The accidental arsonist

The characters in this black comedy just want to be left alone to lead calm, safe lives, but are ambushed by theatrical plot turns that cast them in a garish light. Chief among a decidedly eccentric crew is narrator Sam Pulsifer: devoted son, husband, father and convicted arsonist.

At age 18, he had broken into the Emily Dickinson house. Once he was inside, a noise startled him into dropping a lit cigarette. The house, with its caretaker couple inside, burned to the ground, and Sam got a 10-year prison sentence.

Returning home, he hardly recognizes his house, littered with beer cans and other trash, or his parents, both of whom have taken to drink. Most surprising of all is that his mother, an English teacher, has gotten rid of all the books in the house. Sam remembers how she had urged him to read classics that were all about something called the "Human Condition." But the books seemed to make her miserable. She looked as if she "would like to take [a] book and beat herself over the head with it and then go out and find the Human Condition and beat it over the head, too."

They kick him out and he settles into the stereotype of a normal life: He finishes college, marries, gets a job as a "packaging scientist," acquires two kids and a house in an antiseptic suburb named Camelot. He feels lucky, until the past returns in the form of his nemesis, Thomas Coleman, the son of the couple Sam had accidentally killed. By lying to his wife, Anne-Marie, Sam sets in motion a chain of unfortunate events. Anne-Marie kicks Sam out, he returns to his parents' house, becomes a drunk and sets out, as amateur detective, to find out who has tried to burn down two other writers' houses.

Sam is a fascinating if perplexing character. He calls himself a bumbler who always gets things wrong. He blurts out inadvertent insults to his wife and guests and now, investigating the recent arsons, does everything he can to make himself the chief suspect. He is a cross between Candide and the autistic narrator of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." Or is he? Most of the time, he's clueless about other people's feelings and motives, yet he can make shrewd assessments, too, as when he describes a couple as "walled up in their own ghetto of resentment, unable to see anything outside the walls."

We know he didn't set the fires, but we never quite know what to make of him. With his stagy posturing, he sounds as if he's lying even when he's telling the truth. Sometimes his bumbling seems less hapless than angry and aggressive. We can never be certain if his actions are deliberate or unconscious.

All we learn is that fiction is somehow dangerous. His mother used to tell Sam stories about the Dickinson house, in which the building itself takes on a certain malevolence. An English instructor he meets wants to hire Sam to burn down the Mark Twain house; she "didn't believe in or like books because she feared being a character in them and thus not a real person, whatever that was."

In his pursuit of the arsonist(s), Sam discovers that his childhood family life was a fiction, too. So do we have a meta-novel here, a fiction that contemplates its own metaphoric navel? Yes, but the antic goings-on and over-the-top characters are so entertaining that the self-conscious theme isn't annoying.

A rousing climax involves a book-loving handyman who wants the Robert Frost house burned down, a pack of bond analysts, a mystery woman and a really big fire. And finally, by telling the biggest whopper of his life, Sam finds a measure of peace and even redemption. And we readers, absorbed in that alluring lie we call fiction, can't help but run right into the Human Condition.

Brigitte Frase, of Minneapolis, also reviews for the Los Angeles Times.