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Loading... An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (2007)by Brock Clarke
I am more often surprised by the ends of books than not these days. Am I losing my plot-fu? Am I narratively challenged? This is the second book in a year which has discombobulated me. (The first was Mark Watson's Bullet Points.) The narrator was so bland, so dreary that I wasn't prepared for the sudden horror. I think the author wanted to be clever but instead he was depressed. (  ) veracite | Apr 5, 2013 |  Well, trying to read this book right after finishing [book:A Moveable Feast] didn't do it (or me, really) any favors. Perhaps that made it more likely to annoy me. The fact that it was awful didn't help, either. ( ) cat-ballou | Apr 2, 2013 | I loved this book. The narrator is a humorous self-deprecating bumbler with some down-to-earth views about life and luck. The story is funny and sad. The characters are delightfully weird and flawed. The "mystery" is compelling. The settings are rich and lively. The social commentary is witty. I couldn't put it down. (  ) malrubius | Apr 2, 2013 | I did not like this book. __________ I am stuck. Got a few chapters in, but this author is the type who loves to foreshadow everything. "And that is why I ended up in prison and so and so ended up blah, blah, blah, but we'll get to that later." I can deal with this every so often, but tell the freaking story, don't tell me what you're going to tell me later! Had to put this away for a bit. The premise is interesting so will likely come back to it later. ( ) Krumbs | Mar 31, 2013 | Darkly funny. Helps if you have read lots of Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. And if you think that memoirs are often novels in disguise. (  ) beckydj | Mar 30, 2013 |
Eighty pages into this, his second novel, Brock Clarke takes a seeming swipe at his first. His narrator, Sam Pulsifer, is wandering through a bookstore when he begins to feel bad for fiction and poetry, those “obsolete states” that have been “mostly gobbled up” by the store’s memoir section, “the Soviet Union of literature.”  “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.
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Sam Pulsifer is determined to put his past behind him after serving a prison term for torching an American literary landmark and killing two people in the blaze, but when the homes of notable American writers begin to go up in smoke, his history makes him the prime suspect.… (more)
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