Customer Reviews

Woodsburner: A Novel

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4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Only one year before the move to Walden Pond that would result in his literary masterpiece, Henry David Thoreau had a very different experience with the rustic environment near his Concord, Massachusetts home. In a careless attempt to start a cooking fire under unusually dry circumstances, Thoreau watched helplessly as a strong wind spread his small fire, and as almost 300 acres of the Concord Woods were destroyed. In fact, if not for the efforts of the townspeople, Concord itself might have burned to the ground.

John Pipkin looks at this surprising incident from Henry David Thoreau's personal history through the eyes of Thoreau and several fictional characters in his strong debut novel, "Woodsburner. " In the process of creating a back-history for each of his main characters, Pipkin provides a revealing look at Massachusetts society of the 1840s and theorizes on how Thoreau's mistake heavily influenced the rest of his life and career.

Pipkin uses three main characters other than Thoreau: Eliot Calvert, a bookstore owner who considers himself a budding playwright; Reverend Caleb Dowdy, a radical preacher who plans to build a new church in the Concord Woods; and Oddmund Hus, a simple Norwegian immigrant farmhand who works on one of the small farms surrounded by the woods.

Surprisingly enough, this novel of almost 370 pages takes place in just one real-time day, beginning shortly before Thoreau and his friend, Edward Sherman Hoar, make the fatal decision to turn some of their fresh catch into fish chowder, and ending not long after the locals finally manage to control the runaway fire. Pipkin uses the bulk of his novel to illustrate the 1840s lifestyle by creating detailed backgrounds for his three main characters, each of whom has an interesting story worthy of its own novel.

Circumstances bring Pipkin's characters together in a way, and at a pace, that allows the reader to gain a clear picture of Massachusetts life of the period at several different societal levels. The novel also offers insight into how Thoreau's budding environmental concerns were strengthened and focused by what happened to him and his friend in the Concord Woods that day - suggesting, perhaps, that tragedy oftentimes produces positive change.

As a minister and a Unitarian Universalist I've occasionally felt "up to my eyeballs" in transcendentalists. I thoroughly enjoyed John Pipkin's refreshing glimpse of this uniquely American philosophical movement. I love irony, coincidence and playful synchronicity and this novel contains plenty.

I found myself so engaged in the individual character's narratives I experienced a tangible pull when the story switched to another character. The conclusion of the book leaves you wanting more and wondering about the characters' futures. Alas,that cannot be avoided when an author does such a splendid job of connecting the reader to the subject.

This novel manages to be gripping and amusing while inspiring reflection upon the human condition and perhaps even a bit of self-reflection. How lovely to run across a page turner with respect for our intelligence rather than insulting it.

Boilerplate: This is based on a real incident in which Henry David Thoreau and a companion accidentally set the woods outside of Concord on fire, threatening the town.

But Thoreau is almost a MacGuffin in his own book. The real stars are a broad ensemble cast of characters and the fire itself. A fallen preacher, a Scandinavian immigrant with perversion in his bloodline, a respectable Boston merchant who yearns to be a playwright, ancient Slavik lesbians, and more, all thrown up on the vast heaving New World.

Most of the action occurs in flashbacks and internal dialogues - how the characters got here. There's a fascinating web of interactions where they impinge on each others' stories without realizing it, you don't even have to notice these, but it's a real pleasure when you do.

There's also an amusing subplot going on of the merchant's horrible play in which everyone runs around in the throes of angst and culminates with a house burning down (on stage) which parallels the book itself, but in a horrible way.

Woodsburner manages to pull off being well written yet extremely easy to read. Some might think there are too many main characters crammed in here, but I think it helps - you never dwell on one for too long and it forces a certain economy from the author if he doesn't want it to turn into a ponderous 900 page brick (which this isn't). It's a definite page-turner, with many clever turns of phrase (I have to wonder whether Pipkin, like his playwright, pulls out a moleskine and jots these down whenever they occur to him), genuinely interesting characters, and a generally satisfying ending.

It is hard to review this book without giving away too much. The events take place in a very short time period and each character's participation in those events overlaps closely with others. The product description above tells enough of the story line to either entice you or turn you away (hopefully the former). The book itself is an extension of the fire and each character's reaction to it.

Pipkin's writing is very smooth. When I finish a book and realize I haven't ranted to myself during its reading, then I know I enjoyed the author's style. His writing doesn't get in the way of the story he is telling. There are writers whose style is the story and that can be enjoyable, too; but Pipkin's purpose was to take us for a time to Concord, not to show off.

This is especially well written for a first novel. Pipkin's method is to fill in the background of the characters' lives as the story advances. It works very well, until it has worked for too long. Too much of even a good thing is still too much. We're still learning background with just a few pages left.

That doesn't make this book a chore to read; but it does keep it from being as good as it could have been. Four stars is still a very good rating for a first novel and I will be looking for future Pipkin books.

We all learned about Henry David Thoreau in high school English. His writings (Walden, Civil Disobedience) introduced us to a man with the courage of his convictions, devoted to a simple life in a natural environment, free from the tyranny of powerful government. It may come as a surprise to learn that his neighbors in Concord viewed the young Thoreau as something of an idler, or in his own words in this novel, a wastrel.

First-time novelist John Pipkin draws on an obscure incident in Thoreau's life and uses it as the foundation for a panoramic view of the intellectual, civic, and social environment of mid-18th century New England. In the rain-deprived spring of 1844, Thoreau set fire to the parched woods near Concord. The conflagration destroyed nearly 300 acres of forest and came close to reaching the city.

In addition to the intelligent but vacillating Thoreau, the author introduces us to a number of other well-drawn characters. Eliot is an aspiring playwright, who makes his living running a bookstore paid for by his wealthy father-in-law. Caleb is a fire-and-brimstone preacher who wants to build a new church on the outskirts of Concord. Oddmund is a hardworking and taciturn Norwegian immigrant in love with his employer's wife.

Pipkin's descriptions of the raging fire are dramatic and realistic at the same time. His skillful writing places the reader squarely in the midst of the men desperately fighting to save their property. At the same time, he deftly explores the inner musings of his characters, making them into living, breathing people.

I strongly recommend this novel to readers who appreciate literature and history. What a remarkable debut novel!

In their writings, Henry David Thoreau and his contemporaries plant the seeds of the modern environmental movement, deforestation already a concern in 1800 Massachusetts. In this historical reflection on Thoreau's early actions with the wilderness, John Pipkin recreates a seminal event, a fire started by Thoreau and his companion, Edward Sherman Hoar that burns nearly three hundred acres of Concord Woods. It is an unusually dry season. When Henry and Edward decide to make a chowder of the fish they have caught, random sparks ignite nearby thirsty foliage, spreading rapidly before their astonished eyes. As the fire leaps from dry grass to branch, Thoreau and Hoar must raise the alarm in nearby Concord to get sufficient manpower to beat back the growing conflagration. Already in thrall to nature's power, Henry first attempts to stamp out the flames, aware of nature's unpredictable volatility. Greedy, the fire spreads.

While Henry goes in search of help, as does Hoar, the author introduces three individuals pivotal to a novel that highlights the temperament of 1844 Concord, Massachusetts: Oddmund Hus, a Norwegian farmhand, Eliot Calvert, a bookseller and aspiring playwright and Reverend Caleb Dowdy, a fire and brimstone preacher who has discovered the seductive pleasures of the opium pipe. Thoreau vacillates between career decisions, his penchant for philosophy, an unwillingness to work for his father's very successful pencil manufacturing company and the ramifications of his guilt in starting the fire, which will earn him the label of "woodsburner". Oblivious to the blaze, Calvert arrives in Concord to conduct a little clandestine business and inspect a local shop he may rent as a second bookstore. Ruminating over his potential profits, the pompous would-be playwright belatedly recognizes the threat to Concord as he is caught up in the town's defense.

In his religious zeal, Caleb Dowdy heads to the fire as the source of his salvation. Visited by opium delusions, Caleb spreads the word of God among man's unfortunates; having convinced himself that "the path of revelation came through damnation" Caleb flirts with the dark side of humanity to find his way to truth. But the most intriguing of Pipkin's characters is Oddmund Hus, a simple man who has fallen in love with his employer's plump wife, Emma Woburn. Odd has a pure soul, unencumbered by the weighty philosophies that burden the others. And as all of these protagonists come together to fight the encroaching flames, the reader is provided an intimate view of American life where hard-working men labor, commerce flourishes and nature already bears the scars of man's hubris. Luan Gaines/2009.

In the spring of the year before he set up residence at Walden Pond, Thoreau was on a camping and fishing trip with his friend, Edward Sherman Hoar. It hadn't rained in three months and the wind was unusually fierce that day. He struck a match on his shoe to light a campfire for their chowder. Brush and branch took flame as the wind carried the sparks, igniting an uncontrollable forest fire in the Concord Woods. Fortunately, the fire's damage was limited to 300 acres--the townspeople ultimately banded together and kept the fire from reaching further into Concord. Thoreau wrote about this in his journals, but not until fourteen years later. And, now, almost two hundred years later, John Pipkin has woven an outrageous, ribald fable from this singular event that takes place over the course of a day.

As the flames spread and Shoar goes by boat to get help, Thoreau wrestles in the woods with the flames and his guilt. He obsesses about cause and effect, reflecting on numerous incidents in his life that, had they been avoided or met, may have prevented this fire. Moreover, he is torn between working in his father's pencil factory and furthering his artistic and philosophical pursuits. He mourns the sudden loss of his brother years ago and now the gradual loss of his teeth, among other things. Can he be a hero and save the fire from lethal damage or will he fold in shame for burning the woods?

It isn't just Thoreau's story, however. Pipkin practically supplants Thoreau's significance with a Dickension array of fictional characters in this picaresque tale of love, redemption, and salvation. Oddmund, the most compelling and bawdy of them all, is a Norwegian immigrant who is already spooked by a fire that consumed his family on the journey to America when he was a young boy. He lives in the woods and pines for the voluptuous and gentle wife of his drunkard, coarse employer.

There is Eliot, the narcissistic bookseller and self-proclaimed playwright, who has been trying to finish a play that climaxes with a conflagration. He seizes this event as an opportunity to write from experience. Unclasping his journal at intervals, he is inflamed with new ideas while he joins the crowd to beat back the blaze. Ultimately, though, there are less lofty moral lessons for him to learn.

The most outrageous character is Caleb, the self-destructive, opium-addicted damnation preacher who destroyed his father's church with an axe and subsequently guided his congregation to the woods. Eventually, his wretched hypocrisies and ambivalences culminate in a soul-searching quest for heroism as the fire inspires him with Biblical allegory.

As the fire spreads its anthropomorphic wings, it heats up the story with a scorching and combustible mixture of gallows humor and philosophical woe. Although I wasn't wholly surprised with its outcome, I was charmed by the story's conceit, the exuberant vitality of the narrative, and the bawdy, burlesque characters.

Woods Burner takes as its starting point the time when Henry David Thoreau, the year before his famous move to the Walden Woods, accidentally set fire to the woods around Concord, a fire that eventually destroyed about 300 acres of the forest. It's an obviously interesting idea, fraught with irony, the image of this man whose name is so connected to nature and the woods being responsible for so much natural destruction, but Pipkin, though he starts with Thoreau, wisely makes him only part of the story.
While the fire rages, we're introduced as well to Oddmund Huss, sole survivor of his immigrant family; Eliot Calvert, a bookstore owner and would-be playwright (a truly awful one); Caleb Dowdy, son of a beloved and forgiving preacher but whose own faith is much harder and harsher; Emma Woburn, an Irish-born farmwife whose sole request of her drunken husband is that she be allowed to regularly buy books she can barely read; and a pair of older lesbians emigrated from Bohemia.
As the novel moves forward through the course of the single day of the fire, we're filled in on the background of these characters and their connections and see as well how they connect to the Thoreau we would later come to know. We learn what happened to Huss' family, why he fears fire, what drove him to live alone in a cabin in the woods (precursor to Thoreau), of his unspoken love for Emma, whose husband he works for. For Calvert, we learn of his courtship of his wife and how his life turned out much different than he had expected, despite his outward success. We watch him struggle with his play (its concluding scene a giant conflagration), see how his desire for art competes with his need for financial stability and leads to his quiet sale of pornography, and quickly grasp he is a man living a life of "quiet desperation" that Thoreau will later describe in his journals.
All of these characters are some how hemmed in, feel trapped, whether its by their own urges, a poor marriage, persecution, money. And all of them burn, with passion and faith and desire. The fire is a living thing of real danger to the town and its people but it's also a highly visible and appropriate metaphor throughout the book.
As we wind back and forth in time and place among these characters and back and forth to the fire's progress and the attempts to defeat it before it reaches the town, we circle back always to Thoreau. As he watches first the fire and then the attempts to stop it, we enter his thoughts and can see the younger, less-refined, not-quite-so-polished Thoreau we all think of from his journals, listening to him worry about the effect on nature, argue he won't need to pay reparation since "the woods belong to nobody". Though Pipkin employs some of Thoreau's actual journal, what we see is not so much that Thoreau but the hints of the pieces that led to him.
It's a subtle portrait and one made all the stronger by the way it is filled in more by the characters surrounding him than through interior monologue. Perhaps the best mark of Pipkin's success in this novel--sharply written, precisely-structured--is that in the end we care at least as much and perhaps more about the "side" characters such as Oddmund and Calvert, as we do about the main event--Henry David. Well-recommended.

Henry Thoreau defines his life by what he is not. Farms have eaten into the Concord Woods situated in the vicinity of Walden Pond. It is the last day of April and it has not rained since February.

The fire theme is just one aspect of this wonderful novel, (although the fire in the woods forms a sort of backbone for the rest of plot). Stories of farming on the perphery of the woodlot, Emma Woburn, the farmer's wife, and Oddman, a helper on the farm, and the bookseller Eliot Calvert, Eliot Calvert of Boston, draw in the reader.

One farmer, in a foreshadowing of difficulty to come, fails to offer aid to fight the fire since it is not on his property. This respose surprises Henry, a budding communitarian. Backgrounding the life of Emma Woburn is the Irish Famine. Her father's circumstances were dire. He purchased passage for her to America.

Henry sees the fire from Fair Haven Hill. He notes the beauty of the scene. Eliot Calvert has a bookstore in Boston funded by his father-in-law. His house on Beacon Street was made possible by the same source. The profits from the bookstore have never sufficed to support the family's lifestyle.

Caleb Downey, Unitarian minister, delivers uncompromising sermons. He has come to realize that he is more suited to visit the jail than to have a congregation. Caleb's harshness isolates him from his father. The father chides Caleb for being a formalist. He discovers he failed to forgive a hanged man who was innocent of the deeds under which he had been charged.

Subsequent events will not be disclosed. Connections, causation, even the tenuous linking of people and events are concerns of the author in the construction of a rich array of incidents. Some of the forces portrayed in the book are supernatural. Pantheism is one of the forces. Fire is a dynamic system. Consequences of its existence cannot be predicted.

The Author's Note presents the historical record of the fire. This is a mighty work, an accomplished work.

I wanted to love this book. I've always been fascinated by Thoreau and have at least 4 copies of Walden. This fictionalization of a true event misses the mark for me. The pacing is off, for starters. Pipkin seems to want to provide a broad overview of the period and thus invents several characters, most of whom are more interesting than Thoreau himself. Consequently the story jumps from one character's perspective to another. In the meantime the fire is building strength. It's not till the last third of the book that people finally start doing something about the fire. I found this degree of exposition to be very frustrating. The fire is devastating and a life-changing event for many of the major characters. However, it's difficult to care about any of them.

So what's right with the book? The flip side of the extensive exposition is that the descriptions are well-done and the setting feels very authentic.

It's not the worst book I've ever read but it was a bit of a slog. It's really a fascinating anecdote. However, when he turned it into a novel, Pipkin treated it more as a social case study than a story.