California's landscape ignites `Fire in the Canyon'
Daniel Gumbiner muses on the effects of climate change on not only the land, but its people
Early in “Fire in the Canyon,” the latest novel by Daniel Gumbiner, a character named Ben Hecht is making small talk with a food co-op clerk, who tells him that he enjoyed the latest book from Ben's wife, Ada, a novelist.
The clerk, Rudy, asks Ben about a section of the book. “It was such a long scene,” Rudy says. “And nothing happened.”
“Well, sometimes,” Ben replies, “the scenes where nothing is happening have the most stuff in them.”
That's definitely true of “Fire in the Canyon.” While plenty happens in the novel, Gumbiner finds profundity in the everyday — a scene where two characters argue over apricots reveals a great deal about their relationship.
“There are a lot of kitchen table scenes in this book,” Gumbiner says. “I love a kitchen table scene. I love just the characters being around each other and just witnessing their life.”
“Fire in the Canyon” follows Ben, a farmer in the California foothills who in the past served time for growing marijuana; Ada; and their adult son, Yoel, who's had a troubled relationship with his father. Ben and Yoel make attempts at reconciliation, but not before a wildfire sweeps in, destroying a barn on the family's property — and along with it, Ada's manuscript for her next novel.
This is the second novel from Gumbiner, who was longlisted for the National Book Award for his debut, “The Boatbuilder.” In addition to writing his new book, he's been keeping busy these days editing The Believer, the beloved and recently resurrected literary magazine. He spoke about
“Fire in the Canyon” via Zoom from Oakland, where he lives. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
QHow did the first spark of this novel come to you?
AI had been observing for the last several years how the environment in California was shifting as part of this broader climate crisis, and these new, very different wildfires were impacting the lives of friends and family around me in different ways and to different extents. I wanted to write something about that. I wasn't exactly sure what would be my way into it, or what kind of book it would be, but I ended up having a conversation with a friend of mine who lives in Sonoma and who lost both of his barns in a fire up there. He started telling me about the way in which his relationships with his neighbors transformed in these unusual ways after the fire. There was a guy who he met at a laundromat who was clearly this very wealthy guy who didn't really go to laundromats, but he was there because he had to be, and they started talking. His neighbors from down the hill came to check on him there, people who are still in his life. That seemed really interesting to me, the way in which an event like this would transform the social dynamics of a community.
QYour first novel was set on the California coast, and this one takes place chiefly in the foothills. Are these terrains that you're intimately familiar with, that you love?
AYes. That's part of what attracted me to writing about both of those places. The foothills especially are sort of a passedover place in California in a lot of ways, a quiet part of the region. Most folks, especially city people, if they're coming from the coast, they usually just pass through them on the way to the mountains. I had some friends who lived in the foothills on an organic farm, and we would go up there when I was a kid in the summers. We would swim in the pond with all the catfish and just play around up there. It was always a really special place to me as a kid, a kind of magical area. It's also one of the places that is most fire-prone in the region these days. The Caldor fire a couple of years ago was right through there, and of course, the big Camp fire in Paradise — that was a foothills town.
QTo what extent would you say that the foothills themselves are a character in this novel?
AThey are a character for sure. I wanted to incorporate both the land as a character and also nonhumans and animals as characters. That's something I'm interested in trying to do in fiction, to tell the stories in dramas of humans but also shift the perspective onto other parts of the landscape and other kinds of life. It was especially important in this book, I think, because part of the reason we're in the situation that we're in is because of this lack of perspective — we have put ourselves at the center of everything, and we are not thinking about the environment and the degree to which we are interconnected with it and depend on it.
QBen cultivates grapes after having previously cultivated another kind of crop. Did you have to do a lot of research into winemaking, or is it something that you were already familiar with by virtue of where you live and where you grew up?
AThere was a lot of research involved in that. I have a few friends who are in that world, as winemakers and grape growers, so I fortunately had a lot of intimate resources who I could rely on. They would take me to check out vineyards and talk to me about all the different processes. I didn't know that much about it before I started the book. It just worked its way into the book, and it seemed like a logical thing for Ben to be doing. I was curious about it, too, which is also important for me when I'm writing. If I'm curious about something, I try to follow it, and I find that then the reader also follows along with my exploration and my curiosity, and that makes it more interesting.
QThere are undercurrents in the book of dread, of living under this climate-crisis sword of Damocles, but there's also an undercurrent of hope, in terms of Ben and Yoel's possible reconciliation. Was it difficult to manage those two threads?
AI didn't want it to be naively optimistic. I wanted it to convey the gravity and scale of the problem, but I also think there are opportunities for hope within all of that tension. That was something that I heard from folks who I did interviews with, that their communities were getting better at adapting to this kind of thing. There were also some cases where people became more politically active, working to better effect change with regard to some of these issues. So I do think there are some positive developments that come out of something like this, especially when you're in a front-line community. People who are in the foothills are really starting to see it affect everything, and that does push you to consider your place in all of this and what's transpiring, and I think that can have a positive outcome. There is something on the other side that is optimistic.