Clarke's affectless account torches the literary scene
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
By Brock Clarke
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 303 pp., $23.95
Every so often, who knows why, a new literary aesthetic announces itself - an approach, a tonality, a way of setting up scenes and characters that clearly has to do with how the authors, and those readers who embrace them, experience reality. If there is not progress in the arts, there is certainly change.
I first caught wind of what seemed to be a distinct - and unsettling - new literary take on things reading Donald Antrim's short novel, "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World," and then I noted it soon after in work by writers like Ben Marcus, George Saunders, and Colson Whitehead. I'm sure they're not the only ones.
What struck me in all cases was the writers' way of staging reality. To begin with, they all deployed a style of affectlessness, even in presentation of moments when affect is ostensibly being expressed. This by itself dates back at least to Hemingway. What was different here was what felt like a carefully gauged disconnect between an action or event and emotion. I had an ongoing sense that something was "off," but a sense, too, that only a disappointingly dull reader would be looking for the old kinds of resonances. I would liken it to the black humor of decades past, except that it has a different edge; this tone seems occasioned not by the prospect of the Bomb so much as of a world permanently cut off from verities. Post-post-modern.
Brock Clarke's "An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England" is a paradigm instance of this sensibility. The novel represents narrator Sam Pulsifer's attempt to compile - and account for the compiling of - the eponymous "guide." Pulsifer has just returned to his hometown of Amherst to move in with his parents and try to rebuild his life after serving time in prison for having accidentally burned down poet Emily Dickinson's famous house: The fire caused the deaths of two people who had sneaked in to tryst on the writer's bed.
The tone is established right away. "That didn't work out too well," declares Sam, "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." I hear this deliberate, almost sinister insincerity adhering to every page, and it seems to me very much part of Clarke's design on the reader.
The arson premise is absurd and unlikely, and from it unfurl more and increasingly preposterous developments, including, centrally, a resumption of burnings, or attempted burnings, of the homes of other famous New England writers - Edward Bellamy, Mark Twain, Robert Frost. Pulsifer, who naturally comes under immediate suspicion, is not the arsonist, but neither is he blameless. Scene by scene Clarke reveals a web of connection that includes the grown son of one of the victims, a group of Pulsifer's fellow prison inmates, former bond traders now on the streets again, and his own now-flagrantly alcoholic parents, of whom our narrator remarks with characteristic remove: "They looked like skeletons dressed in corduroys and loafers. Their eyes were sunken and wanting to permanently retreat all the way back into their skulls."
The author is delivering, no question, a deliberate, comically muted slap in the face to our whole societal construct of the literary, almost as if it represents something emblematically heinous. The monuments are attacked, of course, and with them the boosterish idea of "importance." But Clarke also has sharp set pieces throughout that mock contemporary literary rituals and practices, notably book clubs and readings.
Here, in a scene that might be tipping its hat to Don DeLillo's brilliant "White Noise," Clarke wraps his tone more tightly than usual to its targets. In a bookstore, watching a discussion group, Sam observes: "A man (he was the only other man there . . . ) in his fifties, wearing a shiny warm-up jacket scarred with multiple zippers and Velcro patches, said that he read the book in one sitting and then immediately went and hugged his father's gravestone. . . . 'I got all dirty from hugging the gravestone,' the man said, 'but I don't care. It felt good to get dirty.' "
Couched as a memoir, "An Arsonist's Guide" is a morbidly tuned, at times hysterical, send-up of this publicly confidential genre, its hierarchies of dysfunction, and salvationist subtexts. Still, one may well ask: Why this intense animus against all things literary? If Clarke were not as widely hailed as a rising star among younger fiction writers, I might guess that the whole effort is a writer's not-so-thinly veiled retaliation for some long-held grievance, some cosmic snub.
"An Arsonist's Guide" concludes with various confessions and revelations, and narrative threads are tied up, but somehow this doesn't seem to be the point. Rather, the plot finally seems to be a vehicle, a construction on which Clarke can hang his disquieting prose. That prose communicates a feeling of such anomie that I had to wonder how literature will survive its gifted servants. But I did also find myself humming Peggy Lee's old standard "Is That All There Is?" Seeing her house burn to the ground, Lee asks: "Is that all there is to a fire?" To which she responds, shifting from speech to song: "If that's all there is, my friends, / Then let's keep dancing / Let's break out the booze."
Sven Birkerts is the author, most recently, of "Reading Life: Books for the Ages." 