Wow! Another highly lauded critical success turns out to be a rather glib, empty meditation on contemporary glibness and emptiness.

In AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE TO WRITERS' HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND, protagonist Sam Pulsifer accidentally sets fire to Emily Dickinson's home with a cigarette when trespassing as a teenager. A married couple is also trespassing upstairs and burns to death, and Pulsifer is sent to jail. Upon his release he attempts to change his identity but is of course dogged by his past.

Is this an allegory? I don't think so. It's not as funny as Sam Lipsyte or Mark Leyner, but because the subject revolves around famous writers, somehow it came off as literary enough to entrance a literary house to publish it. There is the same sort of hangdog pathos that one finds in some Lethem or in Charles Yu's Third Class Superhero, but this book just isn't as smart.

If you find this book in the one-dollar bin, it may be worth reading one day when you really don't want to think. It's sort of a INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME with a very, very thin literary veneer.

If there is any message that one can extract from the book-- and I feel very cautious here, because my sense is that it's more of a faux-subversive lark-- it's that a lot of people really feel hostility toward dead writers. If anything, I get the sense that the real hostility is toward thought, toward history, toward Enlightenment. The people in this book would rather be entertained.