Author Brock Clarke has said that plumbing is as noble a career as writing fiction. That’s a fresh perspective, and one you’ll seldom hear from the literati or the bastions of higher education. What that means to you and me is that Clarke understands, recognizes and experiences the same struggles we all do in the day-to-day—making relationships work, understanding family, wrestling with the realities and falsehoods of our own self-image. By extension, so does Sam Pulsifer, the protagonist of Clarke’s newly published novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. What makes the two different is that Sam is a bumbler, whose ineptitude affords us not only the chance to laugh at him loudly and often, but also to watch as he tries to piece together and understand what is essentially the human condition. The result is a book that is both thought provoking and highly entertaining.

Sam is an arsonist, though an accidental one. He burnt down the Emily Dickinson House, inadvertently killing one of the tour guides and her husband, who were amorously engaged in the writer’s upstairs bedroom. The story picks up with Sam’s release from a 10-year stint in white-collar prison, at which point he seems to straighten his life out. He finishes college, becomes a successful packaging scientist, gets married and has a family that he moves to a lifeless suburban development. But then more writers’ homes start burning down, and Sam is the primary suspect who must also become a detective to find the true arsonist and acquit himself. The ensuing events lay bare Sam’s history of near-pathological lying and his life begins to unravel.

Clarke, who teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, took time out recently to chat with Artvoice about the writing life, writers’ homes (though, notably, not his own) and his signal lack of desire to burn them down.

How’d you come up with the idea of an arsonist who, in theory, targets writers’ homes? I actually didn’t come up with that idea first. I had a bunch of interests—one of them was in memoir, one of them was in writing a mystery. I’d been to the Emily Dickinson House when I was a senior in college, and I’d loved Dickinson’s poetry and still do, but I couldn’t understand why I was at the house. I was there for a field trip, but it didn’t make any sense to me, what I was supposed to learn from the house that I hadn’t learned from the poetry and couldn’t learn from the poetry. I guess all of these things conspired for me to write the book; it’s not like I really wanted to write a book about this guy who burns down writers’ houses, that wasn’t the impetus at all. There were a bunch of interests that coalesced, and that’s where the book came from. It’s not like I have a long-standing interest in torching writer’s homes, or anyone else’s homes, for that matter.

How long ago was it when you went to the Dickinson House? I was a senior in college, so fall of 1989.

And it stuck with you that long? It did. Very few things happen to me, so certain things stick with me.

Did you visit other writers’ homes to do research for the book? I did. I mean I didn’t check out all of them, but I did check out a bunch of them. I probably went inside six, seven, eight houses. Other houses were closed when I got there, so I walked around the grounds and looked at them. There’s a book out there called A Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Miriam Levine, and I read her book and read up on the houses that I hadn’t visited. But then I didn’t use much of the research. I mean this isn’t my lame way of researching…I do other stuff, take all these scribbling little notes and then use about five percent of it. Maybe that’s true of everyone, but it’s frustrating for me. But nonetheless, yup, that’s what I did.

Your main character seems like a familiar type in your writing. What’s your fascination with the “noble failure”? There’s that great line by Donald Barthelme. He said something like “I’d rather have a wreck than a ship that sails. Things attach themselves to wrecks.” I think that people who are bumblers, who make messes of their lives, interesting fiction comes out of them because of the conflict. It’s not just their own lives they mess up; it’s other people’s lives. I think most of the characters I write—most guys, in particular—aren’t bad people, they just do some questionable things and then scramble to try to make up for them, and in doing so make the problem worse. I’m not really interested in heroic characters, I have to admit. That implies a certain kind of valor, a nobility. And I’m not interested in characters who have a lot of nobility, I’m interested in characters who’re trying to find it. But those who have it, I don’t know. I like characters who struggle, not characters who find their way through life easily.

An Arsonist’s Guide… deals a lot with the nature of truth as found in fiction and memoir. What’s your interest in that topic? Those are interesting topics for any writer. These are choices we make, you know. These things don’t come to us naturally. One isn’t born to be a fiction writer as opposed to being born a memoirist. For me, all writing is sometimes about the choices you make in being this or that kind of writer. In some ways it’s a sense of, or a critique of, your own choices and other people’s choices, usually implicitly. In my book, it’s explicitly…you know, where I make this part of the theme of the book. It’s also a metaphor for the way we live our lives. Do we live them by trying to tell the truth, or are we too easily convinced that we know what the truth is? If we are easily convinced, then do we get bitten in the ass when we find out that, in fact, it’s entirely subjective, that our truth, to other people, looks like a lie? So these things are all interconnected with me. I’m interested in books, but I’m also interested in how these issues reflect us outside of books…in the world, in our families, in love and death, in work, wherever.

Were you worried that the book would become too self-referential? Yeah. I very much didn’t want it to become one of these books that are very pleased with themselves about being about the transcendent power of literature. And I also didn’t want it to be one of these books that’s cripplingly aware and self-conscious. I wanted a novel with a plot, I wanted a novel that existed outside of its own self-referentiality. I was cognizant of those things. One way I think I got around it—I hoped to get around it, at least—was by making him a bumbler. He’s no expert at any of this stuff, at being self-conscious, or even conscious. I think that takes a certain amount of the smarminess out of such a project, some of the knowingness. If you have a narrator who’s a bumbler, then he can’t very well be knowing, because he admits that he doesn’t know very much. That’s the plan, at least.

How do you balance the more serious themes with the humor of Sam’s bumbling? Hopefully this bumbling takes some of the self-seriousness out of the serious themes. Part of it is he’s genuinely curious about how these things work, about how almost anything works, because it’s kind of a life and death matter for him. No matter how goofy he is, he wants to know how stories work before someone else starts telling his story and he suffers because of it. So he wants to know these things. But because he’s a bumbler, he can’t know them as clearly or as surely as he wants to know them. For me, I don’t like books that are overly silly, nor do I like books that are overly serious. And for me these are serious issues, but if you have a bumbler examining them then that immediately makes it almost impossible for the writer or the character to be self-serious about them. For me, serious subjects often deserve irreverent treatment, because we expect them to be treated reverently. So we almost lose our ability to be surprised by these serious things when we treat them the way in which we expect them to be treated. So if we treat them differently, then maybe we can see something unusual in them, something we hadn’t seen before.

Did you know that Sam was going to be a bumbler going into the book? Nope, that’s why I had a big problem with the book early on. He wasn’t a first-person narrator, I had a third-person narrator…I had a real problem. It was too distant and too superior. I didn’t like the book as a result, because those qualities I was just talking about, was just praising, the book totally lacked. Only when I realized that he had to be inexpert at everything, including being a detective, then the book began to do what I wanted it to do. But it took a long time, it took me five years to write the book and at least two years of that to figure out his voice. That’s not the only thing I did in those five years.

The book satirizes many aspects of modernity, including suburbia, academia, book culture and memoirs, among others. These must be frequent frustrations in your life. Yeah, they’re frustrations but they’re also joys. There’s that scene in the classroom, for instance. There’s some pain in academia, but I had good fun making fun of it, so there’s the joy. I don’t use fiction to work out my aggressions, it’s just not the way it works for me. And if I’m doing that, usually the fiction is terrible, and I have to go and do something else.

An Arsonist’s Guide… is your second novel. Compare the experience of writing a novel with a short story. You hear a lot about how different they are, and a lot of what people say is true. It’s a different process. Novels require a different kind of stamina, and you have to have different expectations of them. For a long time I was more comfortable writing short stories. Maybe that’s simply because I’d written more of them, so I knew earlier on if I was doing something badly…not necessarily how to address it, but to recognize that something was going badly. With a novel it takes more time. And you hear all these aphorisms like “A novel is like a marriage and a short story is like an affair.” I don’t think that’s entirely true. I don’t think that does justice to fiction or marriage or affairs. I don’t think of short fiction as a warm-up for writing a novel, either. I think they have particular virtues. In short fiction you can get in and out before you wear out your welcome, among other things. I like the novel because it’s a sustained examination of someone’s life, someone’s world. And there’s a real enduring charm and value in that, so they’re different, but it’s not like I think differently as a novelist or short story writer. Different subjects demand different treatments.

You’ve said that writing fiction as a career is no better than any other career. It’s not more noble, at least…unless you’re an assassin or something like that. I don’t tell my students this to discourage them, but some of them come in with this ridiculous, high-flown idea of what it means to be a fiction writer. It’s this sort of ennobling, transcendent thing, and those are some of the people who often don’t get down to work. That’s one of the things I always want to prevent. This is not something where you just sit around and wait for inspiration. This is tough work, and you need to recognize that and start doing it. You’re not going to find inspiration if you’re just sitting around waiting for it to happen. But I don’t mean to discourage people from it. In class I just want them to know that if they want to do this, there are certain things they’re going to have to do, and one of them is not sitting around thinking about how noble their choice of occupation is. There’s nothing noble about being frustrated, which is 95 percent of what a writer does, or is.

Brock Clarke will read from An Arsonist’s Guide… on Tuesday, September 25, as part of Canisius College’s Contemporary Writers Series. The reading takes place in the Grupp Fireside Lounge, and begins at 7pm.