Whose woods these are I think I know A Contrary review by Harriett Green  Years ago I went on a literary expedition to Concord, Massachusetts and its environs, and it included a stroll down the snowy banks of Walden Pond to the lean-to where Henry David Thoreau wrote in inspired solitude. Walden Pond was surprisingly unassuming, but its moving simplicity attested to the power of nature at its most subtle. The reasons for Thoreau’s meditative sojourn there are uncertain, and John Pipkin now adds to the suppositions with his strong first novel. Pipkin mines the fragments of a briefly noted April 1844 news event to chronicle a day that literally seared the life of Thoreau and in doing so it transformed his destiny, and that of American intellectual history, forever. The Woodsburner opens with Thoreau sitting in the Concord Woods: Far from an incisive intellectual, this Thoreau is an aimless Harvard graduate who has returned to his hometown and is at a loss to determine where to go next: he admires acquaintances such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but can’t imagine himself as their peers, and has begun to resign himself to a mediocre life working at his father’s pencil factory. In a fit of restless escape from these anxieties, he goes fishing with his friend Edward Hoar and attempts to start a fire to cook their catch: Henry stands and watches helplessly as the small fire he has birthed flows like brilliant liquid over the tree stump’s ragged edges and into the dead grass and pine needles that carpet the barren slop from the water’s edge to the lip of the woods…. For the first few seconds he can only stare at the impossibility blooming before him and it is at this moment that he recalls one of his earliest lessons, a lesson learned in the pre-history of his youth, when he was still called David Henry…. The lesson was a simple one: for every cause, an effect. “For every cause, an effect” is the recurring theme of the novel, and it positions the Concord Woods wildfire as a resolving force that catalyzed Thoreau and other individuals to take drastic steps toward their desired destiny. For the character of Reverend Caleb Ephraim Dowdy, the fire portends dramatic upheaval for “the fire tells him its intention to advance on Concord, and he divines that it will not stop there; the burning will lay waste the town and then descend upon Boston. Caleb rejoices that heaven has at last grown weary of the wickedness of the New World, and he is pleased to have played no small role in at last moving the palsied hand of Providence.” Caleb Dowdy is one of multiple witnesses thrust into the middle of the conflagration whose narratives Pipkin skillfully interweaves with Thoreau’s story. The characters include Oddmund Hus, a stoic Norwegian immigrant farm hand on the Woburn farm; Eliot Calvert, a well-to-do and ambitious book merchant; and Emma Woburn, the farmer’s wife. Pipkin ably captures the emotional nuances of each character through vivid yet evocatively archaic language, and gradually creates a rich narrative of one transformative day of fighting against the decimation of Concord. In the desperate fight against the fire, the character of Oddmund recalls that: During the years Odd lived alone in his cabin, he had come to suspect that trees and plants and animals—and all else that relied upon sun and soil and water—were inhabited by a gentle spirit that seemed to tremble beneath the surface of living things. And now he imagines the ghosts of what has burned gathering the dark ribbons of smoke and fleeing skyward. Odd feels helpless to save them; he inhales, tried to draw the dissipating life into his chest, and doubles over coughing. The novel echoes Thoreau’s classic works in its exploration of human connections to the natural world and the desire to divine the essence of life. As the narrative unfolds, each character finds himself isolated as a result of the fire and ensuing chaos, and the imposed self-containment forces each to examine his life. They emerge with questions: Thoreau ponders, “What consequences would he unleash . . . if he were to walk down the hill into the burning trees? What unforeseen series of events might his sudden demise cause or forestall, ten, twenty, a hundred years from now? How would his non-being ripple through the seasons to come?” Life and death are not simply physical concepts, however, to the characters in The Woodsburner: their lives revolve around becoming contributing citizens of a fledgling nation, and as such, the sacrifice and chaos of the fire forces them to confront their internal conflicts. The Woodsburner ultimately takes a footnote of historical annals and in Pipkin’s hands, the Concord fire becomes a simple but powerful frame for a layered work of imaginative biography and the tumultuous social history of early America. Harriett Green is pursuing a master’s degree in library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 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Woodsburner

John Pipkin

2009, Nan A. Talese

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SUMMER 2009 COVER YELLOW FINCHES JIM KROSSCHELL THE FACTORY: AN ELEGY IN 6 PARTS REBECCA LEHMANN CROW YEAR PAUL SILVERMAN DAY OF THE DEAD ARLENE ANG THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS EDWARD MC WHINNEY BABY IN A JAR TANIA HERSHMANN REVIEWS JOHN PIPKIN J. ROBERT LENNON MARY STRACHAN STEPHEN HAVEN C.E. CHAFFIN PAULA MEEHAN DAG SOLSTAD D.A. POWELL Summer-2009.htmlFinches.htmlFinches.htmlFactory.htmlFactory.htmlCrow_Year.htmlCrow_Year.htmlDead.htmlDead.htmlSisyphus.htmlSisyphus.htmlBaby.htmlBaby.htmlReviews.htmlCastle.htmlStrachan.htmlHaven.htmlChaffin.htmlMeehan.htmlSolstad.htmlPowell.htmlshapeimage_5_link_0shapeimage_5_link_1shapeimage_5_link_2shapeimage_5_link_3shapeimage_5_link_4shapeimage_5_link_5shapeimage_5_link_6shapeimage_5_link_7shapeimage_5_link_8shapeimage_5_link_9shapeimage_5_link_10shapeimage_5_link_11shapeimage_5_link_12shapeimage_5_link_13shapeimage_5_link_14shapeimage_5_link_15shapeimage_5_link_16shapeimage_5_link_17shapeimage_5_link_18shapeimage_5_link_19shapeimage_5_link_20shapeimage_5_link_21