In 1844, Henry David Thoreau and a friend accidentally started a fire that scorched 300 acres and threatened the town of Concord, Mass. This incident provides John Pipkin with the narrative core of his first novel, and with the larger metaphor for his theme, man's nature and mankind's relationship with nature at large.

Along with Thoreau, whose ruminations the reader is made privy to, "Woodsburner" presents an interesting cast of subordinate characters. Eliot Calvert keeps a bookstore, dreams of authoring stage plays and sells pornography to support his affluent lifestyle. The Rev. Caleb Dowdy, driven by stern Puritan theology, suffers doubt as to the existence of God. Oddmund Hus, an orphaned Norwegian immigrant, grapples with self-doubt and lust. Emma Woburn, a refugee from the Irish potato famine, unhappily married to an older and uncouth local farmer, nurtures a passion for serious literature. Anezka and Zalenka, joined in a lesbian relationship, fled Bohemia for America, where their illicit union is possible.

These characters are all involved with Concord's effort to stop the approaching fire. Thoreau and Hus are in the forefront of this struggle. The cowardly Calvert, who dreamed of being a hero, flees to the safety of the town. Dowdy fails to commit suicide by walking into the inferno and is rescued by Anezka and Zalenka.

This experience foreshadows Thoreau's stay at Walden Pond a year later. Nature, he understands from the experience, is where man belongs, not removed from it in towns and cities.

Pipkin's research into the event and the era seems impeccable. The book is rife with interesting historical trivia: how lead pencils were made, the proper use of a mulling poker, how raw coffee beans were roasted. And the author's language nicely captures the tone and diction of 19th-century American English. Famous Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller are frequently referenced, and the coming Civil War is evident in national politics.

This is an ambitious and complex fiction. Its virtues are only mildly diminished by the too-frequent device of resorting to flashbacks for the purpose of exposition, which slows the pace of the narrative. The description of the raging forest fire is compelling, if now and then the prose employed for this tends toward the florid. Nevertheless, Pipkin's "Woodsburner" is an impressive debut.

Gordon Weaver is a fiction writer in Wisconsin.