An Arsonist’s Guide To Writers’ Homes In New England by Brock Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This started out as a solid three-star book, worked its way up to four via cleverness, and then got bogged down in a bit of tedium and down to three again. But I’m nostalgic for that cleverness, so call it three point five, rounded up to four. I’m going to justify this by saying that I’m looking forward to reading Brock Clarke’s other books, which is praise enough.
An Arsonist’s Guide is silly, but it’s such a subtle silliness that you kind of have to pay attention. It pops up here and there, an almost hidden taste of absurdity. This casts the main character as something of a fool, allowing the reader to doubt the veracity of his passions at almost every turn. He’s a self-proclaimed “bumbler,” a man prone to “accidents,” and while you take those accidents at face value at first, you start to wonder about them towards the end.
And it’s that end where I got a bit frustrated, as I say, with tedium. I wanted some kind of resolution, if not revelation. New characters keep showing up, each as stand-out exquisite as the next, and I don’t know whether to cast them as environmental or willful. When we finally do get a few histories revealed, my reaction was “really” and the same time as “how would that even work.”
I guess the point is that if readers’ willfully suspend disbelief, so do people in real-life, with the expectation that their own life will tell a story. It’s easy to tell lies to people who want to hear a narrative, not the cold, inconvenient truth. Or something.
But I liked it. The Arsonist’s Guide felt to me like what A Confederacy of Dunces would be if set in New England suburbs with a much humbler Ignatius J. Reilly. Brock Clarke has been compared to John Irving, and this character to Irving’s Garp (which I have not read) so I guess that says something for those of you who like that sort of thing.