From Publishers Weekly Clarke follows up his acclaimed An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England with a less gripping exploration of truth and fiction, set in Watertown, N.Y., during the Iraq war. Miller, a precocious nine-year-old eighth grader, is convinced that when his parents split up, his father joined the army, was shipped to Iraq, and is now recovering from combat injuries in a VA hospital. The father-son dynamic has roots in, strangely enough, Frederick Exley's cult book, A Fan's Notes, which Miller's father is obsessed with, leading Miller to fantasize that, if he can locate Exley, his father will be cured. Miller's story is augmented by the notes of his therapist, whose professionalism is first compromised by his attraction to Miller's mother and soon by his amazingly unethical (and sometimes morbidly funny) antics--breaking into Miller's house, playing along to a perverse degree with Miller's interest in locating Exley--that eventually obliterate the already tenuous line between reality and imagination. Clarke's a deft satirist, but the narrative's structural intricacies are more confounding than anything, resulting in a work that's fitfully engaging but slow, wonderfully mysterious but increasingly confusing.
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From Booklist In his latest brain-teasing raid on literary history, following the much-acclaimed An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (2007), Clarke riffs on a cult classic, A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir (1968), by Frederick Exley. For Tom, a lost soul living in Exley’s hometown, Watertown, New York, this misfit’s ballad of fury and alienation is a sacred text. Tom’s precocious nine-year-old son, Miller, is caught between his floundering father and his lawyer mother, who works at Fort Drum. Then his father abruptly joins the army, goes to Iraq, and ends up in the VA hospital in a coma. Or does he? Miller is beyond unreliable as a narrator, and so is his dangerously crazy shrink, who not only lusts after Miller’s mom, but also encourages his young patient’s impossible search through Watertown’s underworld for Exley, whom Miller believes can save his dad. If only this clever and tender novel didn’t get stuck in a vortex of aberrations. There are hilarious moments; Miller is endearing; and Clarke’s take on the cruel toll of the Iraq War is profound. --Donna Seaman

Memory of the World Librarian: Quintus

2025-02-18