The best fiction performs two levels of deceit. First, the author draws characters so convincingly that you’d swear they were real. Second—and this is where the real magic occurs—the author explores issues and ideas through them. Fire in the Canyon, the second novel by Daniel Gumbiner—his first, The Boatbuilder, was long-listed for a 2018 National Book Award—succeeds wildly at both. He has written that rare book of people and ideas.
Let’s start with Gumbiner’s characters. There’s Ben Hecht, 65 years old, a grape farmer who served a stint in prison for growing cannabis. There’s Ada, Ben’s wife and a commercially successful novelist; it’s her income that pays the family’s bills. And there’s Yoel, their twentysomething son, with whom Ben has almost no relationship and who returns home while working remotely for a television production company.
But I’ve left out perhaps the most important character: the land of Northern California. The action unfolds on the Hecht family farm in Natoma, a small town nestled in the Sierra foothills. Looming over these characters and propelling the narrative is the gold country landscape. It’s the land here that produces the marijuana that put Ben in jail and the fruit that he sells to winemakers. It’s the land that threatens drought, that supports the bear that breaks into their lot of primitivo, and that will bring the family to its financial and emotional breaking point. Above all else, it’s the land that unleashes devastating wildfires.
On the surface, Gumbiner’s chief preoccupation seems to be climate change. The Hechts experience the terror of red flag warnings on their phones, power outages during the threat of fire, and having to don N95 masks to protect themselves from woodsmoke. Ben is forced into a nearly constant state of vigilance: he keeps his phone nearby so as not to miss an emergency alert; he is unable to sleep; he keeps the gas tank full; he mentally rehearses evacuating the farm’s livestock. But while the peril builds, Gumbiner is steering us toward questions about the meaning of family and human connection. Even if everything burns, they’re what matter most on this warming planet.
EXCERPT
Should they consider running now? He looked off toward the forest, tried to identify the direction they should go, if they did leave the car. Stay alert, he thought. Stay alert, he kept thinking. Stay alert, stay alert, stay alert. Everything was bright and roaring with light. A tree to their left burst into flame. Sparks skittered across the hood of the truck. Smells of burning metal, burning rubber. At one point, he thought he saw a fire truck coming up the road toward them but no, nothing was there.
Alta Journal caught up with Gumbiner to discuss Fire in the Canyon just days before its publication. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Your first novel revolved around boatbuilding, and this one involves winemaking. Why these crafts?
I think both of those crafts—and most crafts, in general—force you to bring your attention to the present. I see them as companions to meditation, in a way. I find work like that to be very grounding, so I think that’s part of the attraction. But I also find it satisfying to explore a form of creativity that has some constraints. With writing, there are very few boundaries to the work you’re doing. But with boatbuilding, the boat has to float. With winemaking, the wine has to be drinkable. There are certain brute realities that can’t be ignored. So spending time doing something like that can be a nice complement to the more freewheeling creativity involved in writing.
In many ways, the Hechts are an ordinary family. But you subject them to extraordinary circumstances—it’s as if they’re characters from the book of Job! What about their trials interested you?
In general, I wanted to show the ways in which a fire like this might impact the social fabric of a community. There is a way in which events like this dissolve certain boundaries, and I was interested to see how each of the family members would transform under those conditions. Whenever a wildfire happens, there is always a lot of news coverage about it as it’s transpiring, but what occurs afterward? How are people affected psychically? How do their lives change? That felt like the terrain of a novel to me.
Did you set out to write a climate change novel?
Climate change is definitely a part of the book. It was difficult, at first, trying to figure out how to involve the political elements of climate change in the story. They always seemed to dwarf the other concerns of the novel, so I mostly ignored them in early drafts, which never felt right. Ultimately, I realized those ideas could be broached naturally through the lived concerns of the characters. Once I began revising along those lines, I felt like the novel was unlocked in a new way.
The imminent threat of wildfire is palpable throughout your narrative. What does this say about the anxiety being experienced by people across California?
I think this is a part of what we all live with now, especially during certain months of the year. This was something I wanted the book to speak to. I had read a lot of books that approached climate through the lens of futuristic dystopias—which I think can be a really important frame to bring to the subject—but I felt there was another story, about the way in which people were being affected right now, which wasn’t getting told as often. Living in a perpetual state of precarity, as you say, is a big element of that story.
Over the past few decades, California’s wildfires have grown in frequency and intensity. How much of a role did research play in your making fictitious fires seem true and real?
Yes, there was a lot of research that went into this book. I did interviews, took road trips, read fire ecology books, listened to oral histories. I try to absorb as much as I can about whatever I’m writing about. But then when it comes time to write, I set that all aside. I don’t bring any books to my desk or anything like that. I just try to focus on what a given scene needs. The research works its way into the story more naturally in that way.
You describe a protest against large corporations, namely oil companies, that in some ways is ineffectual yet it’s a galvanizing, positive force in others. Did you intend to come down on this issue one way or another?
I don’t feel like the book is making an argument in that way, no. I think it’s more documenting the way different people might respond to the current crisis. But you’re right that certain ideas about how we live are involved in those responses. I think the hope is that, through reading, people reflect on their own perspectives and their own relationships to the choices we face today.
Internet access and mobile phones are omnipresent in the book, but their utility is juxtaposed, say, against the pleasures Ben and Ada take from walking their land. Do you think your characters, and by extension your readers, would be better off with less technology in their lives?
Ha! Probably. I think all of us could do with less technology in our lives, but that’s the subject of a whole other book. My computer got damaged recently, and now I can only use it with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, which means it’s no longer easily portable, and I’m using it less than I used to. It’s been pretty nice, honestly.
Several themes of your narrative are universal, yet all of it is firmly rooted in California. Why did you set it here?
I looked around at my friends and family and how these increasingly destructive wildfires were affecting all of us, and I wanted to document that in some way. So much of the conversation around climate change is super global—which makes sense; it’s a global issue—but there was also this more intimate, personal side of the story that I was watching develop. I wanted to tell that story.
Thank you.•
Blaise Zerega is Alta Journal's editorial director. His journalism has appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio (deputy editor and part of founding team), WIRED (managing editor), the New Yorker, Forbes, and other publications. Additionally, he was the editor of Red Herring magazine, once the bible of Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, he has helped lead teams small and large to numerous honors, including multiple National Magazine Awards. He attended the United States Military Academy and New York University and received a Michener Fellowship for fiction from the Texas Center for Writers.
