Fiction

Daniel Gumbiner, Fire in the Canyon (Astra House), 304 pp. Hardback, $27.00.

When an advanced copy of Fire in the Canyon first arrived in LaVeRB’s mailbox at the end of the summer, temperatures in Las Vegas were threatening to break last year’s record of 117 degrees. It felt appropriate, if uncomfortable, to be reading a book about the ravages of fire and climate change by Daniel Gumbiner, who lived in Las Vegas when The Believer magazine, which he edits, was housed at UNLV.

But despite his brief sojourn in Vegas, Gumbiner is a California writer. As he put it in a recent interview, California “occupies a really powerful place in the national imagination: it’s sometimes the great, gleaming future and other times the godless apocalypse.” In his first novel, The Boatbuilder, a young man named Berg works through addiction by building wooden boats along the northern California coast. In his second book, Fire in the Canyon, Gumbiner moves inland to a rural agricultural town in the Sierra foothills, where a natural winemaking renaissance is underway. The novel follows 65-year-old Ben Hecht, an aging hippie-type who grows grapes and raises sheep, his novelist wife, Ada, and their adult son, Yoel, who is home visiting from Los Angeles. Although the threat and effects of wildfire are key undercurrents in the novel, the central drama unfolds between father and son, whose relationship is rocky at best and drives much of the plot.

If Yoel had his way, Ben would simply be a different person. Someone with pedigree and a stable white-collar career. Instead, he was an embarrassing old hippie. A self-righteous hippie. That was the word Yoel always used: “self-righteous.”

Ben knew very little about his son’s life these days, except for the fact that his career had stagnated.

Beyond Ben, Yoel, and Ada, a fourth key character is perhaps California itself—its fragile landscape, its grape varietals, its people. The novel opens with a grand and sweeping description of the land:

That fall, across the gold country, it rained steadily, and the people of that hilly land, who lived up and down the spine of the state, looked forward to a season of balanced precipitation. The land, it seemed to them, existed in a state of fragile equilibrium. If there was too much rain, the grasses grew tall, and in the summer when they dried out, they provided extra fuel and triggered large fires.

Californians have always lived with wildfire but never of this magnitude. In the last several years, thousands of wildfires have burned across the state. In 2018, the most destructive year for wildfire on record, 1,975,086 acres burned, 103 lost their lives, and 24,226 structures were damaged or destroyed. Like Nevada, California has experienced drought for most of the last twenty years. Every year, the anxiety is not whether there will be fire but where, and how large. “It had always been like this in the gold country, as long as the oldest of them could remember, but it seemed the margins for error had grown thinner,” Gumbiner writes.

The tension of these thin margins is reflected in the relationships between the characters, in the dryness of Gumbiner’s crisp prose, and in the parched tinderbox of the dialogue between father and son. One of the more nuanced elements of Gumbiner’s book is the way he very gradually untangles the complicated relationship between Ben and Yoel. The nature of the narration, largely focalized through Ben’s perspective in the present, obscures certain elements about the past. This kind of withholding of detail can seem gimmicky in the hands of other writers, but it is here handled so gently and in keeping with the personalities of the characters that it feels natural. One of Gumbiner’s great strengths as a writer is his ability to bring human relationships in close conversation with the larger existential crises of our times. Like the past lives of these characters, we do not always fully comprehend the scope or scale of the weight of history when it comes to climate change.

Perhaps because Gumbiner is otherwise so good, it’s disappointing that Ada’s character seems so lifeless, so ignored by Ben (and by Gumbiner). Her loss is perhaps the most intense of the story—early on, her novel in progress burns in the fire along with all her books and her writing room in the barn—but this loss is sidelined. Her grief, her anguish, is felt only through the vague concern of her husband and son—the sense that mom is not herself. Ben loses his tools; the fate of his grape crop hangs in the midst. But for the most part, these losses can be fixed. Ada’s cannot.

Gumbiner’s great strength is his ability to bring human relationships in close conversation with the larger existential crises of our times.

Although Gumbiner’s epigraph explicitly nods to Wallace Stegner, it’s hard not to see Fire in the Canyon as a kind of homage to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Ben has served time in prison; Yoel, like Tom Joad, flirts with activism and speech-making. But the allusion to grapes is not merely figurative but literal—in many ways, this is a novel about winemaking. Pages and pages are devoted to the intricacies of grape varietals, harvesting, and the vagaries of “natural wines.” However, the comparisons with Steinbeck might stop there. Yoel is supposed to be a great orator, but the novel curiously contains none of his speeches. (Tom Joad, he is not.) Unlike Steinbeck’s characters, who spin yarns and even make speeches, Gumbiner’s characters expose their felt interiors with only minimal dialogue. Of course, Gumbiner is not to be faulted for not being Steinbeck; his gifts are more subtle. And yet, at the same time, the novel would have profited from greater length. Like wine, it could have used more time to breathe.

Fire in the Canyon’s ambiguous ending leaves the reader with several questions, especially about the relationship between activism and climate change. Is what passes for protest and activism in any way effectual? Is Gumbiner’s book a protest novel? It is perhaps a strength of this novel that, though it flirts with tragedy, it refuses to give in to the tragic, the elegiac. The characters possess a hard-edged optimism, a sunny-ness, a desire for beauty and equilibrium that feels distinctly Californian. The question is whether this resilience is enough.