts and lawyers and day traders and city managers and school administrators, all of them caught with their hands in the till and nothing at all like me, an eighteen-year-old accidental arsonist and murderer with blood and soot on his hands and a heavy heart and plenty to learn and no high school diploma. I flung in and tried. I took a biweekly self-improvement seminar called the College of Me, in which I learned the life-changing virtues of patience, hard work, and positive attitude, and in which I earned my GED. I also hung around this group of high-stepping bond analysts from Boston who were in the clink for insider trading. While they were inside, the bond analysts had set out to write their fond, freewheeling memoirs about their high crimes and misdemeanors and all the cashish—that’s the way they talked—they had made while screwing old people out of their retirement funds and kids out of their college savings. These guys seemed to know everything, the whole vocabulary of worldly gain and progress, so I paid extra attention during their memoir-brainstorming sessions, listened closely to their debates over how much the reading public did or did not need to know about their tortured childhoods in order to understand why they needed to make so much money in the manner in which they made it. I took notes as they divided the world between those who had stuff taken from them and those who took, those who did bad things in a good way—gracefully, effortlessly—and those bumblers who bumbled their way through life.

  “Bumblers,” I said.

  “Yes,” they said, or one of them did. “Those who bumble.”

  “Give me an example,” I said, and they stared at me with those blue-steel stares they were born with and didn’t need to learn at Choate or Andover, and they stared those stares until I realized that I was an example, and so this is what I learned from them: that I was a bumbler, I resigned myself to the fact and had no illusions about striving to be something else—a bond analyst or a memoirist, for instance—and just got on with it. Life, that is.

  I learned something from everyone, is the point, even while I was fending off the requisite cell-block buggerer, a gentle but crooked corporate accountant at Arthur Andersen who was just finding his true sexual self and who told me in a cracked, aching voice that he wanted me—wanted me, that is, until I told him I was a virgin, which I was, and which, for some reason, made him not want me anymore, which meant that people did not want to sleep with twenty-eight-year-old male virgins, which I thought was useful to know.

  Finally, I learned to play basketball from this black guy named Terrell, which was one of the big joys of my life in prison and which ended badly. Terrell, who had written checks to himself when he was the Worcester city treasurer, was in prison for the last three of my ten years, and whenever he would beat me in one-on-one (this wasn’t often, even when I was first learning to play, because although he was very strong, Terrell was also shorter than I was and about as sleek as a fire hydrant; plus, he was twice my age and his knees were completely shot and would crack like dry wood when he ran)—whenever he would beat me, Terrell would yell out, “I’m a grown-ass man.” That sounded good, and so after our last game, which I won easily, I also yelled out, “I’m a grown-ass man.” Terrell thought I was mocking him, so he started hitting me around the head, and since I get passive in the face of true anger, I just stood there and took Terrell’s abuse and didn’t try to defend myself. As the guards dragged him to solitary, he promised that he would beat on me a little more once he got out, which he shouldn’t have, because, of course, the guards then gave him more solitary than they might have otherwise. By the time Terrell got out, I’d already been released from prison and was home, living with my parents.

  That didn’t work out too well, living with my parents. For one, my burning down the Emily Dickinson House caused them some real heartbreak, because my mother was a high school English teacher, my father an editor for the university press in town, and beautiful words really mattered to them; they didn’t care anything for movies or TV, but you could always count on a good poem to make them cry or sigh meaningfully. For another, their neighbors in Amherst weren’t exactly happy that I’d burned down the town’s most famous house and killed two of its citizens in the bargain, so they took it out on my parents. People never had trouble finding our old, creaking house on Chicopee Street: it was always the one with the driveway that had been spray-painted MURDERER! (which I understand) or FASCIST! (which I don’t), or with some quote from Dickinson herself that seemed to promise vengeance, but you could never tell exactly what the vengeance might be, because there were a lot of words and the spray-painter always got sloppy and illegible from fatigue or maybe overemotion. It only got worse when I went home after prison. There was some picketing by the local arts council and some unwelcome, unflattering news coverage, and neighborhood kids who cared nothing about Emily Dickinson or her house started egging the place and draping our noble birches with toilet paper, and for a while there it was like Halloween every day. Then things really got serious and someone slashed every tire on my parents’ Volvo, and once, in a fit of anger or grief, someone hurled a Birkenstock through one of our bay windows. It was a man’s right shoe, size twelve.

  All of this happened within the first month of my return home. At the end of the month, my parents suggested I move out. I remember it was August, because the three of us were sitting on our front porch and the neighbors’ flags were out, caught between the Fourth of July and Labor Day and in full flutter, and the light was spectral through the maple and birch leaves and it was all very pretty. You can imagine how much my parents’ request that I leave home wounded me, even though the College of Me said that life after prison wouldn’t be easy and that I shouldn’t f
ool myself into thinking otherwise.

  “But where should I go?” I asked them.

  “You could go anywhere,” my mother said. Back then I thought she was the harder parent of the two and had had high hopes for me, so the disappointment weighed on her more heavily. I remember that my mother was a dry well at my trial when the jury brought back the verdict, although my father had wept loudly and wetly, and he was starting to cry now, too. I hated to see them like this: one cold, the other weepy. There was a time when I was six and they taught me to skate on a pond at the Amherst public golf course. The ice was so thick and clean and glimmery that the fish and errant golf balls were happy to be frozen in it. The sun was streaking the falling snow, making it less cold. When I finally made it around the perimeter of the pond without falling, my mother and father gave me a long ovation; they were a united front of tickled, proud parenthood. Those times were gone: gone, gone, forever gone.

  “Maybe you could go to college, Sam,” my father said after he’d gotten ahold of himself.

  “That’s a good idea,” my mother said. “We’d be happy to pay for it.”

  “OK,” I said, because I was looking at them closely, really scrutinizing them for the first time since I’d been home from prison, and I could see what I’d done to them. Before I 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 (when I was a boy, my father left us for three years, and after he left us, my mother started telling me tall tales about the Emily Dickinson House, and all of this is part of the larger story I will get to and couldn’t avoid even if I wanted). 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. A few minutes earlier, I’d been telling them about my virginity and the lecherous Arthur Andersen accountant. My parents, as far as I knew back then, were both modest Yankees who didn’t like to hear about anyone’s private business, but the College of Me insisted that it was healthy and necessary to tell the people we love everything. Now I was regretting it. 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.