Gold Country lies at the western edge of the Sierra Nevada, and its name has long linked the region to the thousands who migrated there during the gold rush. More recently, Gold Country, like so much of California, has become known not only for its natural beauty, but also for its brutal and seemingly unrelenting fire season.
Daniel Gumbiner’s second novel, Fire in the Canyon, takes place in this landscape, at once idyllic and threatened. The book ponders the personal cost of climate change—the grief of losing property, yes, but even more, an entire way of life. It also offers glimpses of connection: the opportunities to bond with others in a world that can no longer be depended on or taken for granted.
Benjamin Hecht is 65. He’s a farmer who grows a smattering of CBD plants and 11 acres of wine grapes on his land. He’s also got a flock of sheep, a few dogs and chickens, and recently acquired a couple of emus. His wife, Ada, is a successful novelist, and they have one adult son, Yoel, who lives in Los Angeles. If this sounds picturesque, it is, except for the rain that won’t come. “Every year,” Gumbiner writes, “the conditions seemed to be getting worse, the season lasting longer.” Ben and Yoel also struggle with a troubled relationship; things have been rocky since Ben served an 18-month jail sentence for growing marijuana while Yoel was in high school. Since then, father and son have been semi-estranged, their attempts at harmony foiled by arguments and hurt feelings. As Ben sees it, “Yoel expected a kind of purity of him. But he was impure.” When his son comes to visit and ends up staying far longer than expected, the family moves through a season of miscommunications, forgiveness, winemaking, financial precarity, and, of course, the constant threat, and reality, of fires.
Fire in the Canyon lingers on Ben in his everyday life of farming tasks and marital affection, his low-simmering anxieties and regrets. The prose is unadorned, offering a tender realism with the occasional comic edge. The dialogue favors verisimilitude over drama. When Ada reveals that Yoel will be visiting, she and Ben are preparing for their yearly summer solstice party, for which he is making pies. As they talk, she adds, “I think it’s a great opportunity.” Ben’s reply? “I’ll deal with the crusts.” Although the novel’s epigraph is from Wallace Stegner and the text includes a winking reference to John Steinbeck, Gumbiner’s closest literary ancestor is Tom Drury. Like Drury, Gumbiner is attuned to how the quotidian leads to the transcendent. In Fire in the Canyon, even when the characters face danger and painful change, the novel’s style is evenhanded, almost leisurely.
Gumbiner is the editor of the Believer; his first novel, The Boatbuilder, was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. Here, he revels in getting a whole world on the page: the town’s colorful residents, the exchanges between acquaintances, the way the weather—the climate—feels to a farmer in unpredictable times. The prose shines in its depictions of nature and setting, as when Gumbiner compares burnt trees to “spires of obsidian.” Near the end of the novel, when Ben thinks of “the wide encompassing solitude of the mountains…about the river, with its scoops of scalloped granite,” the reader must also locate the sacred in the natural and mourn all that humanity is losing as we hurtle toward a decimated planet.
Gumbiner’s choice to cast Ben as the main character of this story can at times seem puzzling. Why not focus on Yoel, the prodigal son? Over the course of the novel, Yoel becomes an environmental activist, engaging in risky, illegal activities; his father watches from a distance. In some respects, Ben is the least captivating resident of Gold Country.
By the novel’s end, however, his connection to the land has become the most charged and authentic. The ways he grows close to his son, and to others in the community, change him profoundly, if subtly. Ben longs for continuity and stability; Mother Nature has other ideas. We, like Ben, must grapple with the loss. Were it to focus on a more dramatic character, Fire in the Canyon might, in the name of conventional narrative, upend its warning calls. As it is, Gumbiner doesn’t offer a deus ex machina to save the places these characters love so much. Likewise, there is no one coming to save us, in real life, from the havoc we’ve wrought.
In a previous century, we damaged the land looking for gold. Fire in the Canyon is a touching and clear-eyed extension of that story. It asks: Now what?•
