This straight-faced, postmodern comedy scorches all things literary, from those moldy author museums to the excruciating question-and-answer sessions that follow public readings. There are no survivors here: women's book clubs, literary critics, Harry Potter fans, bookstores, English professors, memoir writers, librarians, Jane Smiley...

...When Sam [the main character] was 18 years old, he snuck into the Shrine of Amherst [Emily Dickinson's house] after hours for a smoke and accidentally incinerated it along with two docents who were upstairs making whoopee on the poet's virginal bed. As you can imagine, Sam's parents took this hard. His father was an editor at a small university press, and his mother was an English teacher. "Beautiful words really mattered to them," Sam writes. "You could always count on a good poem to make them cry or sigh meaningfully." And the town reacted badly, too: graffiti, ugly slurs, "some picketing by the local arts council." And there were the letters, although, as Sam admits, "There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail -- the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions." What really unnerves him are the "other letters," scores of them from across the country: "They were all from people who lived near the homes of writers and who wanted me to burn those houses down."

... You'll have your own favorite scene, but mine is the spot-on description of a bitter, alcoholic writer-in-residence at the Robert Frost House reading from a story that is "more or less an unadorned grocery list of the things the old man hated."...

A man in New London, Connecticut, wanted me to burn Eugene O'Neill's home because of what an awful drunk O'Neill was . . . A woman in Lenox, Massachusetts, wanted me to torch Edith Wharton's house because visitors to Wharton's house parked in front of the woman's mailbox . . . A dairy farmer in Cooperstown, New York, wanted me to pour gasoline down the chimney of the James Fenimore Cooper House . . . 'We'll pay, too; I'll sell some of our herd if I have to. I look forward to your response.'

Other homes on the list: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, Mark Twain's, Edward Bellamy's, and a replica log cabin at Walden Pond. As these places begin to go up in flames, Sam desperately tries to prove his innocence by tracking down the people who sent him those letters years before.

The plot doesn't burn so much as it smolders. But that doesn't matter, because Clarke serves up so many priceless setpieces skewering the literary life — from women's reading groups and the current vogue for memoirs, to the love affair between two professors of American literature, one of whom begins class with the statement, "Willa Cather is a cunt." There's also a detour to New Hampshire, where Sam attends a reading by the writer in residence at the Robert Frost Place, an author who embodies the spirit of New England, and whose work features an ax-wielding old man named Pa. Any English major who can read this chapter without shedding tears of mirth should go into accounting.