Nearly every novel is written with its predecessors firmly in mind, and the need to avoid cliché, certainly, has a way of preoccupying the novelist. Such considerations threaten to cripple Brock Clarke’s bracingly self-conscious new novel, “An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England” (Algonquin, 205 pages, $23.95), but despite some notable flaws, “An Arsonist’s Guide” is generally very engaging. Mr. Clarke’s singular conceit — that lots of people might secretly want to burn down the historic homes of great novelists — is well-served by his ability to craft a brisk, unpredictable story populated with distinct, if frequently absurd, characters.

Sam Pulsifer, the arsonist of the title and also the narrator, has just spent 10 years in prison for burning down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Mass., an act that he repeatedly insists was an accident. He acknowledges, however, that declarations like “It was an accident” tend to make a man sound “like a coward and a liar, both.” Sam didn’t know when he burned down the Dickinson House that its tour guide and her husband were upstairs “sharing a private, after-hours moment on Emily Dickinson’s bed,” and so he became not just an arsonist but also a murderer, and not just that, but also a profound disappointment to his literature-loving parents.

Speaking of his parents, they had some odd habits: Sam’s mother used to tell him stories about the Dickinson House devouring little kids (“there were screams, faint but indistinct. … you could barely hear their howls over the creaking of that venerable hell house …”), which, if you think about it, might have had something to do with how things ended up for Sam. “Why do we hurt our parents the way we do?” Sam asks the reader. “There’s no way to make sense of it except as practice for then hurting our children the way we do.” The relationship of Sam to his parents is the foundation of “An Arsonist’s Guide,” and the quirky premise and somewhat nutty plot serve alternately to illuminate, disrupt, and affectingly repair that relationship.

After he gets released from prison, Sam implausibly marries a beautiful woman (“an Italian goddess”) named Anne Marie, from whom he conceals his past and with whom he produces two children. The idyll of their suburban life with its “constant soothing hum of lawn maintenance” is interrupted one day by the arrival of one Thomas Coleman, whose parents died in the Dickinson fire and whose attempts to get revenge result in Sam being kicked out of his house and going to live with his parents again. “The past comes back,” Sam says morosely, “the forgotten crowd of your life breaks out of the gallery and comes rushing at you.”

Soon, mysteriously, the homes of famous writers all over New England start burning down, and Sam is the obvious suspect. To clear his name by finding the new arsonist, he looks through the letters he received while in prison requesting that he torch various literary landmarks; it’s an innovative setup, and it allows Mr. Clarke to both abide by and refurbish detective novel conventions. The central section of the novel involves Sam visiting the writers of these letters, and this is the most interesting material. Among the letter writers are Lees Ardor, a literature professor who wants Sam to burn Mark Twain’s house because she considers Twain a “female pudendum,” and Peter le Clair, an ornery old repairman who wants to see Robert Frost’s house in flames because of an ancient dispute about some roof work he did. (A scene in which Sam visits the Robert Frost house for an excruciating literary reading is one of the novel’s incisive highlights.) Mr. Clarke gets quite a bit of mileage out of characters like Ardor and le Clair, managing gently but successfully to mock writers, readers, and literary scholars in the process.

“An Arsonist’s Guide” would, I think, be a stronger novel if Mr. Clarke had been a little more judicious about the inclusion of self-reflexive passages. “In many of my mother’s books,” Sam says, “the troubled narrator has a telling dream at a crucial moment, and so I wasn’t at all surprised that night when I had one.” Mr. Clarke is a very talented writer and Sam’s dream is actually effective and memorable, but I rolled my eyes when I read the above sentence, and there are many more like it in the novel, as well as a subplot about some white-collar criminals who are writing a book called “An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England.” That said, I did admire Mr. Clarke’s audacity in a passage wherein Sam picks up and quickly dismisses a bad-sounding novel that (if you take the time to Google it) turns out to have been written by a certain Brock Clarke.

Mr. Antosca last wrote for these pages on Ivo Stourton.