On the Shelf book review
Lynn Bonney, Special to the Gazette
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Yes, Sam Pulsifer will readily admit, he is the one who burned down the Emily Dickinson home in Amherst. But, he will insist, it was an accident. And, yes, two people died in the fire — but they shouldn’t even have been in the house. Who would have thought that the couple would seize a moment to make love on the poet’s bed?
Sam tells his story, forthrightly and pathetically, in “An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England,” selected as a 2008 Notable Book by the American Library Association. In the hands of author Brock Clarke, Sam’s memoir is a mixture of comedy and tragedy reminiscent of “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
For his venture into accidental arson, Sam serves 10 years in prison, where he graduates from the euphemistically named “University of Me” and gets to know a cadre of former bond-traders, with whom he shares his personal history. Sam’s father, a book editor for a university press, abandoned the family for three years, but he kept in touch with Sam through postcards telling of his travels and adventures. One of the bond-traders will later claim those adventures as his own in a best-selling memoir.
Sam was raised by his schoolteacher mother, who introduced him to literature and told him child-frightening stories about the Dickinson house — stories that eventually would prompt Sam to break in and start the inadvertent fateful fire.
Out of prison, Sam enrolls in a college so close to failure that it will accept anyone who applies for admission. He finds his niche as a packing-materials major and falls in love with a fellow student, the beautiful Anne Marie, who is majoring in plastic lids. Naïve, awkward and ashamed, Sam cannot bring himself to tell Anne Marie about his past. He won’t even invite his parents to their wedding. Instead he tells Anne Marie that they died when their house burned down.
He doesn’t see his parents, even after his young family moves to Camelot, a suburban development not far from Amherst. And life seems to be good until the day the son whose parents died in the Dickinson housefire arrives to exact a revenge that forces Sam to move back in with his parents.
But then, something happens. The homes of other famous New England authors — Samuel Clemens, Robert Frost, Herman Melville, among them — are hit by mysterious fires. And Sam Pulsifer is the likely suspect.
Sam decides to track down the arsonist on his own. Could it be the bond-traders? The vengeful orphan, who seems to have taken Sam’s place in Anne Marie’s life? He finds many suspects, but the only thing he is sure of is his innocence.
In telling Sam’s story, Clarke skewers many aspects of the literary world: academics, writers’ workshops, book groups, the plethora of memoirs on bookshelves — all come in for their share of barbs. But ultimately, this is a book about literature, love and forgiveness and the unexpected nobility of an unlikely hero.
F Emporia Public Library staff and volunteers write “On the Shelf.”