An arsonist's guide to writers' homes in New England

In Brock Clarke's novel, somebody's burning down the homes of famous writers. WE all know that plenty of kids took to Route 66 after reading "On the Road," but few juveniles committed thrill-kill murders after paging through "Crime and Punishment." Thus Brock Clarke's publishers apparently do not fear that his new novel, his second, will tempt some unhinged teenager to set fire to Emily Dickinson's house the way his protagonist, Sam Pulsifer, does. This is despite Clarke's lovely descriptions of houses as they burn, baby, burn: "There is plenty that is beautiful about a house burning hot and high in the dark, cold night: the way flames shoot out of the chimney like a Roman candle; the way the asphalt roof shingles sizzle and pop; the way the smoke pours and pours and pours heavenward like a message to the house's great beyond." Sam was 18 when he burned Dickinson's house, accidentally killing a couple having sex on the poet's bed. (The episode was doubly horrible, Sam says, 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.") These deaths got him a dime in a minimum-security prison. At the novel's beginning, Sam has been out for several years, and he seems like one of those hapless Richard Brautiganesque 1960s man-children. He is a 30-something virgin who calls his genitals "private parts." His fiancée, Anne Marie, asks him, "Why aren't you inviting your parents to our wedding?" He lies: "Because they died. ... Their house burned down." Later he confesses: "I wanted to tell Anne Marie everything - about the Emily Dickinson House and how I'd burned it, accidentally, and the people I'd killed. ... I should have told her right away ... but new love is so fragile and I thought I would wait until it got stronger." He waits too long. Before you know it, the now-adult son of the couple who died in the fire shows up at Sam's suburban home and enacts a form of revenge that ultimately causes Sam to have to move back in with his parents. And before you know it, the houses of other famous writers - Frost, Twain, Wharton, Hawthorne, Thoreau - burn down one by one. Sam is suspected. His attempt to find the real arsonist leads him to wonder if one of his newly alcoholic parents could have committed the torchings. Or is it a team of ex-con financial guys he met in the slammer? One of them publishes a "memoir" plagiarized from Sam's verbal reminiscences of the postcards his father sent him when he'd ditched his family for three years. That abandonment, incidentally, compelled Sam's mother to fill her young son's head with H.P. Lovecraftian horror-style lies about the interior of Emily Dickinson's house, lies that motivated her son's break-in to begin with. Clarke knows a lot about arson but appears to be ignorant of what the firebug narrator of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" knew: books burn swell. Imagine tossing a lighted gasoline-soaked book into an open window - what sweet household deflagration would follow! As Sam delivers rants against Hemingwayesque he-man memoirs and false memoirs and memoirs in general, one suspects that maybe memoirs feed flame best of all. In a metafictional moment, Sam even comes across a copy of Clarke's own "real" first novel, "The Ordinary White Boy": "I plucked it off the shelf. After all, I'd been an ordinary white boy once, before the killing and burning, and maybe I could be one again someday, and maybe this book could help me do it, even if it was a novel and not useful, generically speaking." After Sam reads this book's back cover and learns that the author was once a reporter in upstate New York, he glances at the first sentence - "I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York" - and sets the book down in disgust. This is memoir disguised as fiction! "An Arsonist's Guide" begins with an epigraph from Muriel Spark that seems to be used to imply that this novel, too, is autobiographical. The book's first chapter began as a short story published seven years ago in The New England Review; at the end of that version, the narrator promised never again to tell the arsonist's story of Emily Dickinson's house. It is to comic fiction's advantage that Clarke reneged. "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. There is a single sentence of dialogue (unprintable here) that will paralyze any Willa Gather scholar. There is a lone paragraph describing a woman's head aflame - "Then she pulled out a lighter," part of it reads, "flicked it, and grabbed a clump of her hair" - that could compel Stephen King to increase the fire insurance on his own New England house. Hell, Clarke himself had better buy a fire extinguisher or two from Home Depot. Who knows how many crazy firebug readers this book will goad? As Emily Dickinson wrote: You cannot put a fire out; A thing that can ignite Can go, itself, without a fan Upon the slowest night. David Bowman is the author of two novels, "Let the Dog Drive" and "Bunny Modern." He has recently completed his third.