Woodsburner: A Novel

by John Pipkin
Nan A. Talese, 384 pp., $24.95

Using a little-known event from the biography of Henry David Thoreau as a jumping-off point, local author John Pipkin produces a novel that brings to life the pitfalls and power of unencumbered freedom. A freedom that the still-burgeoning young America of the mid-19th century used to its full advantage.

The opening chapter describes the factual beginning of a fire Thoreau started that raged until more than 300 acres of woods around Concord, Mass., were decimated. It’s an event largely overlooked in biographies but one that Pipkin argues was a driving force for a great man struggling to find direction in life. But what starts as a pulse-quickening work of historical fiction takes a turn to follow various characters affected by the fire.

Subsequent chapters dilute the central action as we follow the likes of opium-addicted pastor Caleb Dowdy, oppressed family man Eliot Calvert, and Oddmund Hus, a lovelorn Norwegian immigrant. Pipkin takes care to round out each character, giving them backstories, and to paint a more complete picture of the New World. But it’s not all doom and gloom. The fire is set up as the impetus for great acts of love, bravery, and, of course, one of early America’s greatest written works.

The result leaves Thoreau to wallow in a middle ground between biography and fictive character that benefits neither the interested historian who can glean as much information of the Concord fire from a biography nor the reader who wants an interesting character to follow through the inferno. The book has an identity crisis that creates awkward transitions from the raging fire to the decidedly less immediate stories of how the characters came to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite pacing problems and a few ends getting tied up that could have remained loose, the America that Pipkin paints is a unique one: a nation founded on freedom and citizens that find ways to shackle themselves or are confounded by the myriad options that America’s seemingly unlimited resources engendered. There’s nothing like a fire threatening lives and livelihoods to get people out of their heads and into the woods.

John Pipkin will read at BookPeople on Thursday, May 7, at 7pm.

This article appears in May 1 • 2009.

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James graduated from Columbia University in 2000 and moved to Austin a year later. Ever since, he has followed the arts and video game scene in ATX, editing and writing stories for the Chronicle along the way. Over his more than 20 years with the paper he has climbed the "corporate" ladder from lowly intern to managing editor.