Woodsburner

Most readers know Thoreau's Walden as a treatise on man's respect for nature, but Pipkin's debut novel adds something new to the equation. A fictionalized version of a true event, this book explores Thoreau's overwhelming guilt for a Concord forest fire he accidentally set a year before his Walden retreat. Pipkin jumps effortlessly among the perspectives of Henry David and several unconnected townsfolk brought together by the fire, taking the blaze itself as his central character: ""not one enemy but many, thousands of individual flames, chewing through trees, taking possession of the woods as if this were their inheritance."" Fire chews through his character's lives as well; as the flames grow too large to control, the townspeople must one by one face the absurdity of man's bulwarks against nature. Pipkin tosses off hints of Thoreau's writings (""man's inability to conceive of the world's limits,"" instructing a local bookseller to ""come to this very spot and build your home from the blackened timbers""), but his novel succeeds beyond the confines of its literary pedigree, making it a thought-provoking page-turner in its own right, a successful balance of story and character study.