Woodsburner

Aside from Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES, Thornton Wilder's THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY may have been the first tale to ask one of literature's most enduring questions: what were a bunch of ostensibly unrelated people all doing at the same place on the same catastrophic day? In Wilder's case, the event was the collapse of the grandest, highest pedestrian rope bridge in all South America. In the case of Professor John Pipkin's first novel, WOODBURNER, the occasion that unites diverse people in Concord Woods, Massachusetts is a fire inadvertently started on a dry windy day by a hungry man wanting to make fish chowder for himself during a river outing. That historically attested fire burner was none other than Henry David Thoreau. And when all was over, this future preacher of environmentalism had burned 300 woodland acres. His life intersects those of a half dozen other real and imaginary characters. All their lives are transformed by the experience of fighting and philosophizing about the fire. In another few months Thoreau will retire to a cabin on Walden Pond, an area untouched by but close to the great fire. "He will keep the injured woods company until they revive. And, if they will have him, he will become their steward." -OOO-