With the crumbling economy and the overheating planet requiring us to contemplate a simpler life, it might be time to reconsider Henry David Thoreau, whose journal of the natural life, "Walden," bulged from the backpacks of generations.

With his injunctions to live harmoniously with nature, Thoreau seems just what we need now.

In his richly imagined debut novel, John Pipkin re-imagines Thoreau, and it seems he's busy burning down the woods of Concord, Mass.

The book covers one day in May 1844, the year before Thoreau famously moved to Walden Pond. When the book opens, he is building a fire in the woods to make a chowder when his fire lets an ember fly.

As the blaze begins its progress through the Concord woods, Pipkin tells the story of the day from four very different viewpoints.

First, there is Thoreau himself, a reluctant engineer in his father's pencil factory, now running to put out the blaze, weighing with agony the extent of his guilt, contemplating what his life might mean.

Other chapters follow Eliot Calvert, an aspiring playwright and reluctant owner of a bookstore, struggling to make a profit. He does much better in a side business, selling the kind of printed matter that, before the Internet, came in a plain brown wrapper.

The third story concerns Oddmund Hus, a Norwegian immigrant who actually exploded onto American shores at 10 when his ship blew up in the harbor, killing everyone but him.

He is indeed, in the bustle of Concord, "odd" -- inward, illiterate, small but strong, and desperately in love with the plump wife of his employer.

The fourth narrative follows opium-smoking, fervent evangelist Caleb Dowdy, burning with his mission to save souls from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who has "demonstrated how carelessly one might progress from believing in Christian redemption to worshipping trees."

All these people searching for meaning. For most of the novel, these four story lines are separate, and much of the pleasure of reading it comes from watching their inevitable convergence, each encountering the other on the edge of the blaze.

Pipkin draws on details from the Concord newspaper and from Thoreau's journals to re-create this day, writing in sentences that are reminiscent of the 19th century, yet enticing to the 21st-century sensibility.

He is a thoughtful writer, capable of describing the wild, willful beauty of fire, the subtle forces of the tide of history, and the inner lives of his amalgam of American characters .

In Pipkin's retelling, it is this fire that leads Thoreau to begin the sojourn that will result in "Walden." He tells himself he will build a cabin in the woods, where he will "remain the patient guardian of this vulnerable world, a steward content to spend his days in penitent isolation."

"Woodsburner" is a marvelous, quietly brilliant book. In this compelling homage to an iconic American writer, Pipkin may himself have just written a new American classic.