An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

(Algonquin, 320 pages. $24.95)

by Brock Clarke

America lives in the age of the memoir and the confessional. It's the defining literary legacy of our time, much as insanely long novels marked the Victorian Age.

Sure, we didn't invent the genre from scratch, but it might be time to point out we've reached an unhealthy saturation point. Currently, the top three books on The New York Times non-fiction paperback best-seller list are memoirs, and it seems any manner of lesser literary lights are prepared to air their dirty laundry, tell all and work out their personal demons in public.

Even the spectacular crash-and-burn of the less-than-truthful James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) didn't dampen our enthusiasm, so it's nice to see at least one American writer willing to set a match to the whole enterprise.

In the spectacularly titled An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Brock Clarke gives us a sharp new novel that reads like a memoir, a scathing satire that reminds us of the horrors of truth-telling.

His main character, Sam Pulsipher, is our everyman, a bumbler who as a teenager accidentally torched the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts., destroying an American landmark and killing two people.

Sam spends ten years in prison and comes out determined to leave his past behind. He finishes college with an absurd degree in packaging science, gets married, has two kids and moves to the reassuringly bland suburb of Camelot. But the truth will out, and now that other famous literary landmarks are being burned down, Sam becomes the primary suspect.

It's a crisp story that moves along like a detective novel. But what makes it come alive is Clarke's sharp wit, dropping funny, deadpan observations about suburbia "It was like building a 'sub' without first building the 'urb"' and literary life throughout the book.

His hottest torch comes for the memoir. He stumbles into a Book Warehouse and notices the memoir section has taken over, "like the Soviet Union of literature, having gobbled up the smaller, obsolete states of fiction and poetry". He finds that most novels are just thinly disguised memoirs.

But the mere existence of the memoir section makes Sam and book clubs everywhere feel better to know "there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was".

And God bless Clarke for being brave enough to take on a certain literary wizard of the moment. You'll know which book he's calling out, even without naming it.

The book club is dressed as Harry Potteresque witches and wizards, trying to get in touch with the reading habits of their kids. "It doesn't matter whether the book is good or not, in a sense," says one wizard. "And besides, in a sense, the book has to be good. It's part of the culture."

Beyond the vicious satire, however, there is serious business in the Arsonist's Guide. Clarke has a lovely sense of the meanings that hide behind what we say and the contradictions of personality.

An Arsonist's Guide is a smart novel about people who desperately need to reinvent themselves, perhaps without knowing who they were in the first place.