John Pipkin based his novel Woodsburner on an incident that happened to Henry David Thoreau a year before he moved to the cabin at Walden Pond. With feckless forethought HDT set fire to an estimated 300 acres of Concord Woods threatening the existence of Concord and other villages, and of course wrote about it later. Among the oddities and crazies of Pipkin’s Concord and Boston, HDT is the putz. Collectively, it is a good thing that Massachusetts is surrounded on three sides by stable sister states because otherwise a nor’easter would dislodge, pushing her out and up the coast to come ashore at Nova Scotia. No, she would shamble along the Nova Scotia coast and end up wedged on Newfoundland.
This book is far more than a treatise on conflagrant forests. It is the oddities and crazies that make it enjoyable. Among them love takes heart and grows. Straight and strange, Odd and Emma hopefully are bound for Pennsylvania and a life of happiness with or without children. Anezka and Zalenka have paid in full for their domestic tranquility if their generosity to strangers does not destroy it. Even HDT the putz has a lingering eye for muscled young men as long as they are not intellectually threatening to him. As for Eliot, he needed someone to pass an opium pipe to him. Love had no chance with him.
Pipkin was brave to base the character of Eliot on one of his teaching colleagues. It may be risky but not dangerous to write about HDT, but to take on someone in the English Department still living and possibly venomous takes hutzpah. Read the book and you will know what I mean. Charles Marlin
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