The Roads Taken: Travels Through America’s Literary Landscapes by Fred Setterberg (review)

Reviews 189 her first encounter with the linguist-ethnographer, she takes the reader into her private life with the legendary scholar, telling of their life as she remembered it. There is no attempt to romanticize her role as his wife and co-worker. She chronicles the events with a clarity that perhaps only comes with the passage of time. HAZEL McKIM Central Valley, California We Aspired: The Last Innocent Americans. By Pete Sinclair. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1993. 232 pages, $16.95.) “We chose our route according to the angle of the moon, moving in a pool of moonlight as if God held a lantern for us.” WeAspired: TheLastInnocentAmericansis the On theRoadof mountaineering literature. It is an autobiographical tale of adventure and initiation. Beginning with the historical first ascent of McKinley’s (Denali’s) southwest rib, Sinclair interweaves his story with the stories of friends and landscapes that range from Alaska to Mexico, from Wyoming to New York City. Mountaineers have been accused ofwriting mainly to promote themselves or as a means offinancing expeditions, and they sometimes tend to boast about their personal achievements. Sinclair is, if anything, self-effacing and humor­ ous, even humble. The descriptions of climbs and rescues are honest accounts of life and the loss of life, accounts of fear and sympathy, ofjoy and fulfillment. He discusses his fears—not only about mountaineering, but about life in gen­ eral—with honesty. Sinclair also discusses wrestling with relationships, with his place in society, and with his responsibility as a human being. Sinclair’s words are the words of an adventurer, a poet, an observer, and a participant. WeAspired: TheLastInnocentAmericans is a long-awaited and a muchneeded addition to the American mountain canon. MIKELVAUSE WeberState University The Roads Taken: Travels Through America’s Literary Landscapes. By Fred Setterberg. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. 166 pages, $24.95.) The Roads Taken won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction for 1992. The author, a free-lance writer who lives in Oakland, California, combines autobiography, travel writing, and literary criticism as he makes pilgrimages to the literary landscapes ofJack Kerouac, Larry McMurtry, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack London. Setterberg figures prominently in his own 190 WesternAmerican Literature work; he is a zany picaresque hero comfortable camping in the Maine woods or samplingjazz in the French Quarter. The book opens and closes with chapters featuring the author in his Bay Area home. He is inspired to hit The Road again following a long sedentary interval after a visit from his nineteen-year-old cousin who hitchhikes cross­ country. He read On the Road twenty years ago but can recall only two of its lessons: “America was worth getting out to take a look at,”and Kerouac “didn’t actually seevery much of the country along the way.”In visiting the environs of some of his favorite writers, Setterberg duplicates Kerouac’s vision and blind­ ness. The Roads Taken is most effective when the author’s love of literature and place combine with resonant autobiographical reminiscence, as in the chapters on Cather, Hemingway, and Hurston. I found particularly powerful his visit to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan along with a re-reading of “Big Two-Hearted River.” Setterberg is least effective when he actually looks at the landscape and tries to report his observations. Whether he be in the Llano Estacado ofTexas or the Maine woods, the author demonstrates unequivocally that he is landscape illiterate; he writes offthe former as a “wasteland,”while the latter is seen hardly at all in his obsessive quest to glimpse a moose. The conclusion focuses onJack London’s Oakland. It is a poignant remem­ brance of the author taking a ferry with his father across San Francisco Bay. He recalls hisworking-class upbringing and his literary old man pushing offon him the work of London when he was a boy. Setterberg knows this urban landscape well, so the prose rings true. Overall, I found The Roads Taken an engaging memoir/travelogue; it caused me to get out the map and relive my own cross-country journeys and literary pilgrimages. Which is exactly what travel...