Woodsburner

A Novel Of Thoreau And His America

John Pipkin's first novel "Woodsburner" (2009) is set in Concord, Massachusetts in 1844 and describes an incident in the life of Thoreau (1817 -- 1862). On April 30, 1844, Thoreau and a companion spent a day fishing. When they returned to land to cook their catch, Thoreau lit a fire which, as a result of heavy winds and a long dry spell, got away. The fire threatened the adjacent woods as well as the town of Concord. Prompt action by the town residents put out the fire after a loss of about 300 forested acres. Obviously embarrassed by the incident, Thoreau did not write about it until 1850, and then only in the privacy of his Journal.

Pipkin tells convincingly and well the story of the fire,its escape, the destruction it caused, and the heroic efforts of the local citizens to put it out. The difficulties of fighting wildfires, of course, survives into the 21st Century Pipkin also offers a well-drawn portrait of the young Thoreau, with details about his relationship with his brother John who had died tragically in 1842. Pipkin describes the pencil factory Thoreau operated together with his family. Thoreau made several notable improvements to the process of manufacturing pencils. Most importantly, Pipkin describes a young man still seeking his path in life. With some plausibility, Pipkin suggests that the experience with the wildfire may have been formative for Thoreau. In 1845, Thoreau moved to Walden Pond, where he wrote a book about an earlier river trip with John, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and began working on the book that became "Walden".

All of this makes an excellent basis for a historical novel. The trouble is, I thought, that Pipkin tries too much for a first novel and, as a result, the book loses its focus and in places comes close to collapse. Fighting a forest fire is a serious, emergency endeavor that requires the full, immediate, attention of the participants. So too should be a book about the exigencies of fighting a forest fire.

Pipkin recounts the story in the voices of several characters who in one way or the other are impacted by the fire but who also have their own stories to tell. The characters include a solitary farmhand and immigrant, Oddmund, who is in love with Emma, the wife of the farmer for whom he works. Elliott Calvert, who manages a bookstore and is writing a play about --- a burning house -- is also a key character in the story. Then, there are two elderly women, one of them blind, also immigrants who were imprisoned in Europe for many years for being lovers before coming to America to begin a new life.

Finally, the book tells to story of the Reverend Caleb Ephraim Dowdy, who followed the footsteps of his father in Boston and became a minister. Caleb is a tormented soul, filled with doubts about the existence of God and influenced in spite of himself by the pantheism and transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Obsessed both with his own misdeeds and with what he sees as the possibility that there is nothing beyond death, Caleb seeks to find evidences of eternity in the lives of sinners. His story is troubling and may be the most interesting part of the book.

Pipkin recounts the stories of each character and their early lives in a series of separated flashbacks. Each story is well done and interesting in itself. But together they become distracting from Thoreau and his fire, making the book disjointed. It is only with difficulty that Pipkin connects the separate threads of each story to the main event of the fire, and the book seems forced as a result. The fire symbolism throughout the book, and the role fire plays in the separate stories also seems too obvious and overused.

There is material in this novel for several books with the result that the book is not fully successful as one. Pipkin offers a good portrayal of a growing young United States with characters having diverse dreams for themselves and their lives and, on the whole, realizing them. The American experience receives a largely positive portrayal. The townspeople of Concord unite quickly and effectively to extinguish the fire. The sections about Caleb are interesting in their character and in their philosophical speculations even though his story and the stories of the other characters do not integrate well with the story of Henry Thoreau and the fire.

The merits of the book outweigh the deficiencies. Pipkin may well be able to offer an approach which is both more focused and digs deeper in subsequent novels.

Robin Friedman