An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke is the perfect start-off-summer-reading-strong choice.

As long as you don't mind coming off of your first summer read feeling not-so-warm-and-fuzzy.

The title of this novel (the brilliant title) suggested to me that the novel would be quite funny, with lots of literary inside jokes about Emily Dickinson and H.D. Thoreau to make us literary-types feel oh-so-clever and smug when we're done.

Not so much.

Instead, it reminded more of a John Irving novel (see the Must List), though with fewer perverted sex acts ending in violence.

What I mean by this is that as the protagonist bumbles his way through the plot (and I use this word intentionally, more on that later) this reader was led to wonder, "is there anything worse that can happen to this guy?" And, as with Irving, the answer is always yes.

Sam Pulsifer is an unreliable narrator to make Gene Forrester look downright dependable. (Click that link; I find it hilarious.) Sam pulls frequent Jane Eyres in attempts to explain himself to his audience, but his reassurances just made me trust him less. So the first-person Arsonist's Guide may be Sam's autobiography, it may be his novel, or it may be his autobiography ghost-written by a group of bond analysts with whom he spent ten years in minimum-security prison who now seek to blackmail him in order to turn a profit off of his disastrous misadventures. Half-way through the novel, Sam is approached by Morgan and G-off, the aforementioned bond analysts, who petition him:

Morgan said, "We want you to tell us how to burn down houses like the one you burned down. And after we do, we can write a book about it."

"An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England," G-off said. "We've already come up with the title."

Yeah.

So there's literal arson in this story, but I think, (and this is what makes me like it/bothers me about it) that its really much more about whether or not stories themselves should all be torched, since Sam/Brock seems to think they mostly just cause problems anyhow. Sam burns down a house, yes, and many other literary abodes go up in smoke throughout the novel, but Sam contends that it was a story that was actually to blame for the accidental conflagration that killed two people and changed the course of his life.

Rather than using literary allusion to make us readers feel like cool insiders, Brock instead mocks every piece of reading culture us book-bloggers hold dear. Sam encounters a Lit prof who doesn't "believe in literature,"an English teacher who is through with books, a book club that discusses everything but, and a late-night meeting of men and women dressed as witches and wizards whom he fears are Wiccans but turn out to be clutching "one of those children's books out of England." (Incidentally, Brock uses overwhelmingly famous examples of literary popular culture without naming them several times; a trick that I found particularly delightful.)

The professor and the teacher have shunned books because, as the professor puts it, she "[doesn't] want to be a character in the book my students are reading." She goes on, "I don't want to be the hard-bitten character who had endured tragedy and come out a better, more sympathetic person" (148). They seem to have been so negatively affected by books that they need to literally escape from them.

On the other hand, the even crazier book clubbers and wizards seem to operate under the delusion that there is something to be found in fiction that might actually make their lives better. They don't need the book so much as they need the object of the book to give themselves a place to put their problems. As the witches and wizards depart from their late night meeting, "there was a long sincere discussion about how very magical fog was and how they'd be sure to wake up their kids ... to show them the fog ... and then they'd compare the literary fog and the meteorological fog ..." (174). It's obvious Sam thinks this is a pretty dumb idea.

If all of this is confusing, well, yeah, it is. I have no idea what side Sam/Brock/the bond analysts want us to come down on. As the judge who sentenced Sam asks during his trial,

"Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story?"

Not to be too cute, but I haven't decided if this novel is a good story or a bad story. But it's worth spending time reading either way.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

With all due respect for the friend who recommended it to me, I am hard pressed to figure out why The Elegance of the Hedgehog is at the top of the New York Times best-sellers list. I suspect it is one of those books that lots of people buy because it is trendy and then never finish.

But maybe I'm missing something.

The novel is full of the types of maudlin, pseudo-philosophic sentences I would have copied into my diary when I was in high school:

In the split second while I saw the stem and the bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of Beauty ... Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea.

I will admit there is a slightly yogic quality to the novel. But it feels so heavy-handed it's hard to enjoy. Narrated by two alternating and supposedly kindred souls, the book is inconsistant, and this lack of integrity of voice makes it tiresome at times -- I felt myself rushing through one narrator to get on to the other.

Of the two narrators, Madame Renee Michel, concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, takes the novel to a higher plane. She, indeed, lives the mindful life amateur yogis aspire to.

But Paloma Joss, the "introspective" 12-year-old, rings false. Her reflections on the inferiority of all those around her are so predictably jaded that its exhausting. Worst of all, her voice appears in a different font -- a pet peeve of mine, and a bit of an insult to the reader, as though the voices are not sufficiently different to make the point of view clear.

Yes, the novel is a meditation on friendship. And perhaps it's simply because I spend so much time in the teen world, as a teacher of middle schoolers, that I found Paloma's voice so tiring. But her narration keeps the very adult portions of the book anchored to a far more narrow view of the world.

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Juot Diaz

At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, obese teenagers (see She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb) and repressive Central American regimes are two subjects that I do not particularly enjoy reading about. Obese teenagers depress me and repressive regimes highlight my ignorance regarding world history in a manner that makes me uncomfortable. But Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao describes the politics of the Dominican Republic so clearly, and is so compassionate and funny regarding Oscar and his dieting woes that neither of my hang-ups got in the way of the intensely moving experience of reading this book.

Somehow, family myth and political repression become one in this story, leaving Oscar strangely, yet effectively, peripheral. Narrated primarily by Junior, Oscar's sometime-roommate and Oscar's older sister Lola's sometime-lover, the book tells the story of the de Leon family and their "fuku," the family's word for, as Junior describes it in the novel's first pages, "the Curse and Doom of the New World."

The thing about the novel is that while it is, in many ways, the family saga you'd expect, the emotional impact is epic even beyond the extensive scope of the plot. Though it is about a family, to me this book is really about the de Leon women: their legendary beauty, their guts, their bodies, and their minds. Junior's casual, macho, street-smart voice, along with his persona as a self-professed womanizer make the stories of these formidable yet seemingly cursed women overwhelmingly powerful. Junior uses women in his life with a blatantly casual disregard, but he tells the stories of Lola and her ancestors with palpable respect.

Through Junior's frame narrative, it becomes clear that he is telling the story of a family to which he does not belong because its stories have impacted him enough to bring him to change his life entirely. It is his voice, and the seeming incongruity between his world view and the stories of the de Leon women, that is so unexpectedly moving. Paradoxically, Diaz manages to use a man's voice to give the women in the novel the real power.

This entry is about three years late, I guess, but I hope that my initial resistance to the novel underlines just how highly I recommend it.