one stay true to their ideals in a world given over to madness and destruction?). It has the scope of an epic, while luxuriating in the intimacy of details. It’s what Baerwald has always done best: drawing an entire life out of closely observed specifics. The Fire Agent is one of the finest novels you are apt to read this year. Full stop. Book Review by Robert Wiersema by David Baerwald You might not know David Baerwald’s name, but you are definitely familiar with his work. In 1986, Baerwald formed the duo David & David with musician David Rickets. Their first album, Boomtown, went platinum and lingered on the Billboard charts for more than a year; the single Welcome to the Boomtown was a top 40 hit (and remains, four decades later, one of the first songs I add to any new music player). While David & David broke up after that album, Baerwald continued with a highly regarded solo career and worked behind the scenes as a songwriter and session musician. In the early 1990s, he co-founded the Tuesday Music Club, a loose group of L.A. musicians and friends who got together regularly to play and write songs. When one of the club’s members introduced his girlfriend Sheryl Crow to the group, the result was multi-platinum: Crow’s 1993 debut Tuesday Night Music Club draws from the group and its songs. Baerwald, who plays guitar on the album, is credited with co-writing seven of the album’s 11 tracks, including such hits as All I Wanna Do, Run Baby Run and Leaving Las Vegas. In the decades since, he has continued as a songwriter (for performers as distinct as Waylon Jennings and Luciano Pavarotti, among dozens of others), writing television and film scores and continuing his work as a singer-songwriter. This next bit might sound overly dramatic, but it’s true: About 10 years ago, Baerwald made a discovery that changed his life. In the carport of his family home in Los Angeles, which Baerwald was cleaning out to prepare for sale, the songwriter discovered a cache of boxes containing letters, diaries, formal records, souvenirs and photographs. It was a largely unexamined history of his family and their movement through some of the most significant events of the 20th century. The focal point of the material was Ernest Baerwald ‒ David’s grandfather ‒ a gifted German-Jewish polymath and industrialist who, while working for a German chemical company key to the Holocaust, also served as an American spy. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Baerwald spent eight years working through the hidden archive and navigating the complexities and contradictions of his grandfather’s life and work. The result is a whopping 600-page novel, The Fire Agent, and it’s a masterpiece. Rooted, at times explicitly, in Ernest Baerwald’s life, The Fire Agent occupies a wonderfully blurry space between fiction and biography, between historical fiction and thriller, between a novel of events (after all, it spans two world wars, the rise of fascism in two countries and the beginning of the Cold War) and a novel of ideas (how does The Fire Agent 52 | www.snowbirds.org
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