Brocke Clarke, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

Sam Pulsifer made me furious. Pulsifer, the narrator of Clarke’s thoroughly engaging novel An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, simply refuses to act according to common sense when he encounters life-changing events. The two biggies–getting kicked out of his house and finding his parents in an “interesting” state–should have allowed the wronged Pulsifer to correct his mistake-riddled life. Alas, he doesn’t do so, and I’m left at times comparing Pulsifer to Thomas Covenant, the weak-kneed character from Stephen R. Donaldson’s sci/fi series. Couple this character trait with inexplicable circumstances–particularly involving Thomas Coleman, the orphan I wanted to punch–and I’m left scratching my head. But perhaps these elements are what make the novel so engaging and funny.

Yes, that’s right, funny. What’s not to laugh about a book that begins with Emily Dickinson’s house burning down–as long as we know it didn’t really happen. [If the arsonist went after Hawthorne's Old Manse, I would have jumped through the pages to stop it, but that speaks more to my own neurosis.] Clarke performs an amazing feat here: he takes a horrific set of circumstances, pushes us back for a different view, and allows us to see the silliness of it all. After Pulsifer destroys Dickinson’s house and is released from prison, we follow him through a bizarre path that allows him to both create and destroy his life. Now that’s comedy. At its best, Clarke’s writing echoes the strength of other writers–the gallows humor of T. C. Boyle, the funny academic caricature of Richard Russo, the Dupin-esque detective work of Poe, if Dupin were more of a bumbler.

Beyond the plot, though, Clarke has much to say about storytelling itself, and it is through these moments–even if they are far too few for my taste–that Clarke really shines. The central question Pulsifer draws from his experiences is, What is the effect of a story? That is, does a story directly affect a reader? At one point, he concludes, “Of course a story could produce a direct effect. Why would anyone tell one if it didn’t?” And at another moment, a reader tells him that she likes the memoir she is reading because “It’s so useful,” a statement that sends him past the pitiful fiction-section of a bookstore to the memoirs, only to put one of these books back with sadness: “I was grateful to the books for teaching me . . . that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was.” What then is the effect of a story? Perhaps, he later notes, people read “not so that they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.” That’s a sad claim I should think about the next time I find myself perusing the customers at a coffee shop. While not the metafiction of, say, John Barth, these moments certainly beg us to ask ourselves why we read and why we write. Clarke never offers a direct answer, but the questions continue to resonate even after I turned the last page.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

A colleague of mine lent me this wonderful novel, which won the National Book Foundation Award for Young People’s Literature. With the exception of the Harry Potter collection, I don’t find myself reading too many books aimed for readers in grades 6-10, so I didn’t know what to expect. Would this be a silly, flattened version of Alexie’s otherwise powerful writing, or would he infuse this novel with smart, nuanced ideas engaging to young and old readers alike? I can say emphatically that the latter is the case. I will admit that I have a bias here–I find Alexie to be one of the strongest writers today, and I teach his work nearly every semester. I also thoroughly enjoyed his other 2007 novel, Flight, which draws together fantasy with history and an alarming ability to deftly (if briefly) show how different historical figures experienced cultural clash and destruction.

I was therefore happy to see that in The Absolutely True Diary Alexie refuses to play it safe for younger readers and instead offers a moving account of a boy torn between his family and friends on the Spokane Indian Reservation and his decision to attend a primarily-white school off the rez. At once humorous and moving, the novel begs us to view the complex world through Junior’s eyes, and by the end, rather than erasing doubt from a young reader’s imagination, Alexie has somehow managed to leave Junior’s world as frightening, funny, and sad as it began. That is, he concludes the novel convincingly without silencing any of the powerful ambiguities that define his “adult” fiction, which is what I had feared going into this novel.

I would also add that there is little new here, and while “recycling” material might be a reason to dismiss some writers, for this novel it serves as a welcome addition to the characters and settings that populate Alexie’s canon. We have Junior, of course, who figures into Alexie’s other works, alongside an alcoholic father (sometimes pleasant and other times destructive), a caring if troubled mother, a cluster of friends–drunk and not, friendly and not–and a reservation that is, at once, both home and prison. We have seen these elements before, most notably in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but for some reason they remain disturbingly fresh. I can only hope that The Absolutely True Diary serves to introduce a new generation of readers to the power and potential of Sherman Alexie’s writing.

J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

First published in 1980, this novel, like Gilead years later, won a major literary prize (the Nobel rather than the Pulitzer), and, again like Gilead, it won for a very good reason. Coetzee deftly creates a powerful account of an empire in fear from those beyond its borders, a darker-skinned, shadowy group that supposedly poses a threat both to security and moral righteousness. What I found most powerful about this short novel, though, was its resonances in 2007, and indeed this timeless novel, set in an unknown land, begs us to situate this understanding of threatened power and coercion through fear wherever we may. We all know who the “barbarians” in this novel are, even if this account pushes its different readers around the globe and back and forth through centuries. I strongly recommend this book and wonder if there will ever be a time when it will cease to be so sadly pertinent.