Imagining Thoreau shaped by a wildfire

Drawing on Thoreau’s personal journals and on historical records from the Concord Freeman, the local paper at the time, and other sources, Pipkin recasts the comparatively minor episode (the fire lasted only a day) as a watershed in Thoreau’s life, indeed as the chief influence on his decision to undertake his experiment at Walden.

“He will build a simple cabin near the pond, perhaps, and study nature’s infinitesimal beauties, as frail as they are profuse,’’ writes Pipkin, who generally employs an acute present tense in the novel. “He will commiserate with displaced creatures, tend to the injured woodlands until they revive. And, if they will have him, he will become their steward.’’ Pipkin suggests that Thoreau’s careless act may have changed the trajectory of the American literary landscape at a time when it was still in its adolescence. The young dreamer, “plagued by indecision,’’ was certainly facing a crossroads, unsure of which direction to take among seemingly endless possibilities.

In addition to Henry David, as he’s called, Pipkin masterfully threads together the stories of three other primary characters, each a reflection of an aspect of the distinctive American character at a time when the New World was still relatively fresh but the specter of the Civil War loomed.

The most intriguing character, Oddmund Hus, is a Norwegian immigrant who labors in the fields while pining for his landowner’s wife. After his family was killed when their ship from Norway exploded in Boston Harbor upon arrival, Odd withdrew from human contact and sought meaning in the forest, years before Thoreau’s foray into nature. Seeking to “remove himself from the paths of other people,’’ Odd builds a simple cabin in the woods, communing with flora and fauna and marveling at the “vast whole, a complication far greater than the combined complexities of its parts.’’

Odd’s pioneering spirit is reflected in a different manner in the character of Eliot Calvert, a bookseller and aspiring playwright who desperately seeks to become a legitimate artist. While trying to open a second bookshop in Concord, Eliot struggles to maintain his vision of himself as a highbrow purveyor of literature. Unfortunately, he’s soon selling pornographic trading cards to make ends meet and accepting handouts from his wealthy father-in-law.

Of course, what’s a 19th-century historical novel without a healthy dose of organized religion? Pipkin nicely balances the natural spiritualism of Thoreau and his contemporaries, including Emerson and Hawthorne, with the pious, hellfire preacher Caleb Ephraim Dowdy. While fighting an opium habit and his guilt over not absolving an innocent man before his hanging, the preacher battles personal demons as well as “the mystics and the spiritualist . . . and the so-called Transcendentalists - pagans all of them.’’

Against this backdrop, Pipkin lightly sketches elements of the nascent environmental movement, a significant motif in the literature of the Transcendentalists. The author also produces a wry twist on Thomas Hobbes’s pessimistic dictum about the life of men. Despite their wide-eyed embrace of the opportunities of the New World, “America, Henry fears, will always be a brutish home to noble ideas.’’

Americans have certainly borne out that suspicion, but Pipkin’s portrait of a nation in flux is energetic and optimistic. It’s also a remarkably constructed piece of fiction - vibrant, solidly plotted and lyrically yet efficiently composed - and should be a contender for the year’s important literary awards.

Eric Liebetrau is the managing editor and nonfiction editor of Kirkus Reviews.