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A review by torts
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke
2.0
The writing brimmed with a nagging...wrongness. Like:
"His eyes were fixed on Lees Ardor; he had this aroused, glazed look on his face and kept smoothing and stroking his tie, and you didn't have to be an English major or a reader to know what that symbolized."
Does Clarke mean signified? Does he mean for Sam Pulsifier to mean signified but get it wrong in a demonstration of his bumblingness? Or does Clarke not have a great grasp on the difference between symbols and signifiers? Or does he mean something that he's not just very good at communicating? I'm thinking the last one's the most accurate, given the rest of the book...
"The books were all from some library--I could see the telltale laminated tag on the spines. I looked down, lifted my left foot, and saw I'd been standing on a copy of Ethan Frome, a book every eighth grader in Massachusetts since Edith Wharton had written it had been required to read and then wonder why. I kicked the novel away from me, something I'd been wanting to do for twenty-six years, and in doing so I imagined I was striking a blow on behalf of its many unwilling, barely pubescent readers."
Such. Awkward. Prose. Sentences. Need. To. Be. Pruned. (I'm overcompensating by making each of my words its own sentence. Joke?)
"There was no sign naming the place as this bar or that tavern, as if no name were sufficiently bad."
Once again, an ucky rambling sentence where the phrasing is just confusing enough to make you wonder where the subjects and verbs are and whether they got into an argument or something and that's why they're not really interacting like they should in a happy sentence.
There's more kind of ucky writing, but there's also a relatively amusing story buried in it. Along with extreme self-consciousness and bland gesturing toward some sort of greater point which only kind of gets made by the end.
I don't recommend this book. I was going to say at least it's better than Dan Brown, but it's kind of worse. At least The Da Vinci Code pretended to find itself interesting. Clarke can't even muster the enthusiasm for his own book to have its protagonist-narrator commit fully to being its author.
"His eyes were fixed on Lees Ardor; he had this aroused, glazed look on his face and kept smoothing and stroking his tie, and you didn't have to be an English major or a reader to know what that symbolized."
Does Clarke mean signified? Does he mean for Sam Pulsifier to mean signified but get it wrong in a demonstration of his bumblingness? Or does Clarke not have a great grasp on the difference between symbols and signifiers? Or does he mean something that he's not just very good at communicating? I'm thinking the last one's the most accurate, given the rest of the book...
"The books were all from some library--I could see the telltale laminated tag on the spines. I looked down, lifted my left foot, and saw I'd been standing on a copy of Ethan Frome, a book every eighth grader in Massachusetts since Edith Wharton had written it had been required to read and then wonder why. I kicked the novel away from me, something I'd been wanting to do for twenty-six years, and in doing so I imagined I was striking a blow on behalf of its many unwilling, barely pubescent readers."
Such. Awkward. Prose. Sentences. Need. To. Be. Pruned. (I'm overcompensating by making each of my words its own sentence. Joke?)
"There was no sign naming the place as this bar or that tavern, as if no name were sufficiently bad."
Once again, an ucky rambling sentence where the phrasing is just confusing enough to make you wonder where the subjects and verbs are and whether they got into an argument or something and that's why they're not really interacting like they should in a happy sentence.
There's more kind of ucky writing, but there's also a relatively amusing story buried in it. Along with extreme self-consciousness and bland gesturing toward some sort of greater point which only kind of gets made by the end.
I don't recommend this book. I was going to say at least it's better than Dan Brown, but it's kind of worse. At least The Da Vinci Code pretended to find itself interesting. Clarke can't even muster the enthusiasm for his own book to have its protagonist-narrator commit fully to being its author.