Author Brock Clarke is almost pathological in his modesty and self-effacement. This makes it very difficult to talk with him about his books, which are genuinely ambitious, intellectual works that, as he says, “not only engage with their various subject matters, but with the literature devoted to their various subject matters.”

In the case of his latest novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Clarke’s subject matter is nothing less than writing itself—it engages, in ways that are both philosophical and deeply funny, with a range of American texts, from Hawthorne and Hammett to self-help.

Guide tells the story of Sam Pulsifer, a hapless antihero and self-described bumbler. As a teen, he accidentally burns down the Emily Dickinson House—and causes the death of a married couple in the process. After serving ten years in a low-security prison with a group of corrupt bond analysts, Sam marries and attempts to move on, hiding his crime from his wife (he tells her that his own parents died in a house fire). “He tries to forget his past,” says Clarke, speaking from his home in Cincinnati. “Which, of course, he is not able to do.”

Eventually Sam is exposed, his wife kicks him out, and he returns to Amherst, Massachusetts—and to his parents, who seem to be hiding a few dark secrets of their own. When the homes of other famous New England writers begin going up in flames, Sam becomes the leading suspect—and must find the real culprit in order to prove his innocence.

At the time that Clarke, an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, began work on Guide, he was newly “obsessed with mystery novels—Hammett, Chandler, Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.” Though previously skeptical about the genre, he found that these authors were able to emphasize plot without sacrificing language or character, and embraced narrative conventions as much to subvert them as to make use of them. Clarke decided that he too “wanted to write a mystery, or something resembling one.”

But even as it employs some of the mystery genre’s tricks, Guide is no more a standard detective novel than Motherless Brooklyn or Paul Auster’s City of Glass. It more closely resembles Richard Ford crossed with Borges: a thoughtful, playful exploration of everyday life, as well as a metafictional examination of the purpose stories serve in our lives, what we ask of them and what they can, and should, provide the reader with.

In particular, the novel is a scathing critique of the ways in which the culture of memoir has affected how fiction is read and written. In one especially savage passage, Sam browses the memoir section of a chain bookstore. “Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves?” Sam marvels. “I flipped through sexual abuse memoirs, sexual conquest memoirs, sexual inadequacy memoirs. I perused travel memoirs…remorseful hedonist rock star memoirs, memoirs about reading. There were several memoirs about the difficulty of writing memoirs, and even a handful of how-to-write-a-memoir memoirs: A Memoirist’s Guide to Writing Your Memoir and the like. All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me—without my even having to read them—that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was.”

Clarke explains: “I wrote the book feeling peevish about the prevalence of memoir in our culture.” He goes on to discuss how the book-reading public, steeped in memoir and self-help literature, begins to expect particular things of books—that they be useful, enjoyable, emotionally cathartic. “Compounding the problem,” he says, “are novelists who have succumbed to that pressure of writing and publishing things that will provide the reader uplift.” They have capitulated to the pressures of a culture that opts for self-improvement of the market-approved variety.

“Literature doesn’t always make us better people,” Clarke insists, while acknowledging that he has not “totally given up on the prospect that books can do something—something maybe good, maybe bad, something ambiguous—to, and for, the people who read and write them.”

A novel in which the homes of Hawthorne, Twain and Frost are burned down obviously has something to say on the subject of contemporary writers’ conflicted feelings about the American tradition of writing—and of reading, which from Clarke’s perspective could use less self-help and more mystery.

“The novel can do many things,” he says, “including lift a reader up. But it often does so in surprising, perverse ways. We shouldn’t close ourselves off by thinking we always know what that looks like. This is the great virtue of reading a novel: We don’t know what will happen to us before we start reading, just as we don’t know what will happen in the novel itself.”

An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin, $23.95) is out now.